Sometimes, you just want fast food. Most of those times, you’re at the airport. Other times, it’s after 2am and since there’s fast food delivery in Shanghai, a little three-piece meal can’t hurt. But sometimes, you’re walking back to your apartment from morning Chinese classes and trying to decide what to have for lunch.
And then you see this friendly face:
I almost never go to KFC in the States, mostly because I’m not a fan of original recipe chicken. I know, I know – eleven secret herbs and spices, blah blah blah. Popeye’s was always more my jam, and although in China you can’t find any butter-laden biscuits, the spicy wings at KFC are much more akin to the old Popeye’s style.
For all my passion for food, every once in a while I meet somebody who acts really shocked and appalled when I profess my love for fast food (McDonald’s, breakfast sandwiches, and fried chicken in particular). Well, if loving fried processed and genetically modified chicken (if it’s even chicken) is wrong, then I don’t want to be right.
The meal, including a very flat medium Pepsi that I didn’t drink, ran about 50RMB, or a little under US$8. They were out of the Beijing-style chicken wraps, which is another tasty treat on their China-fied menu. Fast food here isn’t as cheap as it used to be, as obvious a development as that may seem, especially compared to some really good local fare that runs for about half that. But it’s also been interesting to see how the menu has completely evolved from when I first started visiting China in the early 2000s, when the menu was more or less fried chicken and sandwiches. Now, KFC has Chinese-style breakfast items, rice dishes, porridge, you name it – and it’s still kicking McDonald’s ass in China, from what I can tell.
KFC
768 Changde Lu
Jing’an, Shanghai
House of Hao's 
French fries at KFC? One of the only reasons I ever hit up a KFC is for the potato wedges, man.