1. Chicken fingers
2. French fries
3. Huevos Rancheros wrap

Fingers, tenders, tendies, strips, nugs. Whatever you call them or however you like them, they’re the holy grail for adults who wish they could still order from the kid’s menu. Unsurprisingly, they’re also this year’s campus fan-favourite.

We can’t afford a staff food critic here at The Uniter, so you’ll have to be patient with us. And while chicken fingers are no Michelin-star dish, we all have to start somewhere. Consider this the Spark Notes of a nonexistent Yelp review section.

The first order of business was to make sure that honey dill, Winnipeg’s culinary lovechild, was included with the order. Checkpoint passed.

The chicken fingers and fries were handcrafted by the Diversity Foods kitchen – two-time winners of LEAF Canada’s Greenest Restaurant Award, among other culinary achievements.

Here are some stats:

Texture: 8/10

Sweet to salty ratio: 9/10

Temperature: 10/10 (steamy without burning your tongue)

Breading-to-chicken ratio: 10/10

And then for our second-place winner: the fries.

Perfect seasoning. Slightly on the dry side. A clear runner-up.

After practicing casual vegetarianism for nearly a decade, I’ve mostly retired from ordering chicken fingers from restaurants. Many of my memories of noshing on chicken tenders are from my glory days of ordering off the kid's menu.

That being said, I can easily imagine 10-yearold me begging my mother for these in the backseat of her van, only for her to shut it down in five crushing words: “we have them at home.”

Chicken fingers align comfort-food seekers, overgrown picky eaters and kindergarten students. They’re so universally loved that even the plant-based crowd opted to drop the “e” for an apostrophe and meat for seitan.

They’re nothing special. That’s what makes them so special.

Published in Volume 77, Number 12 of The Uniter (December 1, 2022)