Fast Food Critic - Reviews, News and Nutrition Information about Fast Food.

My apologies for the post earlier today. I’m NOT closing FFC.

I’m having a bad week, and I let some things get under my skin. I’m going to take a couple days off from posting, to regroup, refresh, and work on some coding and other stuff on the technical side of the site that I’ve fallen behind on. I will be back posting and reviewing again within a few days, stronger and better than ever.

My sincere gratitude to those who’ve sent and posted messages of support. I have deleted my rant on the fast food industry. Perhaps I will re-post and expand on those thoughts at another time, but for now I just want to move on and forget it.

Dear FFC Readers,

Wow… and, I’m sorry. This morning I received 12,000+ visitors in a short period of time, causing the site to exceed bandwidth limits of my hosting account. As a result of the heavy traffic, my web hosting company shut me down and said I was using too many resources, affecting other websites on the same ’shared’ web server. Before today, the largest amount of unique visitors I had in a day was about 2,000. This morning I had 6X that number in only a couple hours. Hence the “Wow”.

Where did the big rush of traffic come from? The free slurpee news post was picked up by lots of different sites, including a couple very large ones with high traffic, and they all linked to me. This is a wonderful thing of course, but my ’shared’ hosting account was simply not prepared to handle the extra load.

The good news — FFC has moved to a Dedicated Server. This won’t happen again.

I apologize for being offline most of the afternoon. Believe me, I was just as surprised as anyone. Thanks for the understanding and support. It’s been a wild day.

Congratulations to Philip Given, winner of the KFC contest. Philip entered the fast food world today with a hunger for new recipe chicken, and he bravely went where no man has gone before. For being the first, and for sending in pics from his adventure, he will receive $50 cash via PayPal.com, plus reimbursement for the meal, and his name up in lights on the FFC website. Ok, there aren’t any “lights” but here’s some bold text.

Congratulations to Mr. Philip Given, of York, Pennsylvania.

UPDATE: 5/29, 10:39 A.M.(CST) We have a winner - details to follow.

To celebrate KFC’s new Chipotle Crispy Chicken recipe, and because I want to do something nice for one of my readers, I’m running the following, quick, mini-contest.

The first person who sends me their photograph (or friends, family, kids, etc.) trying the new recipe chicken, will receive the following:

– $50 cash, instantly via PayPal.
– Reimbursement for your meal. I pay for the food. (receipt required, 1 bucket)
– Your smiling face on FFC. (optional, your choice)
– Your website link posted, or any site you want to promote. (optional)

This post is being made at 5:25 P.M. (CST)
Please send photo to: editor@fastfoodcritic.com

I would like to see a photo of the chicken, packaging, and preferably somebody eating. The receipt can be supplied separately. The first photo I receive that meets the criteria will be declared the winner, and will be posted ASAP.

Please note: I will be offline after 10 P.M. but will update this tomorrow morning. In the event that multiple photos are received over-night, the winner will be decided by the time-stamp of the email message.

No, it’s not the title for Playboy’s next feature spread. Not yet. It’s just my way of honoring these hard-working women in a casual weekend post. During the short life of FFC some of my favorite exchanges have come with the ladies who handle public relations and media for the large chains. There are men doing the same jobs, but so far all the reps (except one) I’ve met has been female. These friendly ladies have the news, press releases and product information I expected, but they also (sometimes) tempt me with free food.

Friendly Women and Free Food — I knew there was a reason I started this web site!

Seriously though, despite my appreciation for their kind offers, I have not accepted any. The offers are made innocently, but I fear that feasting on freebies might have an effect on my judgement (if only subconsciously) especially if I’m reviewing that item, or other items from the same company. So I will continue to reject such offers, because I feel more comfortable doing reviews when I pay for the food with my own money.

But I want to say Thank You to these women for being fine representatives of their companies, while still managing to be REAL people, funny and interesting. For any new visitors to the site who might be working in the same field, please feel free to contact me at anytime. I don’t want your freebies but I love press releases and new product announcements, and I’m always interested in chatting about food.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mom’s visiting the site today.

On this pleasant Sunday morning I would like to present everyone with a short video showing the light box I’ve built for my fast-food photography. It’s simple but effective.

I suppose it’s normal to worry about saying something to upset people when you are starting a new site. After putting your heart and soul into it, you want everyone to enjoy what you have created. However, the reality of the situation is no matter what you say or do, there will always be somebody who disagrees. When doing product reviews, placing scores on items, the pressure can be intense because of the loyal fan-base and employees from each chain watching on. When you are new at doing it, trying to make your mark on the fast food world, that spotlight has a way of making you feel like a tiny ant, who was unlucky enough to crawl past a curious kid with a giant magnifying glass on a bright sunny day. We all know what happens to the poor ant.

With the helpful feedback of a couple friends (one old, one new) I’ve realized that I have been too conservative at times. I’ve been playing it too safe. One example is my review of the Burger King Loaded Steakhouse Burger.

I had originally set a score of only 2.5 stars out of 5, and even used the term “rip-off” to describe it’s value at the $5 price point. But after sleeping on it, I woke up the next morning and changed my review to 3 stars, and removed the rip-off comment and replaced it with a more polite “I want my money back”. I worried that I was too harsh, or that I might have over-reacted. After all, it was the lowest score I had given yet.

But I realize now, I should have trusted my first instinct. There is no reason to be afraid. I was not slamming Burger King, or trying to hurt them. I was simply attempting to give my honest opinion about this one particular product.

The fact is — It’s hard to be a nice-guy when giving a bad-review.

This weekend, I will be a critic of my own work, going over every review that I’ve written so far, and making sure I expressed myself in the way I had originally intended. I might even update a few scores by dropping a half-star, or increasing a half-star.

The site is new — I’m new — and the ’system’ is still being developed. This is a perfect time to make such adjustments, and look within myself to become a better writer and reviewer. At barely 2 months old, FFC has come a long way fast, but now it’s time to learn from mistakes and build towards a better future. I hope that anybody who might read this post, or has ever visited my site, will bear with me as I experience these growing pains. I’m dedicated to making Fast Food Critic the best it can be, but I know there’s going to be some detours and bumps in the road as we travel along.

My sincere thanks to my old friend RJ, and my new friend DD (Geezer).

It’s been a busy couple weeks. There is an incredible amount of work involved in getting a new site off the ground. Thankfully I have the help of my friend Karl who is a fantastic coder and designer. Together we have made lots of tweaks and changes to the site, in an attempt to get it ‘right’. I’m very pleased, and proud of the progress here at FFC. As for content, I’ve been covering the fast food news for the past couple weeks, and I posted my first fast food review 2 days ago. I’m going to stick to fairly basic items for review at first, to establish a baseline for our review system and formula. But it won’t be too long before we start covering the newest, hottest, coolest fast food and activities from around the quick serve industry. I say “we” because soon I will be joined by a couple friends, and fellow fast food fans. It’s a slow start, but I’m trying to do everything the proper way. This is just the beginning for Fast Food Critic. I hope we can become a source of fun and information for whomever happens upon our humble little site. Thank you very much to those who have already visited.

Random thoughts from the FFC Editor: Does anybody else find it strange that we often pay the person who washes our car, or mows our lawn, more money than we pay the person who cooks and serves the food we eat? These fast food workers spend their days on their feet, in (or around) a hot kitchen, they have to deal with the unforgiving public, screaming children, and of course there’s always somebody giving them a hassle because they forgot to hold the pickles or onions. Yet we expect them to be friendly and serve our food fast, fresh and with a smile.

But honestly, how can we really expect to get good service, and quality food, from employees who work under those conditions, barely earning minimum wage?

The problem is not just the fast-food corporations being tight with their wallets, it’s also us, the consumers. We demand $1 burgers and $1 fries. We are cheap when it comes to food, and the industry is just trying to keep us satisfied. Only if we tell them we’re willing to pay more, will they give us better quality. If we don’t — they won’t.

Personally, I think it’s time we start to expect more from fast-food. It may not be fancy, and it might not be the healthiest choice, but it’s still the fuel we use to power our bodies. It provides us with nutrition, and it keeps us alive.

Since this is “fast” food, many people consider it unimportant. That needs to change.

Expect a FFC feature story on this topic soon.