A Heat That Creeps Up On You

For a while there I lived in an area without Popeyes and I was very sad. While I don’t eat fried chicken very often (and, really, should scale back how much I eat out in general), like many red-blooded Americans I do enjoy crispy, deep fried chicken pieces, and Popeyes has always held in my book at the top tier fried chicken joint. The restaurant was all over the place where I grew up, and having moved back to my home state I’ve enjoyed having the option to get their food more often during those times where fried chicken sounded good.

Recently the chicken chain announced a new crossover promotion with the First We Feast show Hot Ones. That show famously has celebrities come on for interviews where, in between asking questions, the host and the guest will eat hot wings of increasing spiciness, going up to ridiculous extremes, up to 2.69 Mil Scoville units for their The Last Dab sauce. Being a lover of spicy food in general, and knowing full well I am not famous enough to ever get on Hot Ones (no talk show seems to care about the guy that used to run a Castlevania web comic for 19 years), I figured this was my best chance to actually try some of their hot stuff and see just how bad it really was. So I packed into my car, headed off to Popeyes, and grabbed the whole of their branded Popeyes x Hot Ones selection.

Sizzlin’ Sriracha Dippers

I started with the Sizzling Sriracha Dippers. The restaurant lists these as “pickled garlic sriracha-marinated Chicken Dippers, served with a Buttermilk Ranch dip cup and a fiery Hot Ones Sriracha sachet.” The dippers came in a cup, in their own bag, packed into the larger overall bag that held all my food (it was a massive bag because this is more food than one sane person should really eat), and pulling them out I was a tad underwhelmed. The cup had plenty of chicken in it, which was good, but the dippers themselves were only fine at best.

The chicken has a mild pickle flavor to it, I will concede. I know people love that pickle flavor on their chicken, and I’ve even marinated chicken in pickle brine before frying at home, but somehow it didn’t taste all that special here. I like the default Popeyes chicken flavor and it felt like while there was a bit more vinegar and garlic taste coming forward here, I wouldn’t say it was better than Popeyes’ normal chicken. Different, yes, but not better. The dippers were also kind of limp, and not very crispy, even though I grabbed them out immediately and started eating on them before they even had a chance to get soggy in the bag. They were just underwhelming.

The Sriracha sauce was pretty tasty, though. It had a light spiciness along with a solid kick of sweetness. I don’t know who Hot Ones sources their Sriracha from, but they have a good mix here. I liked the sauce a lot and enjoyed putting it on my dippers (and other items). It wasn’t very hot, but then this is marked as the “mild” option on the menu, so I won’t hold that against the restaurant. For anyone wanting a little kick, but can’t handle real heat, this sauce is great. Maybe just get it with different chicken because it’s so much better than the dippers it’s paired with.

Darin’ Dab Ghost Wings

We go from the mildest to the hottest, mostly because I love Popeyes’ chicken sandwich and purposefully saved that for last. The Ghost Wings are “classic wings (bone-in or boneless) dusted with a bold Ghost Pepper dry rub, served with a Hot Ones Last Dab Ranch dip cup.” I tried the ghost wings before when they first came out at the restaurant (although I didn’t do a review for them at the time) and I thought they were fine. Tasty, yes, but not as spicy as I would have liked. Standing in the restaurant waiting for my Hot Ones food I saw why: Popeyes’ Ghost Pepper Wings are actually milder than their standard spicy fried chicken. That amused me.

These wings, though, were not milder. There’s a solid heat to them that builds up over time. The first bite was fine, nothing to get bent out of shape over, but each bite added a little more, than a little more, until I had a decent bit of heat in my mouth and some sweat on my forehead. Whatever rub they put on the wings absolutely adds some extra heat to the wing bits, and I greatly enjoyed that. When I come for hot food, I do like it when it’s actually hot.

With that said, the wings on their own were not total winners. While the dry rub added more heat, it was also extra salty and put that into the mix as well. Popeyes’ food is already salty enough that the added salt from the dry rub was a bit much for me. While I don’t think everyone would complain, I don’t need my food to be salted to high heavens. I would have preferred spice without salt so I could enjoy these a bit more. Not bad, but not perfect.

With that said, once we include the special branded The Last Dab Ranch, everything got better. This cup of spicy sauce combines buttermilk ranch with the Hot Ones famous The Last Dab sauce, and, yeah, it gets hot. Like the wings, the heat level sneaks up on you. The first taste I had (because I did taste it on its own) was okay, not too bad. It was a flavorful ranch with just a little kick. The second bite was hotter but not unbearable. By the third, though, my mouth on a low alarm fire. This is real heat, no joke. Together with the wings it made for some edibles I actually had to pace myself on. I kept wanting to eat them because the spice was just at that point where I could handle it but it hurt, and I kind of enjoyed that. It took control to pace myself and not destroy my mouth.

The Last Dab Ranch is a winner, and I'd be perfectly happy if they kept some variant of it on the menu even after this cross-promotion ends. I’d likely skip the wings, though, and use the sauce for other things.

Smokin’ Rojo Sandwich

And then we got to the sandwich, and I had been waiting for this. As I’ve noted in a previous review, I consider the Popeyes Spicy Chicken Sandwich to be one of the best on the market, easily beating many of its competitors without even breaking a sweat (although my forehead sometimes sweats to make up for it). With that said, most of the variants they’ve put out for the sandwich, changing up the spicy mayo on the bun or adding other ingredients like bacon and cheese, generally muted what made the original sandwich so good. It’s hard to top the best on the market, and even Popeyes seems to struggle to figure out what comes next. And that holds true here as well.

Billed as the “medium” option on the menu, the Smokin’ Rojo Sandwich is “a crispy chicken fillet topped with Hot Ones' Los Calientes Rojo spread and tangy pickles, all on a toasted brioche bun.” Most of that carries over from the standard spicy chicken, but the difference here is that the Calientes Rogo spread replaces the standard spicy mayo mix. It does change the flavor of the sandwich, but not really for the better.

For starters, despite this being billed as the medium option, I found it to be milder even than the chicken dippers. It certainly tasted milder than the standard spicy chicken, which shows just how much heat is generally in that spicy mayo. The Calientes Rojo sauce isn’t bad, but it really doesn’t add much to the sandwich in general, and really kind of gets lost under the saltiness of the chicken fillet. A different sauce, something bolder and with more kick, really should have been used on this sandwich instead.

So I did. I grabbed the leftover The Last Dab Ranch I had from my wings and dipped a bit of the sandwich into it, and let me tell you, it was really good. Like, this was the flavor the sandwich needed. It had that same creaminess like the spicy mayo, plus a lot more heat. The first bite was good enough that I put more ranch on the rest of the sandwich and ate it all. Sure, I didn’t taste the Calientes Rojo sauce at all at that point, but I also didn’t care. This was a flavor combination that really worked, and it made both sides of the equation, sandwich and Last Dab Ranch, stars of the show together. It was delicious.

So yes, the sandwich is fine. I’d honestly recommend skipping the Hot Ones version, though, and just using some spicy ranch instead. Or stick to the original because it’s still the king.

The Last Dab Apollo Hot Sauce

And finally, since they make a point of advertising that customers can get a sachet of the famed Hot Ones The Last Dab Apollo Hot Sauce, I clearly had to try that as well. I got one, opened it, and put a dab on the back of a spoon, just so I could see what it was like. Bear in mind I both knew just how hot it would be (at least intellectually) and I’d seen enough episodes of the show to know that most people didn’t like the sauce. It’s both way too hot and tastes terrible, as per the interview guests. So I went in with my eyes open.

Yes, this is hot. It has a very powerful heat that doesn’t seem so bad at first taste but it very quickly spreads and gets worse and worse. It’ll take over your mouth and sit there, unrelenting, unceasing. It’s powerful. Admittedly it’s not the spiciest thing I’ve eaten, not even in the top five, but it still was painful enough that after I let it sit for a bit to get the experience, I decided to take a couple of swallows of milk to help cool it off. And even then pins and needles still plainly lingered on my tongue.

Taste wise, it’s really bad. It tastes like sweet ash, quite literally, which is not pleasant. The point of it is spice, not flavor, and it does that well. But I wouldn’t get it on a wing except as a dare. It isn’t a flavor I’d crave, even if it were milder, and it’s clear there’s nothing in the sauce to really make it taste better. The goal is undiluted heat from the hot peppers they use, and, well, they nail that, but it is not pleasant on any front. It’s very hot, it tastes like ass, and I wouldn’t go out of my way to eat it again.

All that being said, if I were to somehow go on Hot Ones (seriously, guys, CVRPG is great and I’d be happy to talk about it), I’d probably be able to eat it and then cogently have a discussion about something. It wouldn’t be entirely enjoyable, though. Not at all.

Final Thoughts

And that’s the whole menu. I’d say it’s reasonably filled with decent food, but nothing so shockingly, amazingly good that I’d go out of my way to eat it again. The dippers were underwhelming, saved only by the Sriracha sauce. The wings were better, but a tad too salty for my tastes. And the sandwich only really worked because I went off-script and added ranch where I wasn’t supposed to add it. All of that, topped with a Last Dab that tastes terrible, and, yeah, I wouldn’t go back for this.

I appreciate that Popeyes went for a fun crossover with Hot Ones, and I’m certainly glad I tried it. Nothing here, though, beats what Popeyes usually has on offer. It was fine, but I’d rather just get my usual and go home instead.