The Chicken Sisters

In an advertisement for a reality series named Food Wars on The Food Channel, the producers of the show are looking to hold a contest between rival restaurants with owners who have close personal relationships, such as “best friends with dueling taco trucks” (1). The restaurants will be judged on overall dining experience, menus, and on the quality of their specialty food. The winner will win $100,000.

The advertisement is followed by several email drafts to the producers of the show from Amanda Pogociello, whose mother and mother-in-law own rival fried chicken restaurants: Chicken Mimi’s and Chicken Frannie’s. In these emails, Amanda reveals that two sisters—Frances, or Frannie, and Margaret, or Mimi—moved out west to work for a man, Fred Harvey, at his restaurants along the railroad line. Mimi eventually married a man and moved to Kansas, where she opened her own restaurant that sold “fried chicken, potatoes, and biscuits with Frannie” (2). Although they were making a lot of money, Mimi and Frannie got into a fight that cleaved the business in two and began a multi-generational rivalry. Chicken Mimi’s, now run by Amanda’s mother, Barbara, has been run exclusively by the women in Mimi’s lineage.