Well, it’s been more than 2 years since the original southern tender showdown post. For various reasons, other post considerations haven’t made it to fruition. However, I could spend an extra couple of days in Mobile, AL. More importantly, we hopped over the causeway to visit Fairhope Brewery. This, in turn, gave us an opportunity to stop by Guthrie’s Golden Chicken Tenders.
The beers at Fairhope were excellent! Even with just one bartender working, it was an excellent stop on a beautiful Mardis Gras season day. I had great conversations about the difficulty an expense of introducing a new “Core” beer to their lineup via Blue Steel (https://untappd.com/b/fairhope-brewing-co-blue-steel/3894629). I’m not a sour person, but the blueberry flavor was too excellent to pass up.
It’s obvious that Guthrie’s isn’t getting the same treatment as the other chicken tender places in our previous peer examination. In my mind, this is mostly a net positive for the chain. We were able to eat the food fresh, without any travel time. Everyone on the testing crew was primed for a positive review given the aforementioned beer. It wasn’t all roses though – we were consuming much of this inside of a minivan instead of outside, which I always think is a fairly significant downgrade. We’re also operating off of memory here (though this is fresher than 2 years, I eat at chicken tender joints frequently)
As a reminder, Guthrie’s is a chicken tender joint. I define these as restaurants with 3 distinct characteristics:
- The use of chicken breast tenderloins, as opposed to full breasts
- The inclusion of french fries, a bread, and slaw as default sides
- (Crucially) a “Special Sauce” that’s a heavily spiced mayonnaise with ingredients like Worcestershire sauce and Anchovies
For Guthrie’s we ordered a Box. This included 5 tenders, toast, crinkle fries, slaw, and 1 sauce.
As before, we’ll start with the punchline:
The slaw from Guthrie’s was a big disappointment. It started out with interesting flavors, including a hint of horseradish which I didn’t encounter anywhere else! However, the amount of mayonnaise was described as “extreme”. You can see how liquidly this slaw was, which ruined the texture.
Another disappointment was the fries. You can perhaps see from the color that these were overcooked. They were underseasoned as well – perhaps just the salt included in the fries themselves, with no spices to speak of. The best way to describe them is High School football game fries, and this is not a compliment.
The toast was middle of the road. Sufficiently buttered, not stale, and definitely a step up from what you get on average at Zaxby’s.
The sauce was excellent! Sweet, moderately spiced, and extremely well blended for a sublime smoothness. However, getting just one cup of sauce with 5 tenders, fries, and toast, is ridiculous. Guthrie’s should change this.
Finally, the chicken. Guthrie’s had larger tenders than many of our competitors. Foosackly’s (our overall winner, still) has tiny tenders in comparison. Guthrie’s did a great job marinating their actual meat. The breading was substantial, closer to bone-in chicken than some other joints. It wasn’t heavily seasoned but was done well enough to easily eat on its own without sauce if push came to shove.
Overall, I think Guthrie’s still deserves a ton of credit for being the very first chicken tender joint, founded in 1965. It’s changed since I first had it as a kid, and I see they’re expanding into offering wings and other items beyond the core chicken – fries – slaw – sauce – toast formula. It ended up in the middle of the pack in our lineup, and so not worth driving to vs Foosackly’s or Cane’s if you have the chance.
Lowbrow Luminary 