Londoners Queue for Popeyes Chicken Sandwiches | In Pictures

This week, hotly anticipated quick meals import and U.S. fried rooster juggernaut Popeyes made its London debut at its shiny new flagship restaurant on the Westfield buying centre in Stratford.

Popeyes’s arrival in London comes — fairly hilariously — on the expense of that previous timer fried rooster chain KFC; it sits reverse a McDonald’s on the bottom ground of the east London buying centre. And since international meals manufacturers are mercilessly exploiting alternatives within the post-Brexit, post-lockdown London restaurant dystopia, Popeyes might be neighbours with one other American quick meals behemoth as Wendy’s nestled in to Westfield when making its U.Ok. return in August this yr.

Rivalling Shake Shack’s debut in 2013 and extra just lately that of Jollibee in 2018, Popeyes’s fried rooster sandwich has been steadily dialling up the hypeometer since first asserting the London opening in March this yr — this restaurant apparently the primary of 350 websites throughout the nation within the coming years.

Although Popeyes was based in New Orleans in 1972, it’s lately — most notably the high-profile on-line rooster sandwich “wars” of 2019 — that it reached the globally recognised standing wanted to make such an bold enlargement drive possible. However Popeyes success as a meals enterprise can not exist exterior of a dialog concerning the wider economics and sometimes questionable labour practices, low wages, and ingredient sourcing employed by quick meals manufacturers. Nor can its success be totally understood with out first putting it within the context of the racial historical past of fried rooster in America.

Staff at each rooster crops and the quick meals eating places those that bear the best price of the model’s success — the calls for positioned on workers at a hyped launch like that in London should not commensurate with the compensation supplied to them. And but, low prices imply low costs for meals very intentionally designed to attraction to a majority, so usually these economically and socially excluded from many different areas of restaurant tradition.

Based mostly on the reception this week, the consensus from the hypebeasts seems to be that the rooster is nice and that the sandwich is healthier. Whereas the advertising and marketing in all probability beats the lot. The results of which meant that, as predicted, the crowds got here out with Eater there for a primary look on the day that Popeyes opened to the general public in London.

Right here’s what that appeared like.

The queue at Popeye’s snaked again across the floor ground of the buying centre