KFB on this occasion chose to visit the Liverpool Road branch in Newcastle Under Lyme on a busy Bank Holiday Monday night.
The order was for two Quad Wrap meals, (good value at £4.79 each) a pot of gravy (a great 3-step....delicious!) and in order to get hold of the Secret Recipe Fries, a Streetwise snackbox with a 20p upgrade to Secret Recipe Fries. They're not available with all products and this was the easiest way to try them.
The meal arrived, and straight off there was no evidence of any Secret Recipe - disappointing as I'd gone out of my way to explain what I wanted when ordering. I headed back to the counter and was quickly dealt with and had my snack box exchanged.
TLO's come and go but the Secret Recipe Fries were the thing I was most excited about. As a Zinger Tower fan, my physician told me recently that I don't have enough Original Recipe in my diet.... what a great way to rectify it.
I opened the box and was greeted with this:
Not a particularly satisfying sight. 20p is quite a lot to pay for what appeared to be about a single solitary gram of recipe. It hadn't been evenly applied so the flavour was concentrated in one corner leaving many fries totally untouched. To consider there is no cost difference between an OR or a Zinger fillet which has been marinated in a further batch of spices makes one wonder if this is truly worth 20p?
Well the proof of the pudding they say is in the eating so I dived in. Those fries that had taken the bulk of the application were undoubtedly deliciously salty but with another satisfying flavour that caused me to involuntarily suck the inside of my mouth clean of all the lingering flavour particles. However, this level of cover only applied to a handful of fries whilst the rest of the box teased me not quite giving the flavour I craved.
In all, a great idea, and if a little more liberally applied one that KFB could endorse.
Next I moved on to the BLT Quad Wrap... I'm not entirely sure what puts the 'quad' into this product as there are only two mini fillets and three acronymed ingredients the B the L and the T. Perhaps the shape should put one in mind of a some sort of varsity quadrant but there's no allusion to this in the advertising.
I was doing well with this meal. Hot fresh fries, thick dark three step gravy and now I was pleased to be holding a soft tortilla which had a mouthfeel redolent of rural Mexico's halcyon days where the oxymoronic well-off peasants lived off the land in health and happiness grinding flour by hand to produce this unleavened offering/ This quickly gave way to tasty chicken that was firm to the bite and encased in a gooey cocoon of melted cheese that sought to bind the bacon that provided the final savoury taste ready to be balanced by the fresh lettuce and juicy chopped tomato... sounds good right?......except there wasn't a single solitary piece of tomato to be found. The name of this product has a T in it to denote the presence of said tomato. In a normal restaurant when a key ingredient of a dish is unavailable the staff make you aware of this but it was not until I was a couple of bites in that I realised.
At once all my enthusiasm evaporated, I plowed onwards through the meal. It would be disingenuous to say it was all anything other than very nice but in all good conscience I cannot reward such failure.
