Of all the food fads to move through Boulder’s social circles, Birdcall has to be the most aggravating. Before I ever even tried food from the chicken chain, I had heard endless praise for how delicious the chicken sandwiches are and for how the food is a “gift from god”. Yet when I ordered myself a box of this supposedly mouth-watering chicken, received my food from DoorDash, and took a bite into the first chicken tender, all I got was a whole lot of MID! 

One of my biggest issues with the chicken was that it genuinely had the texture of rubber, no exaggeration. Every bite I took was ridiculously chewy, to the point where I felt like I was tooth-deep in a truck tire. At a certain point my jaw started to hurt, because I had to chew so much just to get through a single tender. And that’s not even mentioning how the flavor of the chicken was saltier than the Atlantic Ocean. The Birdcall employees purposefully leave a bit of chicken flavor in the salt, so that when you first sink your teeth into a piece of chicken, you think ‘this is alright’ for a brief second before the sodium proceeds to drain the moisture from every single cell in your body. The sauces were my only reprieve, as they were decent and gave the disgusting chicken a bit of actual flavor. Yet even then they could not totally save my meal, as by the time I got to the fourth tender my mouth was so dry that the salt was all I could taste.

My experience eating Birdcall bordered on agonizing. Why was the chicken so hard to chew through? Why was it so salty? These questions may have no answers, but from them I can draw only one conclusion: Birdcall is overrated.