Best Fried Chicken

STAFF PICK: As you may know, fried chicken is God's favorite food. (They usually leave that part out of the Bible because of space considerations.) It's our favorite food, too. God's preference in fast food was confirmed by a committee consisting of Reverend Ike, Jerry Falwell, the Reverend Sun-Myung Moon, and former University of Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight, who must know God really well because he starts every other sentence with His name. We don't have a really good chicken shack here in town, but we do have three outlets for Popeye's Chicken, that spicy Cajun concoction that can bring a tear to the left eye from the sheer joy of eating something so delicious, and one to the right eye from biting into the chili powder that is part of the coating. The killer side dishes include spicy fries, red beans and rice, mashed potatoes with sausage gravy, Cajun rice, wonderfully greasy biscuits, and mutated onion rings, each the size of a fritter. But the star is the chicken. Make sure you order the spicy. The mild is ... well, mild. How good is the spicy chicken? Put it this way. If there had been a Popeye's Chicken in 19th-century Copenhagen, Kierkegaard wouldn't have been nearly so bummed out.