When you’ve got a new product that has already flopped once, albeit in a slightly different form, how do you successfully reintroduce it to the American pubic?

Call Oprah and let her give it away for free.

That had to have been the thinking in the marketing department at Louisville-based Yum! Brands when repackaging the former boneless, skinless chicken and calling it Kentucky Grilled Chicken.The new product intro needed a really big marketing push. Critics say Yum! miscalculated public response to the free chicken giveaway.

In the company’s defense, it saw the handwriting on the wall years ago and changed the brand from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC. Execs knew that the word “fried” was getting an image problem because consumers were associating the term with poor health and nutrition. By going with KFC, it wasn’t all about “fried” food.

But back to the brainstorming session, I can imagine that someone said, “What about Oprah?” You can see people patting each other on the back and placing some calls. Then Oprah goes on television and gives people free chicken. And because Ms. Winfrey said it, the country went nuts. There were so many redemptions of the Internet-provided coupon that KFC began to run out of its new product and started offering rain checks as the restaurants replenished supply.

Critics called it a public relations nightmare. How does a high-gloss chicken shack run out of chicken? How could Yum! have miscalculated so badly?

It didn’t. In reality, KFC performed a public relations masterpiece. Think about it. What is the main thing you want to do when you introduce a new product? Get people to try it.

Yum! did that. When you’ve miscalculated on Chicken Littles and Kentucky Nuggets, you need to get people to taste it. Due to this perceived screw-up, how many millions put it in their mouths?

It’s too early to tell the net effect of the promotion. Will people eat it and like it or will they return to Original Recipe or Extra Crispy as they have done so many times before? New products are always hit or miss, but keep in mind that in recent years, KFC gave us back popcorn chicken after a sufficient amount of time had elapsed to make us forget about how MC Hammer embarrassed himself by dancing for it.

The Kentucky Grilled Chicken promotion seems to hold a bit more promise. The entire marketing department deserves a two-piece meal today. Don’t make them wait on the rain checks.

Everyone’s heard of exorbitantly priced hamburgers – those usually made with Kobe beef, truffles, and other exotic ingredients that produce a lavishly presented sandwich resembling nothing you’d find at even the more upscale steakhouses.

But would you pay $50,000 for a chicken burger?  The National Chicken Council would, and did – and to a rising star chef from right here in the Bluegrass, no less.

Lexington’s Brigitte Nguyen took the top prize in the 48th annual National Chicken Cooking Contest in San Antonio last weekend, with her Chinese Chicken Burgers with Rainbow Sesame Slaw.  The burger recipe includes soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, garlic, lemongrass, and scallions, and you can find it here.

The contest featured entrants from every state of the union and the District of Columbia, and winners from the state contests and subsequent regionals went on to compete at the San Antonio campus of the Culinary Institute of America.

Nguyen, a 2008 Culinary Arts graduate of Sullivan University’s Lexington campus, has appeared on the Food Network, where she was runner-up in the “Burger Recipe Challenge” in January, and does a weekly healthy cooking television segment for Lexington’s WLEX-18.

You can find more recipes and inspiration from Brigitte’s own spirited and informative food blog, called Counting the Beans and Cooking the Books.

And this won’t be your run-of-the-mill grand opening, either. With their tailgate-type atmosphere and free goodies, Chick-fil-A openings have become so popular that there are groupies who travel around the country attending them.

Some have logged more than twenty Chick-fil-A openings to date. The “First 100 Fans” promotion, as it’s known, was launched in 2003 to mark the opening of the chain’s first stand-alone restaurant in Arizona. Five years later, the event continues to draw fans from around the country. Overnighters – with tents, computers, games and even swimming pools in tow – turn the grand opening event into an all-night party.

“When we first started this promotion, we were stunned when someone arrived 18 hours in advance and asked where he could wait in line,” says Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A and son of its founder. “Five years later, we’ve given away more than $8.5 million in free food across the country to loyal customers who’ve braved snow, wind, rain and triple-digit temperatures to help celebrate the opening of each new Chick-fil-A.”

Starting Wednesday evening, January 7th, the Shelbyville Road parking lot will be filled with tents, games, prizes, live music and dancing, and folks can start lining up at 6:00 a.m. already. Campers will be fed throughout the day, and Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy will join them later on with his own tent and sleeping bag. In all, $26,000 in free Chick-fil-A food will be given away to customers, including a one-year supply of free meals (52 coupons) for each of the first 100 adults, age 18 and older with identification. The line can begin forming up to 24 hours prior to the opening, and prizes will be given away on January 8th sometime between 6:00 a.m. and 6:30 a.m., with the restaurant opening afterward.

by David Dominé, The Bluegrass Peasant

Our Best Restaurant, a small family-run eatery with roots in Smithfield, Ky., recently opened its third store off of 10th Street on Holman Lane in Jeffersonville.

This comes on the heels of the grand opening of a Preston Highway location in the fall of last year. The first restaurant opened in the summer of 1990 when the late Kenneth Way and his wife Kay started a small Henry County diner with seven tables that specialized in country cooking. Before long, their cornbread, soup beans, fried green tomatoes and pork chops had earned them a modest degree of culinary fame that had hungry patrons traveling in from surrounding counties. Although the original restaurant only sat 36, customers would patiently wait in their cars for a table.

How the restaurant came to be is an interesting story, its name coming from “Our Best” flour and cornmeal that were ground at the Smithfield Milling Company. The old mill had always fascinated Kenneth Way and he bought the historic property with the express intent of preserving its legacy in the tiny Henry County community. Neither he nor his wife had any restaurant experience, but Kay was known to have a way with food, so it seemed only natural that they would open a restaurant there a couple of years later.

Menus were printed on the original “Our Best” flour sacks, and this endeavor would provide the perfect outlet to showcase the flour and cornmeal once produced on the premises. This objective is still evident in the crispy coating of many of their signature dishes – all fried, of course – that constitute the backbone of their stick-to-your-ribs dining philosophy. Fried chicken, fish rolled in cornmeal, fried green tomatoes, country style oysters, deep-fried catfish, chicken livers rolled in feature flour and fried till nice and crunchy. Their famous cornbread, fried in thin, crispy pancakes, accompanies most meals.

Other favorites include marinated grilled pork tenderloin, country ham steak, and the hot roast beef sandwich with thick slices of beef smothered in gravy. The meatloaf is made daily and topped with zesty tomato sauce. Dinners come with a choice of old-fashioned sides such as pickled beets, green beans, fried apples, applesauce, great northern beans, pinto beans, and kale. Several sandwiches are available as well, but the sliced country ham on a toasted bun and the grilled rib eye seem to be favorites.

I checked it out the other night with a couple of friends. Buddy, our server, was friendly and efficient, and the prices were reasonable – our check for three dinners, two glasses of iced tea, a starter order of fried green tomatoes and a peach cobbler came to $57 including gratuity. On the whole, the food made a good impression – the fried chicken was crispy and well seasoned, the white fish was not overcooked, the kale had a pleasant and salty bitterness, the lacy cornbread was a nice change from the standard skillet variety – but country cooking doesn’t always mean that everything is made from scratch.

The mashed potatoes – although I devoured every bit of mine – were instant, and the peach cobbler tasted like it got its start with a can of commercial pie filling. Nonetheless, I can see myself going back the next time a craving for hearty down-home fare starts tickling my belly. The fried green tomatoes alone could get me back there very soon.

The competition begins at noon at Victory Park, featuring chefs Richard Mezoff of the Ohio River Valley Food Venture, and executive chef Michael Hargrove of Primo will be facing off.   The chefs will be judged on how easily the meals can be re-created at home, as well as originality, taste and nutrition.

Or You Can Just Eat Chicken Wings and Onion Rings: On the other end of the health food spectrum is the newest franchise entry in town — Buffalo Wings & Rings. The Milford, Ohio-based chain will open its first area location at 2610 Chamberlain Lane next week.  It has about 30 locations, including one in Kuwait.

Stick to the sandwiches at McAlister’s Deli: I’ve long been a huge fan of McAlister’s Deli, its superior sandwiches, fantastic service (where do they—and Paul’s Fruit Market for that matter—find all those handsome, helpful teens? Must be a Glenview-area thing) and its kid-friendly menu. The chain will forever have a fond spot in my heart for helping my son make the leap from hot dogs to more adult sandwiches. the Orange Cranberry Club is a permanent favorite of mine.

However, McAlister’s grilled salmon salad was the most dreadful salad I’ve ever eaten. It was so shockingly bad, in fact, I was too stunned to complain. Well, admittedly, I was in a desperate hurry to get my son to a basketball party so the clock was more on my mind than justice. Had I complained, I’m sure one of those pearl-toothed, wrinkle-free teens would have remedied the situation.

The salad arrived without dressing, so I returned to the counter to acquire an appropriately bad honey mustard dressing (it was gummy to the point of stretching when poured). The salmon tasted overly processed like canned versions as well. Surely this merely was McAlister’s on a bad day, and when I return, it’ll be fine again.

Fuji Japanese Steakhouse is the place for kids: Since my 9-year-old doesn’t yet like sushi, my wife and I loathe taking him along when struck by the craving for a caterpillar roll. But as many parents know, babysitters are in short supply, so often he rides along regardless of whether he likes it. Many times we’ve taken him to Fuji on Springhurst Blvd., where the staff has done everything short of turning cartwheels to fawn on him—and every other kid in the joint. If we’re at the sushi bar (and, yes, despite it being 5:50 a.m., I’d eat sushi right now were it before me), the chefs—always unprompted—use their razor-sharp knives to whittle an orange into a mouse or some other cool bites. (Beats the heck out of a Happy Meal any day.) And if we’re at the teppanyaki grill, which we were last week, they playfully tease him with foods he doesn’t want (squid) or give him a few kernels of fried rice when everyone else gets heaps of the stuff. He loves everything they do, right down to the flaming onion volcano.

Is it my favorite sushi joint in town? No, but it’s darn reliable. And if he’s going to dinner with us, there’s an excellent chance that’s where we’ll wind up because he loves it and he eats the food. What’s perhaps most endearing about Fuji’s staff is that they seem to enjoy him—and other kids—as much as he enjoys them. Truly sweet people who always get big tips from me.

Chicken at Kaelin’s: good, but falls short of the legend: Growing up directly behind Kaelin’s Restaurant was both a blessing and a curse. Seven days a week, the glorious aroma of that pressure-fried chicken wafted to my house just a street away and set my mouth watering. But only about once a quarter, my lower-middle class family could ate out there.

Probably 60 years ago, or so the story goes, Colonel Sanders tried to sell Carl Kaelin a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, but Kaelin didn’t want the whole package; he wanted only the Colonel’s spices and technique for cooking what is—when done correctly—the world’s best fried chicken.

Recently, I went back to Kaelin’s after what was at least a 20-year absence. Ville Voice blogger Rick Redding reported Kaelin’s legendary cheeseburger was excellent as always, and I had the fried chicken. It was good, but not great. The frustrating thing was the bird was perfectly fried—impossibly crisp skin cloaking moist, juicy meat—but underseasoned. The cooks had done the hard part right, but somehow missed on the easy part of the seasoning. Every restaurant has its off days, and perhaps that was one of them. But here’s to hoping they’ll get it right.

Sweet Peas plowed under: Not even sure I should put the announcement of Sweet Peas’ closure in this section since I never made it there. But the truth is, all I ever heard were bad things about it, so I never was motivated to go. Apparently enough people thought its food damnable and, in the end, quit going.

I always thought its predecessor, Furlongs, also owned by the same group, served up good, if not inspired, food that never achieved the mark of real Louisiana/Cajun-style fare. To make matters doubly troubling, the prices for said food were too high, totally unwarranted.

Not sad to see either go.

That’s right: delivery pasta. Hmm.

When it comes to delivery, pasta isn’t at all like pizza or Chinese food: the only two foods I can think of that fare well on wheels. (Well, OK, chicken wings do OK, but not great.) Chefs will tell you that every minute a pasta dish sits in the pick-up window, texture and flavor degrade. So, heaven knows what’ll happen on the 15-minute ride to your door.

Just as interesting was the announcement that KFC’s will add a grilled, bone-in chicken line next year. A Wall Street Journal story quoted CEO David Novak calling it a “non-fried chicken platform.” (Dang, if that don’t make it all honey-coated-cozy and Kentucky-fied, I’m not sure what does!) According to published reports, it’s the chain’s latest effort to make more healthful products.

Kudos to KFC for trying to make healthful foods, but does anyone remember KFC’s Rotisserie Gold line, a face-first flop of a menu addition in the 1990s? I’m not blaming KFC for the failure; the product and marketing were solid. Customers just didn’t want it. When it comes to KFC, they want fried products, and items like Popcorn Chicken and KFC Snackers prove it.

That leaves no surprise, therefore, that I recoiled in horror upon discovering KFC’s use of that eardrum-gnawing song for its Chicken Dance video contest this month. The chain encouraged fans of its hot wings to produce videos of themselves dancing to the Duck Dance song—a sin punishable by scourging in some religions, I bet. The winner earned a Super Bowl Party courtesy of KFC, and the chain also promises to donate $260,000 to charity if someone on the field does the Chicken Dance.

But back to my splenetic hatred of the Duck Dance tune. Is there any worse time at a wedding reception than when some overly lubricated, dance-skill-deprived sot staggers up to the DJ and asks him to play that song? (If I were the DJ, I’d insist on a sizeable bribe, because you know that drunk isn’t giving up.) It makes me want to shove my head into the bride’s cake to insulate my ears from the coming audible horror.

Unfortunately for KFC, not many were motivated to make Chicken Dance videos. The chain’s YouTube link only shows 17 total flicks entered. I’m no marketing expert, but I’d gauge that a pretty poor response for a firm KFC’s size. At least there’s still hope some player will do the Dork Dance, er, um, the Chicken Dance and trigger the chain’s generous donation to a charity.

Pizza: My pizza industry buds will kill me for this, but I say skip delivery and get Papa Murphy’s Take ‘N’ Bake Pizza.

Not only will the delivery dudes be swamped Sunday and it’ll take longer to get your food, if you get a large order at once, it’ll probably go cold before it’s all eaten. If you get take-and-bake pies, however, not only can you pick them up a day in advance, you bake them when you want, which gives you hot pizza all throughout the game. Papa Murphy’s is darn reliable pizza, too, and the price is fair. Word to the wise: Order in advance for late Saturday pickup.

Wings/Chicken: My picks are Pizza Hut’s WingStreet and Buffalo Wild Wings, though there are lots of places to get good wings in Louisville. And whatever wings you get, serve them hot by reheating them in the oven on a foil-lined sheet pan at 350 F for about 10 minutes. They’ll be nearly good as new. Far as chicken goes, sorry KFC, but I love the fried chicken at Kroger. Great price and great product. They have a chipotle-dusted chicken that’s excellent. Definitely order in advance.