Things you've never dreamed of

After giving up KFC a few years ago, there’s only one place I go to for Western-style fried chicken – Clem’s Chicken Shop.

Clem’s is a Newtown institution much like Istanbul on King. It’s the perfect place to go for the post piss-up carb and grease fest.

Clem’s menu board. They have both BBQ and fried chicken. I’ve heard that the BBQ chicken is quite good but I’m there for one thing and one thing only.

It’s… beautiful.

If you want to be fancy about it I suppose you can get some vegetables.

My dinner pack – 3 pieces fried chicken with a mountain of chips. Where do I even start describing how good this is? It’s like KFC, but 10,000x better and probably laced with heroin or similarly addictive stuff, not that it needs any. Not with that tasty, crispy chicken skin with just the right amount of fat that cracks so delightfully between your teeth. Everytime I’ve been here the chicken and chips have been freshly fried and piping hot. No lukewarm dry chicken for Clem’s clientele.

You see, Clem cares.

If there’s one thing you never have to worry about here, it’s the portion sizes. My dinner pack costs $9.60 and will comfortably feed two (you know, if you don’t mind sharing). Large chips cost $2.50 and is the approximate size of a 3 month old baby.

There’s only one thing I find slightly distressing about Clem’s.

What is this? Why is it with the vegetables? I swear to god that everytime I come here it looks EXACTLY like this. With the same amount of… stuff taken out. The world is a strange and confusing place.

Afterwards my friends and I wandered down to Civic to grab a movie to watch while waiting for all the food to digest. I found this:

And I thought FUCK. YEAH. I mean check out that cover. How can this NOT be good?

I found out later that despite an excellent premise, this isn’t very good at all. Read: a steaming pile of shit (redeemed only by that scene where the shark attacks a plane). It’s so cheaply made they had to recycle the 5-minute CGI scenes they have throughout the movie. I mean seriously guys you can’t use the 5 minutes for an 85 minute movie. They probably realised that halfway through making the film though because they padded the rest of the movie out with stock footage from National Geographic docos. The icing on the shit cake though has got to be the sex scene so awkward, my libido packed up and took the rest of the week off. I was experiencing so much second hand embarrassment at the “acting” that I nearly stopped the film halfway. But no, I watched the entire thing. It had so much potential, and I was let down.

Wait, this is a food blog.

Clem’s Chicken Shop
210 King St., Newtown

PS: Fun continuity error in Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus: In the first scene with Emma McNeil, take a close look at bits where she’s pressing the buttons on the submarine console and when they cutaway to her face – you’ll notice that she has black nailpolish in the button scene but not others. I’m suspecting that the button bits are taken off another movie and spliced in.