KFC was one of my favorite fast-food restaurants out there. With its menu of coleslaw, mashed potatoes & gravy, fried chicken, as well as biscuits with jam and butter, KFC had a solid menu of gustatory harmony.

But about a decade ago, things changed. My family and I were given undercooked fried chicken – so undercooked that we had to ask them to fry it again. Even after the request, the chicken bits were oozing pink blood, so my mom had to cook them at home herself before we had any. After witnessing such poor quality, we stopped going to KFC for a while.

After years of staying away and eating Chick-Fil-A instead, our nostalgia for KFC kicked in as we remembered how good the combinations of coleslaw, chicken, and biscuits were.

And so, after about a decade, we made our way back to the same KFC store that served us bloody chicken pieces to order an 8-Piece Fill Up which contains eight crispy chicken, two plastic bowls of mashed potato and gravy, one plastic bowl of coleslaw and four biscuits. With packets of jam on the side like ketchup.

My Latest KFC Review

And I have to say… KFC once again disappointed us!

The “crispy” chicken just had a thin coat of fried batter-like substance which peeled off when bit into. And the biscuits had become smaller and more stale than ever before.

My family and I did finish our lunch (unsatisfactorily) with much of the coleslaw and mashed potato and gravy left over. The two menu items tasted relatively the same as they did about twenty years ago, so they weren’t horrible. But as our tastes have improved over the past decades, the menus were simply “not so bad as to be inedible,” i.e. just tolerable for consumption.

How can a fast-food restaurant with arguably a menu better than Chick-Fil-A be so terrible?

I just couldn’t understand it; neither could my family. And after browsing online, I found that many people shared our sentiment towards the fast food restaurant: pure disappointment.

I couldn’t find a reliable source clearly explaining the reasons behind the downfall of KFC’s quality over the past years, but from the bits of information I could gather, it appears that Colonel Sanders, the founder of the restaurant chain, sold it to someone else. Hence the changes for the worse. Whatever may be the reason, hopefully KFC manages to improve. Because if it doesn’t anytime soon, I could see it shut down for good.

I know for a fact that KFC fares better with the public in Asia such as in South Korea and Japan.

Perhaps it’s the problem with local management rather than the menu or the company. Hopefully the KFC opening soon nearby my place is better than the one I had for today’s lunch. Hopefully I’ll write a positive KFC review next time.

It’ll be the last chance my family and I give to our once-beloved Kentucky Fried Chicken.