Lupe Fiasco Loves Harold S Chicken But Does He Know Which Harold S Is Best

The Reader’s archive is vast and varied, going back to 1971. Every day in Archive Dive, we’ll dig through and bring up some finds. On Sunday, Lupe Fiasco Tweeted the video for his new song “Harold’s,” a tribute to the beloved south side fried chicken chain. As Leor Galil pointed out in a blog post yesterday, the track is part of a long and honorable tradition of referencing Harold’s Chicken Shack in Chicago hip-hop, going all the way back to Common in 1992.

“Lupe makes a persuasive case for Harold’s supremacy,” Galil writes, “which, as he aptly describes on the track, ‘Makes KFC taste like Mississippi river rat.’”

But some Harold’s franchises are better than others, as Reader restaurant critic Mike Sula discovered during his exhaustive 2006 tour of 35 Harold’s locations.

Sula survived the ordeal. No one has dared duplicate it since.

    The freshness category was an important one. Was the chicken fried to order, or had it been sitting around all day? The service category was an easy way for a shack to bump up its score—if a chicken slinger displayed a shred of personality or friendliness he received a high mark.