Pollo Campero’s presence on BuHi presented an interesting conundrum for Adam and I. We had been skipping Waffle Houses, Pizza Huts and the like due to their national chain status. We even skipped the HoneyBaked Ham (which I have never eaten at), because they have more than 400 locations nationwide. And here was Pollo Campero, the “country chicken,” taunting us with is mysterious latin origins, but simultaneously sporting a healthy 300+ locations. And yet we’d never heard of it and it seems to fit in the BuHi culture. So we felt like we should go…. A little research reveals that only 50 of these locations are in America, and only three in Georgia. Compare that to HoneyBaked Ham’s 40 Georgia locations, and eating at Pollo Campero seems far more reasonable. So I think we’re really looking at market saturation, not sheer number of locations.

Okay, now that the splainin’ is out of the way, let’s talk Pollo Campero!

Being tired and cranky at the end of a long weekend, we elected to utilize the drive-thru. That’s what fast food is for, right?

The design is appropriately clean and fresh for modern sensibilities – perhaps you’ll forget you’re ordering fat fast food?

We received the horchata we ordered right away – with no straw – and waited a long time for the rest of the food. While we were waiting, we watched employees take half chickens in and out of the broiler – no chicken by-products were spotted, which was nice.

Rice pudding in liquid form. Teh noms.

I enjoyed the horchata. It was more like my first one at Taqueria Michoacan; like a liquid version of rice pudding, with strong hints of cinnamon and cream, and less like the one I had at Tijuana’s, which was more rice-water-ish and had an overall flatter flavor. Makes me wonder what real horchata tastes like, since fast food is pretty much a pale shadow of what any meal would be cooked at home. Oh and like three times the calories, of course.

Trying to be patient.

We ordered the grilled chicken burrito ($4.99), grilled chicken bowl ($4.99), yuca fries ($1.99), and the aforementioned horchata ($1.99).

The goods in travel mode.

 The burrito was fine, but just fine. The bowl – which was essentially just the burrito innards in a bowl – was surprisingly much more satisfying to eat. It might have had slightly different spices than the burrito, I suppose.

Gnawed burrito… I was to excited about the bowl to snap a pic.

The yuca fries were a toss-up – I thought they were delicious, while Adam found them to be a bit boring.

Yuca fries. They were fry-tastically delicious, IMO.

At the end of the day, we give it 3 stars.

Usually our criterion for 3 stars is that we’d go back again if we were nearby, but wouldn’t necessarily go out of our way to get there, or be over the moon about it. I think I can safely say that we’ll not ever be going back to Pollo Campero, but that is more due to the fact that we don’t do fast food, and less a statement about Pollo Campero as compared to other fast food joints. Pollo Campero seems to us to be a less greasy, latino version of KFC, and for that it gets 3 stars (KFC gets 1.5 stars from us, by the way).

Pollo Campero‎
3389 Buford Highway NE
Atlanta, GA 30329