Snack Wrap Supreme

I have a new lunch-time favorite. It's tastes a lot like a chicken snack wrap you'd get at . It is a piece of flat bread wrapped around some fried chicken nuggets with some sauce and a little lettuce and cucumber.

Yesterday, it tasted good. Today I had to stand in line to wait for one, and I got to watch them made, and it got better.

Here's what I noticed.

The bread was cooking on a large, flat oven in the back of the kitchen. I say cooking and not heating because at one point, the man went over to check on the bread, looked at it, and put the lid back down. That tells me that he is watching for the caramelization on the bread's surface to show that it is cooked, not just heating them up.

Another man was breading the chicken. I couldn't see the whole process. I don't know if the chicken came in fresh or from a freezer pack. But I know that it was breaded before my eyes and then dropped into oil.

When the bread came off the griddle, the chicken came out of the fryer. A man then immediately spread the bread with some red stuff (I think it's the ubiquitous red bean paste), put on a handful of chicken, added a few pieces of lettuce, and a cumber spear. Then he tossed on two shakes of something (salt and pepper?) and rolled it up. Into a plastic baggie and voila.

The best snack wrap you've ever had.

Sure, it has fried chicken in it. You can call that bad for you. I suspect they use peanut oil, though. (Although I don't know, it is certainly the oil of choice in this country.) But I'm noticing that the food is actually made on the premises. Not heated or assembled onsite, but made. By people. Out of food.

It is incredible.

There is a man who makes the noodles. A man stirring up your soup in a pot. A man who puts the ingredients you want into the hot pot for you. And while I don't see it, I bet there is a man or woman chopping the meat and veggies for the stir fry, too. The food isn't 5 star cuisine. Some of the flavors are odd to my palate and sometimes you can tell that things have been sitting on the steam table for too long. It is an enterprise that serves 5000+ people daily. (Well, that's just lunch. Many people eat breakfast and dinner there, too.)

But they serve FOOD.

I wonder if that has anything to do with how wonderful the students are. They eat food, not highly-processed, food-like by-products of the agricultural industry. Imagine that.