The Day O’Fish, No. 11 – Krystal’s Tiny Fish Sandwich Thingies

Krystal has always had a reputation for really bad food and small portions. When I was in college nobody ate there except on their way home from a lot of drinking at 2:00 in the morning. That was an era when Krystal understood their target demographic. Back then they were the only fast food restaurant that had a dining room that was open 24 hours. That was a very important distinction because their standard clientele needed a place to sit and absorb some of that blood-alcohol content before driving home. The food was horrible but everyone was too drunk to care and even though the meal would be regretted as much as the hangover, it still beat spending time picking up trash on the side of the interstate while wearing an orange jumpsuit.

Way back in those glory days of Krystal, some friends and I had a brief altercation there with a few weekend drunks. We were completely sober but for some reason we stopped there for food on the way home from playing music. A couple of my friends had mohawks, black fingernail polish, eyeliner, etc. at a time when that look hadn’t been incorporated by Hot Topic. So, when a group of drunks came in with their shirts unbuttoned, they started in on us with verbal insults. We tried to laugh them off until one of the drunks said, “real men don’t paint their nails.” I responded by saying, “real men don’t wear checkered shirts unbuttoned to their navels.” Apparently, that was both the first and last straw for them as they rushed our table yelling, “it’s not checkered, it’s plaid!” Mr. Plaid got in my face and shoved me so I grabbed the napkin holder off the table and swung for his face. Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite as drunk as I thought or my aim was much worse than I thought. Whatever the case, he moved and I only managed to hit him in the chest. Napkins exploded everywhere like a piñata on Cinco de Mayo. He was momentarily stunned, as we all were by the napkin shower. Then he cleverly retorted with, “That didn’t hurt.” Plaidman grabbed me in a headlock but I managed to get both of my hands around his throat. When my 6’2, 220 pound hippy friend pulled him off of me my hands were still clutching his neck. The giant hippy then used Captain Plaid as a human shield, effectively rendering the other drunk from being able to throw a punch without decking his friend. Giant Hippy laments his timing to this day, frequently chanting, “if I had just grabbed the Plaid Avenger two seconds later he would have been punched by his buddy.” Alas, while such timing was not to be, the Krystal employees intervened and the drunks fled to their car hoping to avoid the police while I followed them outside yelling like the loudmouth I was/am. It was only after things calmed down that the giant hippy and I realized that our mohawked friends (who were the actual targets of the drunken insults) had stayed in their seats the whole time and didn’t lift a finger to help us during the scuffle. When we asked them about it their explanation was simply, “we’re against violence.” I’ll let you ponder the irony of the hippy jumping into the fray while the mean looking punk rockers played the Gandhi card.

However, that was long ago and none of that happened when I went there a few days ago to review their fish sandwich.

Before I get to the fish sandwich though, I would also like to point out that way back in my college days, it was a rite of passage to spend some morning time on the toilet thanks to the Krystal “sliders.” For those of you under the age of thirty, I want to clear the record. “Slider” was originally a derogatory nickname for those little Krystal burgers because of the way they moved through your bowels. It is NOT a brand name created by the Krystal marketing department to describe how easily they slide down your throat. That, my friend, is a revisionist history on the origin of the name. Of course this is typical of the crappy marketing that Krystal has had as long as I can remember. I distinctly recall putting them on the “boycott” list in college for a series of increasingly stupid TV commercials. Fortunately, I have managed to block those tragedies from my memory with the exception of “Cowboy Sid and Sheila the Wonder Horse.” If you don’t remember that particular piece of branding wizardry, I’ll sum it up for you in five words:  “Dumb cowboy with a stickhorse.” That foolishness was long before Krystal got “serious” and started playing up how cool and fun they are. I know you must be thinking, “One thing Krystal is not, is ‘cool’.” Oh yeah? Then how do you explain those commercials with that “Whoa oh, it’s Krystal” song playing over quick cuts of attractive 20-somethings from the 1990s breakdancing in slow motion, doing athletic things, and laughing while holding little burgers? If you think the commercials might be lying, then I encourage you to go inside one of these fine establishments. Ignore the quietly depressed, possibly homeless middle-age customers in desperate need of baths. Instead focus on the wallpaper. There are pictures of young, attractive people enjoying their Krystal burgers and short written testimonies of how much they love it at Krystal all over the walls. The people in the pictures just never happen to be at YOUR location.

In conclusion…Oh, wait a minute. I haven’t even talked about the fish sandwich. Well, it was a new low. The sandwich was as tiny as their little “slider burgers” and was served on a public school cafeteria roll. That reminds me, when I was in elementary school we had a lunch lady who used to take the uneaten rolls off the students’ trays and put them in a box to be reused! Some of us thought this was really gross and tried to sabotage her. We would carefully pull a little plug of bread out of the roll and fill the hole with leftover beans or something like that and then stick the bread plug back in the hole. We then watched to see if she noticed. About half the time she didn’t. Fortunately, I never got one of the leftover sabotaged rolls and oddly enough, I don’t recall anyone ever getting one. Now that I think about it, maybe she wasn’t re-serving those rolls to the students. Maybe she was donating them to the homeless or maybe her family was really poor and she was taking them home. Okay, so now I feel like crap. Where was I? That’s right, the fish sandwich. Well, it was pretty bad. The little piece of fish was flat, dry and tough. It may as well have been chicken or shoe leather. I couldn’t tell the difference. Also, I know this isn’t a French fry review but Krystal fries aren’t very good either. They’re soft and soggy but at least they drown them in salt so you won’t notice.

Final ratings:

 Value for the money:  1 out of 5 borrowed dollars. $4.99 for a Krystal combo. They included three of those little sandwiches. However, even three of the Krystal fish burgers together are smaller than a single sandwich at most places.

Appearance:  2 out of 5 tadpoles

Taste:  2 out of 5 slippery eels