Jollibee Woodside

I could already smell the fried chicken 3 blocks away on my way to pick up my order. Yep Jollibee is best known for its fried chicken which is known as "chickenjoy". It's a Philippines-based chain with 1500 restaurants worldwide, but only 71 in the US. Even in the NYC area there are only 4. So it is still up and coming. We first tried their spicy chicken sandwiches. I would say it's better than Chick-fil-A. What I like about them is the buttery buns and the fact that the batters are not very salty. They absolutely need to put more of that spicy sauce than a tiny dab of it though! We liked it so much that we went back the second day for their Anniversary Bucket. It's 12 pieces of joy for $25. There're 6 drumsticks and 6 packs over 2 buckets and came with 2 cups of gravy. The drumsticks were exceptionally juicy. The backs are OK, being mostly batters. Their mobile app, on the other hand, is a total fail. We tried ordering separately on our respective phones but none of us could get through the payment process. We gave up. It's a bit better after switching to online order using the web browser; still, our attempts kept getting rejected because the restaurant are so backed up that by the time we were ready to submit the order, the pick up time became invalid. We literally changed our pickup time from ASAP to 1:00, 1:30, etc when we first started using the app. By the time we finished ordering using the browser, the available pickup time became 3:00 and 3:30 our 2 orders! The next day when I tried again for the Anniversary Bucket, and the pickup option was removed for this location because it was totally swamped. We ended up ordering directly at the restaurant. Food was 5 out of 5, but the ordering process was a nightmarish 1 out of 5. Tip: There is a motion activated faucet right next to the fountain drinks. Very convenient to wash your greasy hands.

The fried chicken is for da Gods. 😋 The gravy is heavenly. The wait time though.....😭 but it was worth it.