Hear Me Out: Long John Silver’s Chicken Planks

Hear Me Out is a column dedicated to earnest reevaluations of those cast-off bits of pop-cultural ephemera that deserve a second look. Whether they’re films, TV series, albums, comedy specials, videogames or even cocktails, Hear Me Out is ready to go to bat for any underappreciated subject.

I have a birthday tradition. Every year since I turned 10 I go to the same restaurant and order the same meal. It may not be on my actual birthday, but it’s almost always the week of, even now, when it’s become essentially impossible to find that restaurant anywhere near my own house. Every year I will travel to a Long John Silver’s and once again feast upon their incomparable chicken planks—the greatest food of all time.

I don’t just mean fast food. I’m talking all of it, every dish and treat mankind has developed over the last million or so years, from roasting whatever you just killed over an open fire, to chefs with three Michelin stars crafting nine-course tasting menus. The humble chicken plank—encased in its heavenly shield of golden-brown and perfectly spiced batter, studded with crunchy lumps of fried dough and dripping with grease—bests them all. I eat Long John Silver’s chicken planks exactly once a year, and although I might be physically worse off for it, it has made me a stronger man spiritually and emotionally.

If you’ve never tasted the bliss of a chicken plank, imagine the best chicken tender you’ve ever had, and then magnify that by an order of about one million. Truly transcendent, the chicken plank is the ultimate form of fried chicken: thick, juicy strips of white meat deep-fried in the same luscious batter used for Long John’s famous fish. Instead of the flakiness of the fish, though, the chicken’s soft, moist chewiness aligns perfectly with the batter, and combined the two contrast wonderfully with the crispy clumps of fried batter that cling to the chicken plank like barnacles. The ideal chicken plank is both crunchy and pillowy, and with just a little hit of pepper, and that combination is what makes it so divine. 

It’s such a simple, obvious idea, and yet it’s hard to find chicken fried in the same type of batter used for fish and chips, at least in America. In all my life I’ve only found one restaurant other than Long John Silver’s that batters their fried chicken like this, and that’s Cooke’s of Dublin at Disney Springs in Florida. And although their chicken is plumper and cooked to order, their batter isn’t spiced as nicely as Long John’s, so it’s really not the same. Cooke’s of Dublin’s chicken strips will do in a pinch—say, after a night of tossing ‘em back at the Indiana Jones bar—but they’re no chicken planks.   

Sadly, the Chicken Plank may be something of an endangered species, as Long John Silver’s has been steadily closing locations for decades. The one I went to for most of those birthdays (which, grimly enough, sat on the same spot where the sickening antisemitic lynching of Leo Frank occurred, and was just down the street from the famous Big Chicken) was shuttered at some point in the ‘00s. A decrepit and disgusting location in East Atlanta, a block or two up from regular haunts like the EARL and Argosy, closed up right before the pandemic. The last few years my wife and I would drive over a half-hour to a Long John Silver’s / Taco Bell combo spot 30 miles north of the city; in prepping for this year’s trip, I discovered it was now just a Taco Bell, without any trace of the Long John’s menu. Yes, Long John Silver’s is at a point in its history where you have to research whether the one you plan on going to is actually still open or not before starting the trip. The only one that still seems to exist in the Atlanta area is in Stone Mountain, which, depending on traffic, can be quite a haul.

If you’re deeply entrenched in the American fast food scene, you might be wondering why I don’t just go to a Captain D’s. Somehow, Long John’s main competitor in the fast food fried fish segment seems steady. None of the Captain D’s I know of have shut down, and my wife, who loves fish and chips, happily hits one up a few times a year. Friends have asked me why I don’t just go get their fried chicken strips since they still exist near my house, and the answer is one of the cruelest twists of fate in this modern life of ours: Captain D’s, a restaurant so very much like Long John Silver’s in almost every way, doesn’t have anything like chicken planks.

Captain D’s is a miserable fraud of a restaurant that could easily bless the people with their own spin on the greatest food ever devised. But instead, they serve the weakest, limpest, most cliched chicken tenders imaginable. Their chicken isn’t fried in the same batter as their fish; they’re generic, craggy, orangish-brown strips of dry, tasteless fried chicken, no better or different from what you can find in your local grocery store’s freezer. It’s lazy and insulting and offensive and I take it as a personal affront that Captain D’s is still in business. Captain D’s is the most irresponsible and, frankly, sickening restaurant in all of America because they willfully—blasphemously—choose not to help spread the gospel of the chicken plank, instead foisting something so terrible that it can’t even be called mediocre unto the tables of honest, hard-working Americans.

And maybe that’s it, though. Maybe America doesn’t deserve chicken planks anymore—this divided, dysfunctional, depressed and depressing America, where nothing makes sense anymore and everything seems designed to tire us out and break us down. Simple joys still exist in this hellscape but they’re fleeting, and often lead to long-term, life-threatening health problems, as if the billionaires and corporations that rule our society have conspired to kill the rest of us off through the only things that keep life livable. The chicken plank, as delicious as it is, as much as it enriches the soul and the mind, can also contribute to a host of physical problems when eaten too often. (Hence my once-a-year rule, although I generally eat like shit on the other 364 days, too.) Anybody who’s enjoyed one probably agrees that the pleasure it brings tremendously outweighs any health risks, and that’s why the misery industrial complex has been trying to kill the chicken plank off. 

If anything’s too good, too pure, to survive in this world, it’s the chicken plank. Hopefully Long John Silver’s grits it out long enough that I can enjoy one last communion with the chicken plank, right there on my deathbed, swallowing that final bite at the exact moment my soul leaves my body as I ring the Captain’s Bell at the door to the afterlife and walk that heavenly chicken plank into the great big Long John Silver’s / Taco Bell in the sky.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, and anything else that gets in his way. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.