When do you first remember buying Chicken Tenders?

Cafe Society
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Ref the Wendy’s ad (which I agree is a memorable classic) there was another ad I recall. I’m pretty sure it was for Steak 'n Shake, a Midwestern almost-fast food burger chain but with sit-down service.

Anyhow, the camera focuses close on a plate of mis-shapen lumps of something while one sorry chunk is turned slowly on a fork and the voiceover intones

where the italics, scare quotes, and doubled question mark are very, very emphasized. It’s not dripping with sarcasm, it’s made of sarcasm.

Then they cut to a closeup of a real recognizable complete chix breast on a bun and go on to say “At Steak n Shake (or whoever it was) we use real whole chicken breasts. Blah blah blah. Etc etc.”

I always loved that line: What part of the chicken is the “tender”??

I trot that out whenever I’m eating something where I’m not real sure of the provenance or naturality of the ingredients. It’s one of the many in-jokes I shared with my now-deceased first wife who used it as well. Funny the little things you miss. Sigh.

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Or I’m ahead. I’m a real bad judge of pop culture & its timing, especially from now so long ago. As well, in that era (on your timeline or mine) I was living in Las Vegas, which may have been a bit ahead of wherever you were living.

When I moved from there to the Midwest I did notice a bunch of mass market stuff that had been popular in Vegas for a couple years only later arrived in St. Louis. Kind of weird, like having gone back in time a couple years then re-living some aspects of what you’d already done.

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[aside]

And this now evokes Frank Perdue’s immortal ad tag, “it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken”.
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