Archived Article By Tom Fitzmorris Originally published March 24, 2008 1943-2008 Al Copeland Al Copeland, who died over the weekend at sixty-four, was a food guy who lived like a movie star. He could, for the same reason the biggest movie stars can. Copeland's offerings peaked in popularity among the widest part of the population. You didn't have to be a gourmet to like Popeyes' or Copeland's food. In fact, you probably liked it better if you weren't. Everything Al Copeland sold--with one exception--was already well known and appreciated when he began selling it. He added flash, got everybody's attention. The exception was the very thing that launched his career in the first place. That chicken from Popeyes. Popeyes fried chicken was an outrageously bold innovation. Nobody ever tasted or even heard of chicken marinated in Creole spices so hot that you had to make sure you had rolls and a drink at hand before you ate it. For some people, Popeyes was inedibly peppery. But in New Orleans, for every customer who felt that way were ten or fifty or a hundred who found that spicy flavor a unique thrill. After they tasted Popeyes, they didn't want to go back to KFC or Church's or Jim Dandy or any of the other fast-food chicken chains. The first review of Popeyes ever published--in the Vieux Carre Courier in the summer of 1973, about a year after Popeyes started up--called it the best fried chicken in town. That was an overstatement, but the author--me--was twenty-two, just a year into his own career. But I wasn't the only one who felt that way. Popeyes already had three locations around town, and you had to stand in line at lunchtime to get the stuff. The first one was in Arabi. Al came to fried chicken out of doughnuts. Gilbert Copeland, a relative, created a hit with Tastee Donuts, and Al opened his own shop. But doughnuts proved to be zeroes as far as Al's ambitions went. So he shifted his product line, and set to work on the details of his fried chicken concept as he and his wife even as they sold their first chicken dinners in the take-out-only shop. Work was the key word. Throughout his life, Al Copeland was indefatigable. Legendary for wearing out people he worked with, he always had a clear objective and worked obsessively until he achieved it exactly. He tweaked everything about his new chicken shop, from the recipe to the name and look of the place, till the wee hours of the morning every day. At that pace, Copeland soon finished his magnum opus. Popeyes as we know it (including the "Famous Fried Chicken" line in the name) was complete in a few months--an astonishingly short time for one guy working more or less alone to come up with such a finely-tuned, original product and marketing. From then on, everything was accelerated acceleration. Popeyes grew to everywhere. The only major additions to the product line were freshly-baked biscuits (replacing the spongy rolls most chicken places served until then) and red beans and rice (such a natural partner to fried chicken that it blew fries out of the box, at least in New Orleans). Copeland continued as the tastemaker for everything he sold in all his restaurants thereafter. He surrounded himself with the best chefs, including some very big names (notably Warren Leruth). He told them what he was after, and was in on all the tastings, rejecting recipes one after another until it was to his taste. But nothing was ever as original as the chicken. The biscuit idea, for example, was already a hit at Bojangles when Popeyes did theirs. And when Copeland created his first new restaurant after Popeyes, in the early 1980s, its menu was a collection of current New Orleans culinary trends. Fortunately, that was a fecund time. Paul Prudhomme was igniting the national craze for Creole-Cajun food, and the gourmet bistros of which Mr. B's was the archetype had redefined the New Orleans menu. Copeland's freely adapted the newly-famous dishes at K-Paul's and the bistros, and sold at least as much blackened redfish and gumbo ya-ya as anyone else. Of course, following trends, not creating them, is the successful strategy if you're selling to the mainstream. Copeland's and its successor concepts (Straya, the Cheesecake Bistro, and Sweet Fire And Ice) continued to adopt what was doing well in other restaurants, making it accessible and familiar. This, in my opinion, has been to the chain's detriment. I haven't seen what I would consider an original culinary idea in those places in a very long time. And since I know where the ideas being imitated were born, I go there instead of to--did they actually call that place the Cheesecake Bistro? A person who doesn't make mistakes, as the Benjamin Franklin line goes, doesn't make anything. In these unforgiving times, Al Copeland is at least as famous for his failures as his successes. His several marriages, his facelifts, his extravagant lifestyle, the disruption of his neighbors' lives with his street-jamming Christmas displays, the loss of Popeyes when he tried to take over his biggest competitor. All are the kinds of offenses committed by a goal-seeker who can't be stopped. Yeah, he deserved criticism for all that. But the guy just died. May we recall that dozens of major players in the local and national food business learned their strokes by working with Al Copeland? That he spread a reasonably credible taste of New Orleans to many other places? That he threw one hell of a great party? That thousands of people loved his Christmas display? That this guy who didn't finish high school was already drinking Chateau Lafite-Rothschild as his default wine five years after he started his little chicken stand? That he was a shrewd businessman who, after he had to give up Popeyes, kept the exclusive contract to supply the chain with its critical seasonings for another few decades yet? If a novelist writing about an Al Copeland character--a man renowned for having a golden palate--had him die of a rare cancer of the salivary glands, we'd roll our eyes in disbelief. But that's what happened. The disease moves fast and leaves no survivors. Al Copeland was in Munich, Germany, receiving a last-ditch treatment when he succumbed Sunday, March 23. There's only going to be one Al Copeland, ever. © 2008 Tom Fitzmorris. All rights reserved. news@nomenu.com