Mary Brown's Chicken

I'm not a huge fan of the Daily Hive Dished page. They post articles abbreviated for people who prefer only to look at pictures with text rather than actually read. Also, I'm still annoyed that they posted one of my pictures without giving me credit and then ignored me when I pointed it out. Still, I glance through their stuff to keep up with new places, festivals, etc. Recently, DH posted 2 articles, one about fast food fried chicken (10 worst to best) and chicken sandwiches (10 worst to best) and the number one in both categories was the Canadian chain, Mary Brown's Chicken.  So, we thought that it would be a good idea to give them a try to determine whether they were really worthy of being called number one. And not only that, we like fried chicken!

In Abbotsford, MB is located in the Cabello's strip mall near the freeway on McCallum Road. It was quite busy when we arrive at about 1:00 on Sunday but take-out service was tolerably quick. We ordered enough to get a handle on what they do here and headed home to try it out.

We started by trying their Dill Pickle Chips, mostly because it was something you don't see everywhere. Unfortunately, these were terrible and MB should be ashamed of themselves! The pickles themselves were shaved so thin that you could see through them (if you could actually separate them from the batter). Is this a local vendor trying to save money on the terribly expensive pickles? If you look at the website photo, you will not see what is in our photograph above. All batter and way too hard. Ridiculous!

We ordered a 3-piece meal which came with wedges and a salad. We chose their feature corn salad which was tasty enough. We asked for one spicy and two regular pieces of chicken and spicy wedges. The chicken was decent. The pieces were of good size and even the white meat was relatively moist. The spicy piece did have a bit of punch. The wedges by contrast were not so spicy even though they appear to have gotten the same treatment as the spicy chicken. We liked the meal but neither Mharie nor I would rate it ahead of Popeye's (my favourite from DH's list) or Churches (Mharie's favourite from the list).

We ordered a Nashville Mary Combo to try out their sandwiches and it was not bad. It certainly wasn't Nashville spicy but it had some flavour. The white meat was decently cooked and not dry. There were some dill pickles (maybe they were supposed to be in the Pickle Chips?) but not a whole lot of other condiments. It was an O.K. sandwich but we have no terms of reference in comparing it to the others on the list.

The Abbotsford store has a few tables but with the number of people waiting inside, your chances of sitting down and eating are slim.

The DH article was admittedly about Canada's popular fast food joints. Locally, we can make a lot of much better choices including, Down Low, Win-Win, Jolibee (finally), Fritou and even Hi-Five. Better yet, go find some Karaage or Korean fried chicken.

Mary Brown's Fried Chicken is not terrible but I'm not sure how they topped the lists other than by the mere fact of being Canadian. Clearly, the testers did not try the Pickle Chips.

Food             3 out of 5

Comfort        2 1/2 out of 5

Service         3 out of 5

Value            3 out of 5