You Can Now Eat an Atlanta Falcons Sub at Publix.

Will the limited-time-only peach-flavored chicken sandwich make you want to 'rise up' or throw up?

By: Jimbo X

JimboXAmerican@gmail.com

@Jimbo__X

Although I am -- and have been -- an Oakland/Los Angeles/San Antonio(?) Raiders fan my entire life, my de facto "B-team" so to speak has always been the Atlanta Falcons. This is reasonable enough, I suppose, considering the fact that I've spent nearly three decades of my existence residing within the boundaries of the Peach State.

Atlanta Falcons fans are a peculiar breed, to be sure. In a city overrun with transplants, the Falcons are more or less viewed as nothing more than a way for all the neo-carpetbaggers to see their favorite teams from up north and out west live and in living color. Of course, there are indeed homegrown Falcons fans, but they are few and far between, and really, those people are much more inclined to be rabid Georgia Bulldogs fans, or a fan of one of the neighboring SEC squads. There seems to be this weird Boca Juniors/River Plate, Guadalara Chivas/America rivalry going on between UGA and all of Atlanta's teams (college or pro) in which the Southern metropolis (and its corresponding NFL franchise) embodies modern excess and "the selling out" of regional identity, while the quaint little college football powerhouse up in Athens embodies the true spirit of the proletariat, working class Southern man. 

So, who is the true Atlanta Falcons fan? Well, the true Atlanta Falcons fan is usually in his forties or fifties (although there are quite a few hardcore fans in their 20s. If you've ever seen Snow in tha Bluff, you'll know EXACTLY the types I'm talking about. By and large, he has white hair (or a receding hairline), and a beer belly, even though he's otherwise skinny. He either lives in one of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods in the city proper (Castleberry, East Lake Meadows or, god help your mortal soul, Vine City or English Avenue) or one of the many indistinguishable, beaten down 'burbs just outside the city limits (places with names like Rockdale, Douglasville and Fayetteville.) He usually hates his job, he hates himself and he's behind on child support payments. If he doesn't have a truck, he used to, and he prefers getting his hair cut at this one no-name barber shop that he doesn't mind driving or MARTA-ing 20 miles out of his way to visit. And even then, he complains about the slow service when he gets there. 

The actual Atlanta Falcons fan is a weird goulash of desperate blue collar proletariat and unabashed Southern bigot, no matter what color he is. As much as he hates the racial other, he hates all of them damn neo-carpetbaggers even more. He especially hates anybody from New Orleans, if not because they are de facto representatives of the Saints, then because they still get federal incentives they don't qualify for and first dibs at public housing (which is fewer and further in between these days.) 

These are the kinds of people who still wear Michael Vick black and red jerseys in public and challenge people to fist fights at sports bars if they say anything bad about career drunk driver Jamal Anderson. That is, if they feel like walking that far. Or leaving the house. Which they don't, for the most part. 

But more than anything, this rare, rare bird of the Piedmont variety loves to eat grocery store deli product. Go ahead, find yourself a Falcons fan, and they'll talk your ear off about why Kroger's fried chicken is better than Wal-Mart's (it's the fried okra, it's always the fried okra) and why Target, for lack of a better word, sucks the big one (once again, it probably has something to do with the substandard fried okra.) 

That's why I wasn't surprised one iota when I waltzed into the local Publix and saw this thing sticking on the electronic sliding glass door entrance...

An NFL-flavored sandwich, you don't say? Clearly, this idea has some legs to it. As it turns out, Publix actually offers three more NFL-branded sammiches for the three Florida pro-football teams, which -- not unlike their play this season -- I can assume probably suck. 

It's a weird combination of ingredients, to be sure, but then again, this is the South, where we actually fuckin' sell and buy fried brownies. In public. And nobody says anything about it. Really, eating a sub smothered in peach jam and bacon is probably one of our saner local delicacies, now that I think about it a bit. 

For those of you doubting the sincerity of such an invention, well, there's the big, bold, barcoded truth that it ain't a fabrication. I guess you could call this thing a footlong, although I'm not quite sure how geometrically accurate that wording actually is. I mean, it's probably closer to 10 inches, and the meat itself tends to stop at the 8.5 inch marker. The 9 inch, if you are lucky and the sandwich artisan is feeling awfully generous that afternoon.

So, what all do you get with this NFC South-themed sub? Well, you get a pretty decent white roll, but as far as advertised ingredients, that's all I received. You know how uptop, the sign says you get maple-flavored chicken tenders? Well, the dude at my local store just grabbed a handful of fried chicken pieces from the rotisserie pit, crumbled them up and said "eh, good enough." This shit was about as maple-flavored as a Tijuana tostada, which, in case you weren't aware, isn't very maple-flavored at all. 

While my deli man completely deviated from the promotional formula, I reckon his ghetto-concoction was way better than anything that could have been mass produced, anyway. His idea of srirachi mayonnaise was literally slathering mayonnaise on the bun and then squirting some hot sauce on top of the white goop. And he used some damn peach preservative all right -- with a bottle of store-branded peach jam. 

Even the bacon was pure-D trailer park home cooking. The dude took a handful of that instant pork junk, slammed the plastic microwave door shut and nuked the shit for all of a minute and a half before pulling out a sizzling plate of bacon with salty white foam bubbling out of it like someone had just thrown the bacon Necronomicon into a furnace or something. As someone who grew up poor and fat in the American South, I can assure you this is just about the most authentic regional cuisine you're bound to find anywhere. 

Sure, the Falcons sub was a bit on the gross side, but there is no denying that it wasn't filling. It was nearly impossible to hold with one hand, and moving the sandwich just one centimeter out of whack caused three or four chicken tenders to fall out and/or a weird amalgam of mayonnaise, chili sauce and preservative-soaked peach jam to drip all over the floor. In short, it was the perfect foodstuff to symbolize the team and its oft-misunderstood fan base -- a big, bulky, unorthodox and salty tribute to the last of a dying breed of regional roustabouts and lifelong gentrification victims. 

If they ain't selling overpriced simulacrums of this limited-time-only delicacy when that newfangled Mercedes-Benz Stadium opens in 2017, I for one, will be pissed a plenty.

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Little Caesars’ Bacon Wrapped Crust Deep! Deep! Dish Pizza!

A new benchmark in fast food excess may have been set…

As I have stated quite a few times before, pizza is probably my all-time favorite food. There’s just so much you can do with the template, and as the old maxim goes, I don’t think I’ve ever actually had a pizza that I would consider truly, irredeemably bad. And yes, I have had Domino’s before.

In the U.S., Little Caesars is the red-headed step-child of the “Big Four” pizza chains, which I guess would make them the Anthrax to Pizza Hut’s Metallica. I suppose that analogy also means Papa John's is Slayer, except instead of raining in blood, they rain in chili cheese and Fritos.

Here in the Atlanta metropolitan statistical area, the Little Caesars chains practically vanished overnight for a good decade or so, only to reemerge out of the blue, TCBY-style, a few years back. It's one of the great mysteries of life I've always pondered, I tell you what.

To put it bluntly, Little Caesars isn’t exactly known for its robust quality. In fact, the chain’s big claim to fame, I suppose, is their “hot and ready” gimmick, which basically means they make a whole shit load of one or two types of pizza and have them stockpiled for immediate pick-up at certain points of the day. If you want a gustatory experience, go elsewhere -- Little C, clearly, is all about filling up your stomach as quickly as humanly possible.

A few days ago, I received an e-mail from the chain, hailing the arrival of this thing called a “Bacon Wrapped Deep! Deep! Dish Pizza.” I almost never get e-mails of the like, and honestly, I was sort of surprised my spam filter didn’t catch it. Alas, I’m glad Gmail was taking that day off, apparently, because this newfangled product is a fast food event in every connotation of the term.

Yeah, it’s not quite the game-changer that Taco Bell’s national breakfast menu was last -year, but it’s clearly bigger industry news than Chipotle offering tofu, at least. I mean, just look at the ad below …

...an eight-corner, bacon-encrusted deep dish pie, for just $12 USD. According to the email I received, the pizza itself consisted of 36 diametric inches of crispy pork, all glued around the perimeter of the dish like a hickory-smoked bulwark. Yeah, that kind of shit would grab my attention, all right.

After cajoling convincing my girlfriend to give it a try, we recently took home a box. For our more frugal readers out there, we were able to score that, two other large pizzas plus a double order of cheese sticks and crazy bread for a little over $30 -- if DFCS is breathing down your neck to feed all the kids you can’t take care of, then yeah, you might want to locate your nearest Caesars’ pronto.

Admittedly, when I first saw the carryout box, I was a little concerned. First, the box itself was notably smaller than the boxes for the standard pizzas -- clearly, I didn't want to wind up with some underfed, malnourished looking bacon-wrapped abomination. Secondly, and much more concerning, I noticed the bright orange HAZMAT box had the word's "America's Favorite Detroit-Style Deep Dish" plastered on, and that set off tons of alarms in my head. I mean, fuck, when was the last time you saw any product brag about hailing from Detroit?

Alas, when I finally flipped open the cardboard lid, mine eyes were not disappointed...

Now that is a damn good-looking deep dish duo. The eight slice twin pie was shellacked with white cheese and greasier than a teenager's forehead -- the smell of scorched bacon wafted overhead as soon as the box flew open, and indeed, such is the sweetest of all possible smells.

Before I go on to praise the product for the next 1,200 words or so, I would like to begin my formal review with a bit of criticism. While the pizza itself is most certainly wrapped up in bacon (with additional bacon chunks spread out on top of the pie, for good measure) only three sides of each piece contains the promised bacon siding. Granted, it's not a deal breaker by any stretch, but I remained just mildly miffed that I wasn't given a pie with 360 degrees of bacony buffer. I mean, I'm sure there's some sort of baking engineering reason why that couldn't be done, but for the sake of an additional four inches of pork, I would gleefully accept a square pie that was really, really hard to disconnect from the other slices.

Alas, on the three sides that DO include bacon, you're not going to be disappointed. Golden brown, albeit somewhat thin, slivers of bacon encircle the entire dish, and on my pie at least, the bacon itself was very smoky and crispy. Of course, this being a traditional deep dish offering, you also get a couple of slices of pepperoni free of charge, which makes this thing an artery-clogging, cholesterol-raising adventure of a lifetime. And at 450 calories and 23 grams of fat per slice, odds are, that lifetime probably won't be for much longer.

As a card carrying member of the National Deep Dish Pizza Enthusiasts Club (if such a club existed, anyway) I have to say I was plum impressed with Little C's pie. This is actually a damn tasty pizza in its own right -- I mean, it's not on par with the real stuff by any stretch of the imagination, but at the same time, I really can't fathom another national chain having a pizza like this that's as holistically satisfying. Even if you removed all of the extra meat, the pie itself would be a worthy base all by itself -- methinks my next all night Netflix binge, I will probably have to experiment with a special-order jalapeno and pineapple mix, you know, for scientific reasons and all.

So, how does the product fare, you may be pondering? Well, in my humblest of opinions, this is a downright incredible product. It's so brazenly unhealthy and fatty, and I loved every second of digesting it and turning my blood cells into the cardiovascular equivalent of the really fat kids with asthma who can't run during gym class. You could literally taste the delicious unhealthiness dripping down your esophagus with every bite, as if the pie itself was some sort of Faustian forbidden fruit. Per ounce, it might just be the most extravagantly yummy thing available at any fast food pizza joint in the U.S., and hot Jesus, is this thing ever filling. Normally, I can down an entire pizza by myself in roughly the same amount of time it takes most normal folk to set up a DVD player, but after just five slices, I was ready to roll around in the carpet like a beached whale, moaning for my seafaring kin to continue on without me. And as we all know, there is only one kind of food that makes you feel you might actually die from eating it, and that's the absolute best kind of food there is.

A limited-time only product, the Bacon Wrapped Crust Deep! Deep! Dish pizza is expected to leave the official Little Caesars menu by late March. Like winter snow that will soon bleed back into the dirt, nourishing the daisies and posies of April, this dish is but a temporary wonder, a seasonal miracle that will soon give way to the next marvelous sights of spring. As a fan of deep dish pizza, novelty mass marketing and furtive attempts to poison the general public, I give Little Caesar's incredible new offering my highest recommendation, and I strongly encourage each and every person reading this to head out to their nearest chain and pick this one up as soon as they can.

Let's face it ... the FDA isn't going to let this thing stay on the market that much longer, anyway.

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