In a piece we published last week titled “One Change Each Fast Food Restaurant Should Make Today,” I wrote this about KFC:
What I want is a spicy version of its Original Recipe Chicken… All it would take is adding some cayenne pepper to the 11 herbs and spices. Heat is the one thing missing from KFC’s menu.
Now, I don’t expect any fast food chain to take my advice, I’m but a lowly customer, not someone who is paid a six-figure salary to come up with stupid ideas like The Chizza. But still… my pitch was better than whatever this is. (Sidenote, my thoughts on In-N-Out adding bacon caused absolute chaos in the In-N-Out Enthusiasts Facebook group and was eventually taken down.)
Anywayyyyyyy, what is the Chizza?
It’s two Extra Crispy breast filets topped with marinara sauce, mozzarella cheese, and pepperoni. It’s essentially KFC’s version of chicken parm, you know, the thing we’ve all been asking for, right?
Wrong. Please, KFC, we beg you — just give us spicy chicken.
The Chizza first debuted in the Philippines in 2015 and has since hit menus in Korea, Taiwan, India, Thailand, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. Now it’s coming stateside for a limited time. Let me just say outright — I went into this tasting pretty pessimistic. I mean… look at it!
Still, this Frankenfood nightmare is sort of my beat, so I did the thing. I ate it, and now I present you with two reasons why you need to eat the Chizza (and also five reasons why you definitely shouldn’t). In the end, the choice is yours.
Two Reasons Why You Need To Order The Chizza ASAP
- You’re stoned. The Chizza is the sort of dish only Jack in the Box would be able to pull off right. “What if we had pizza but it was fried chicken?” Once you bite into this thing and all the flavors start to clash in weird ways, it’ll be a reminder that it’s best not to formulate ideas about what to eat once you’re already high. And for that lesson, it’s worth it… I guess.
- So you can tell your friends on TikTok not to order the Chizza. Look, I get it, this dish is tempting and I’m sure a lot of people are going to want to eat it for the novelty. I’m one of them. But this dish has no redeeming qualities. The tomato sauce is very sweet and has a flavor way too similar to ketchup, the cheese is low quality, and the weird stiff almost jerky-like pepperoni is some of the worst pepperoni I’ve ever tasted. I did a whole ranking on frozen pepperoni pizzas, so trust me, I know bad pepperoni.
Five Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Order The Chizza
- Because it doesn’t taste good. As I said above, there are no redeeming qualities here. The sauce is way too bright and way too sweet. Imagine the worst spaghetti sauce you’ve ever had, now imagine that sauce wasn’t enough for whatever you wanted to use it for so you cut it with ketchup to spread it out a bit. Now put that on an underseasoned fried chicken breast filet. Tasty right? But it doesn’t stop at bad sauce, the cheese is oddly flavorless, serving as little more than a slimy texture. The pepperoni is chewy and barely registers on the tastebuds as pepperoni at all. I had to eat a pepperoni solo just to get an idea of what this stuff tasted like. If you fed it to me blindfolded, I would legit guess cardboard before meat.
- Because you need to eat it with a fork and knife. Looking at this dish you’d think it’s easy to hold and crunch into. It’s not. When the Chizza is hot, it’s too hot to hold comfortably and you have to sort of balance it on the tips of your fingers. When it cools down a bit, the bottom sogs up and feels slimy.
- Because the money isn’t worth what you get. The pricing for this dish is as follows: $12.99 for the Chizza combo, $9.99 for a two-filet Chizza, $5.99 for a one-filet Chizza. $12.99 doesn’t sound that steep for a combo and it’s in line with the price of KFC’s other combos, but let’s be real here — this dish should’ve been a chicken sandwich. KFC has all the ingredients on hand, all they had to do was ditch the pepperoni, slip this between two buns, and bam, KFC has a Chicken Parm Sandwich. Would that have been a harder sell for the marketing department than the Chizza?
- Because it encourages KFC to make stupid dishes like this more often instead of SPICY CHICKEN. Enough said.
- Because the chicken is the best part. Why order the Chizza and subject yourself to everything bad about this dish, when you could just order anything else on KFC’s menu? This dish is lazy and that’s the worst part about it. I don’t think it’s impossible to make this dish work, as stupid as it is, but the fact that KFC didn’t even try to give us quality marinara, mozzarella, or pepperoni adds insult to injury.
The Bottom Line:
The Chizza will probably go down as the biggest fast food misstep of 2024. If KFC is hoping to compete with the likes of Popeyes, Chick-fil-A, or Raising Canes, they need better ideas and better execution.