Fifteen Years of Chicken Finger Thursday
For a decade and a half, students at Jefferson’s East Falls Campus who are feeling a bit peckish on a Thursday have had the delicious opportunity of indulging in a culinary tradition — Chicken Finger Thursday.
The idea was hatched when students started requesting dining services to add chicken fingers to the menu. Dining services decided to make it a special one-day-aweek event, and Chicken Finger Thursday was born. The offering of delicate morsels of breaded and deep-fried chicken caught on quickly and had diners scrambling to get their servings. Soon, it became a campus institution with a devoted following.
It became so popular that the demand started outweighing the supply. The enthusiasm has never wavered.
Every week about 500 pounds of chicken fingers are cooked and served — and that’s no paltry sum! It would take a mathemechicken to add up how many tons of the tenders have been consumed by students, faculty, staff, and visitors since 2011.
While the original fingers were cooked from frozen pieces, eventually they were transitioned to fresh, hand-breaded morsels because they are tastier and healthier. To ensure everyone gets to enjoy the treat, the menu has "eggspanded" to include the original recipe, as well as vegan, halal, and gluten-free options.
They are served with a variety of dipping sauces, including honey mustard, ketchup, barbecue, and hot sauce, and french fries.
Chicken Finger Thursday is such a feather in the cap of Jefferson that admissions ambassadors — called Rambassadors — tout it highly during campus tours. It has also inspired merch. In fact, dining services celebrated the milestone anniversary of Chicken Finger Thursday this year by hosting a design contest for a new logo.
The contest winner, Sophia Del Pizzo, an interior design major, is "eggcited" to have her design featured on a limited-edition T-shirt.
“The inspiration for my design came from a mixture of a symbol of celebration and capturing the popular demand and love for Chicken Finger Thursday by students each week. … I came up with the concept of a chicken partying,” she says on her Instagram post. “That concept then evolved into the design where the chicken is playing the drums with chicken fingers.”
While the chicken fingers are not offered around the cluck, they are served for eight hours on Thursdays — from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. — to accommodate any student who has been cooped up in their dorm room immersed in their studies.
The food is so popular that when a fowl rumor that the dining services planned to discontinue it made the rounds recently, it inspired panicked emails and Instagram messages. But be assured, the tradition is too big to lay an egg — Chicken Finger Thursday will go on.
The weekly event even got a shout out by a celebrity. In his 2013 graduation address, Carson Kressley, former member of the University’s board of trustees, well-known fashion expert, and “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” TV alum, told the students: “You’ve gotten your education. You’ve pulled the all-nighters, read the books, turned in the projects. You’ve waited in line at Chicken Finger Thursdays. You’ve fulfilled the requirements.”
