Londoners’ queue for Popeye’s chicken sandwiches | In Pictures

This week, Popeyes made his London debut at his shiny new flagship restaurant at Westfield Shopping Center in Stratford.

Popeyes’ arrival in London comes – quite amusingly – at the expense of the old fried chicken chain KFC; it is opposite a McDonald’s on the ground floor of East London’s Mall. And because global food brands are relentlessly exploiting the potential of post-Brexit, the post-lockdown London restaurant dystopia, Popeyes will be next door to another American fast-food behemoth when Wendy’s camped in Westfield when she returned to the UK in August this year. .

Contrary to Shake Shack’s debut in 2013 and most recently that of Jollibee in 2018, Popeyes’ fried chicken sandwich has steadily turned up the hypeometer since first announcing the London opening in March this year – this restaurant is apparently the first of 350 locations across the country in the coming years.

Although Popeyes was founded in New Orleans in 1972, it is in recent years – especially the high-profile online chicken sandwich “wars” of 2019 – that it reached the globally recognized status necessary to make such an ambitious expansion drive possible. But Popey’s success as a food business cannot exist outside of a conversation about the broader economy and often dubious work practices, low wages and purchases of ingredients used by fast food brands. Nor can its success be fully understood without first placing it in the context of fried chicken breed history in America.

Workers at both chicken factories and fast food restaurants, those who bear the greatest cost of the brand’s success – the demands placed on staff at a hyped launch like the one in London, do not measure up to the compensation they are offered. And yet, low cost means low food prices very deliberately designed to appeal to a majority, so often those who are economically and socially excluded from many other areas of restaurant culture.

Based on the reception this week, the consensus from the hypebeasts seems to be that the chicken is good and that the sandwich is better. While marketing probably beats a lot. The result meant that the crowds, as predicted, came out with Eater there for a first look at the day Popeyes opened to the public in London.

This is what it looked like.

The queue at Popeye’s wound back around the ground floor of the mall

Standing in line, looking, waiting

Peter Genna, Global Development Manager at Popeyes. Or the full title: “Director, Culinary Innovation Global Product Development”

Workers at Popeyes’ London launch were at times overwhelmed by the number of customers and orders flying in

Reaching the front of the queue

The UK CEO, Tom Crowley, is ready for launch

So. Many. Order:% s.

The transfer