KFC unveils chicken mooncakes at new Hong Kong outlet among other new dishes

American fast-food chain KFC has just opened a new outlet in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay shopping district, where it is debuting several new dishes.

There’s a grilled chicken combo with waffle fries and salad (HK$138/US$17.50), an oven-glazed hot wing platter (HK$88), and a “chizza” – a boneless chicken fillet topped with cheese, corn and pineapple pieces (HK$88).

And, just in time for Mid-Autumn Festival on September 13, there’s a “spicy chicken and nuts mooncake”.

It sounded so peculiar we had to check it out.

KFC’s mooncake is about the size of a mini mooncake, and inside is a mixture of spicy chicken floss, crushed almonds and walnuts, and sunflower seeds.

Bite into it and you immediately taste the savouriness of the chicken, feel the crunchy texture of the nuts, then detect a lingering subtle spicy taste.

Janet Yuen Yau-man, chief executive officer of KFC in Hong Kong, has worked in the fast food industry for more than 15 years – including at Pret A Manger and Starbucks – and is always searching for new things.

“Our R&D [research and development] team pitched the idea of putting our signature chicken flavour into the mooncake and we decided to give it a try,” Yuen says. “It took about six months of experimentation to get the mooncake taste right, along with the packaging.”

Talking of which, the mooncakes come in what looks like a typical KFC bucket but is in fact a lantern with an LED in it that lights up, with Colonel Sanders as an astronaut printed on the side.

To try the spicy chicken and nuts mooncake at KFC, you have to buy a KFC moonlight bucket (HK$275) that contains three spicy chicken and nuts mooncakes and three golden lava mooncakes – which have a savoury, salted egg yolk flavour.

KFC, G/F, 1/F & 2/F, East South Building, 479 & 481 Hennessy Road & 29 Percival Street, Causeway Bay, tel: 2745 2903