Place: Jollibee
Lunch: Chickenjoy and Spaghetti, Pepsi
The plan WAS to do the lunch buffet at Round Table Pizza, then catch a movie at the theatre in this shopping center. But the last four Round Tables in Las Vegas closed sometime between August and now. Not surprised, but disappointed anyway.
So I decided it was finally time to try Jollibee at the other end of this shopping center. I've always been sort of fascinated with this place and its cute bee logo. Looked a little too professional for something I'd never heard of before.
Turns out Jollibee is the biggest name in fast food...if you live in the Philippines. The parent company started with an ice cream shop, switched to hot dogs, and expanded both the menu and locations into an empire. They've also bought a bunch of other restaurant chains over the years which largely operate in the Philippines and China. They're also the Philippines sole Burger King franchisee (another acquisition).
But the core brand that started it all is so entrenched in Filipino culture that Jollibees have started popping up in other countries, including a couple dozen outlets in the US in areas with bigger concentrations of Filipino populations. Jollibee claims only the spaghetti recipe has been altered for American tastes, but I've seen a difference of opinion on that with the faithful.
The US Jollibees are branded "Jollibee Chicken & Burgers" to fool people into thinking this is a typical American fast food chain, but "Yumburgers" are about the last thing anyone orders. The burgers get poor ratings at the usual online review spots. They have the seasoning cooked into the meat and kind of taste like a dry Salisbury sreak. Chicken (called "Chickenjoy") and spaghetti reign supreme here, though there are other things on the menu too. The breakfast menu includes sweet pork, milkfish belly, and Spam, all on plates with an egg, rice (absurdly heavy on the garlic), and a tomato slice. This particular location shares space with another Jollibee brand, Red Ribbon Bakery. Which had some stuff I definitely need to try.
Anyway, you immediately know you're not in Kansas anymore when you walk in the door. This is clearly NOT an American fast food place, even if you didn't notice the Filipino television programming playing on the flat screen or the big mural showing examples of global markets where it operates. At the same time, nothing feels cheap either. Professional marketing materials hang on the windows and from the ceiling.
The fried chicken has a texture similar to the Colonel's original recipe and doesn't even need the cup of gravy that comes with it for dipping. But you'll use it anyway because it's good. The spaghetti sauce is a meat sauce that I can't really describe the flavor of. It's sweet and maybe has some sort if an..,Asian?...kickto it. It has hot dogs cut up into it. I loved it.
Seriously...this is my go-to lunch spot when coming out to this side of town to see a movie going forward.
It's Black Friday, and I spent it the same way I usually do...watching it unfold on the early morning news as told by cute bouncy local news reporters. And holy crap are the reporters and anchors on Action News 13 cute and bouncy. They had a reporter stationed live at the Las Vegas Premium Factory Outlets, a massive indoor factory outlet mall that's crazy on a normal day. And she's standing there with the outlets in the background and saying "Well...there's not really much going on here."
Then "Good Morning America" came on with the announcers claiming things were "crazy" while showing four simultaneous live shots of malls and big box stores where...almost nobody was shopping.
So where is everybody?
The Action News 13 reporter reasoned this was because the mall opened at midnight and everybody'd already grabbed the "door busters" (hot items sold at a loss to get people in the store). Indeed, there's been a lot of complaining about Black Friday starting earlier and earlier, even moving into Thanksgiving evening (which I've heard referred to as "Grey Thursday"), and the door buster items were gone almost immediately. Action News 13 had footage of a woman in a local K-Mart parking lot throwing a fit that she'd waited in line for hours and didn't get ANY door buster deals.
Both they and Good Morning America were showing a security video of a guy shouting threats to stab anyone who got in his way at a store entrance.
I saw a Tweet about somebody getting knocked out over a bottle of shampoo.
So the media still got their tabloid shots.
Hooray for them, I guess.
I suppose I could suggest that stores have reasonable sales on items they have plenty of instead of encouraging this nonsense with loss leaders, but what fun would that be.
