Bush's Fried Chicken in Cedar Park

For lunch, I had fried chicken, french fries, and a 32oz. sweet tea from Bush's Fried Chicken.

Bush's is not related to THAT family, for which I'm very grateful, despite being started just down the road from the ranch in scenic Waco, Texas. Over my college years, they branched out from Waco to the small surrounding towns of Central Texas, and now they have a franchise in north Austin, Cedar Park. Their chicken is better than most chains, and a tie with Popeye's. They're completely different chains, so the comparison isn't fair to either, but the overall tastiness quotient is similar. The batter is much lighter and crisper than Popeye's, and there is no 'spicy' option at Bush's. Hence, I end up dumping approximately half a bottle of Louisiana-style hot sauce on my chicken strips, but it is worth it.

I had the #1 combo- four chicken strips, cool zigzag-cut fries, gravy, and a huge sweet tea for $6. I hate soft drinks, but my vice all through college was a 32oz sweet tea from Bush's...at least until I gained ten pounds off sweet tea alone. It used to be .50, and comes with "good" ice (yay pebbly ice!). With inflation, it's now a whopping .92, but still, without a doubt, the best sweet tea anywhere. I can't be sure, but it tastes like it's still made with real sugar (no HFCS here), and lots of it.

The chicken was pretty good- crispy, super-hot, with a really nice cracker-crumb saltines flavor and doused with hot sauce. Their fries are always nice, with a retro grade-school cafeteria thing going on due to their prefab Ore-Ida shape. They also get doused in hot sauce. I'm not a huge gravy fan, but I gingerly dipped a few fries into the quivering goo for research purposes. It was creamy and peppery and kind of bland (I think gravy is supposed to be bland?); if I didn't think I'd need a quintuple bypass tomorrow, I'd dip my fries in more often.

Bonus excitement:
I adore Central Texas, and try not to make fun of people who live there (particularly when they make yummy food). However, I checked out the Bush's Chicken website in an attempt to clarify the sweetener used in the sweet tea. No dice there, but whomever wrote the copy for their site is illiterate. Check out the inappropriate apostrophes and grammar (and their pics of zigzag fries) here.