Chick-fil-A Deluxe

The Chick-fil-A Deluxe is the chain's original chicken sandwich with the three things the original was built to leave off: a slice of American cheese, green-leaf lettuce, and tomato added over the pressure-fried fillet, the toasted bun, and the two pickles. The original is a deliberately bare build, a fillet that the chain insists needs no company but two pickle chips. The Deluxe adds the cold layer back, and the interest of the sandwich is entirely in what those additions do to a fillet whose crust was engineered for a dry, tight bun.

The fillet underneath both sandwiches is the same and it is the reason either one works. A boneless breast is brined in pickle juice, which seasons the meat through and keeps it wet, then hand-breaded and dropped into a pressure fryer, where the sealed pot cooks it fast and hot and leaves a smooth, hard, blistered crust rather than the craggy shell of an open fry. That crust is crisp and dry coming out of the oil. Everything the Deluxe adds is cold and wet, which is the tension the original avoids by adding almost nothing at all.

Each cold addition threatens the crust in its own way, all of them by way of moisture. Lettuce and tomato carry water and weight the bare version excludes, so a Deluxe assembled carelessly steams its own crust limp on the walk to the table. A slice laid on a cold fillet sits as a rubber slab instead of melting into a seal. Tomato pulled from the cold line too watery wets the bun from the top down. Lettuce packed flat against the breading presses the crisp out of it. The crust that defines the fillet is exactly the thing the extra layers threaten.

The build defends against all of that with order. The cheese goes onto the hot fillet so it slumps and partly seals the surface against the produce above. The wet lettuce and tomato ride to one side rather than pressed against the breading. The pickles stay where they were, sharp and cold against the meat. A buttered bun toasted on the cut face resists the moisture coming down from the top. The assembly does not stop the crust softening, it only buys it a few more minutes against three cold, wet layers the original refused to carry at all.

Unwrap one and the first thing is the warm butter-toast smell off the bun, then the fried-chicken crust under it, then a cooler green note from the lettuce. The bun is soft and warm at the lip, the fillet is hot and gives a brief crackle before the meat underneath turns tender, and the cheese has gone slack against it into a thin binding layer. The tomato is cold and slips, the lettuce adds a wet crunch that competes with the crust, and the pickle hits sharp and briny a beat later. It eats fuller and softer than the original, the crunch of the breading now arguing with the lettuce instead of standing alone over two pickles.

The order at the counter is short and the cheese is the hinge. Original or Deluxe is the call, the bare fillet against the dressed one, and the kitchen builds whichever from the same fried breast. American is the default slice but pepper jack and Colby are offered, the one place the Deluxe takes a real choice. The sandwich is a Southern chain product before it is a regional dish, sold identically from one drive-through to the next, its grammar the menu board rather than a neighborhood counter.

The codified cousins are the bare original and the spicy fillet, and the spicy can itself be ordered as a Deluxe. The spicy build brines and breads the same breast with cayenne and pepper worked into the coating, a heat layer the plain fillet skips; dressed as a Deluxe it gets the identical cheese, lettuce, and tomato over a hotter crust. The grilled fillet is the non-fried member of the line, a marinated breast off a griddle that trades the pressure-fried crust for char and is a different sandwich under a shared name.

The Dwarf Grill and the trademark

The fillet both sandwiches are built on came out of a single diner. Truett Cathy opened the Dwarf Grill, later the Dwarf House, in Hapeville, Georgia in 1946, and spent the next fifteen years working toward a chicken sandwich that could be cooked as fast as a hamburger. In 1961 he found the pressure fryer that did it and registered the Chick-fil-A name; he settled the recipe of more than twenty seasonings, on a buttered bun with two pickles, by 1964.

Cathy moved to protect the sandwich as the Dwarf House was outselling its burgers on it. He took the name to an attorney around 1963 on the advice that an altered, misspelled word could be trademarked where a plain one could not, which is how chicken and fillet became Chick-fil-A, and he incorporated the company in 1964.

The fillet did not leave the diner for a restaurant of its own until 24 November 1967, when the first Chick-fil-A opened in the Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta, more than two decades after Cathy first cooked it in Hapeville.