“Jolly morning!” is a weird way to be greeted, no matter the context. But it rang out, like birdsong, from behind the counter of a fast-food joint I visited in the Los Angeles suburbs in May. Although the restaurant’s bright overhead lighting and giant menus suggested a typical American chain, something was a little off. Along one wall, a floor-to-ceiling mural depicted a cartoon bee in a chef’s hat demonstrating the dance steps of the twist.The bee is the eponymous mascot of Jollibee, which now has about 80 locations across the United States. Its food seems familiar until you taste it. Chickenjoy, the chain’s signature fried chicken, has a golden, rippled exterior, just as you might expect. But tooth meets flesh with a burst of garlic, citrus, and something salty and fermented, a little like soy. What lingers on the tongue is a blast of umami that’s so deeply chicken-y, it’s hard to square with the mild-flavored meat that Americans have come to know.The menu’s other highlights smack of the surreal. The Aloha Burger is savory-sweet, sporting a halo of grilled pineapple beneath layers of bacon and cheese. Jolly Spaghetti is slathered in a sugary meat sauce and garnished with grated cheese and hot-dog slices. Crisp hand pies ooze purple ube and golden mango.Jollibee does not serve American food, not exactly. The chain is based in the Philippines, which developed a taste for burgers and fried chicken during its years as a U.S. colony, and has since made the foods its own. Despite Jollibee’s off-kilter dishes and feel—or perhaps because of them—Americans are eating it up. USA Today and Eater recently ranked its fried chicken as the best in the country among fast-food restaurants, beating out brands such as Popeyes, Chick-fil-A, and KFC. The company, once threatened by the incursion of McDonald’s into its territory, is aggressively expanding across the U.S.; in 2022, it opened its flagship in Times Square, a block away from McDonald’s New York anchor store. Fast food, an export pushed out around the globe by the U.S., is now boomeranging back in unexpected—and, so far, lucrative—ways.A statue of the Jollibee mascot, ushering customers into a store in West Covina, California (Philip Cheung for The Atlantic)Two symbols dominate the haze of Manila’s skyline: church steeples and signs bearing Jollibee’s logo. Often, the Catholic Church and Jollibee go hand in hand: Final blessings at Sunday Mass release worshippers to their post-service meal, and children’s birthday parties start with blessings over sweet spaghetti (and sometimes end with a visit from an employee in a giant bee costume, as I observed enviously in my own childhood during visits to Manila).Jollibee is often described as the McDonald’s of the Philippines, but that doesn’t do the chain justice. It has approximately 1,300 locations across the nation, which is about the size of Arizona. Per square mile, Jollibee has nearly four times the number of stores in the Philippines as McDonald’s does in the U.S.Driving down Manila’s main highway in May, I turned at a colossal golden statue of the Virgin Mary and headed toward one of the city’s main business districts. Chubby red lettering at the top of a skyscraper came into view: Jollibee TOWER. At a Jollibee across the street from the headquarters, I met Ernesto Tanmantiong, the global CEO and president of Jollibee Foods Corporation. We sat down for a light breakfast: a Burger Steak (beef patties smothered with mushroom gravy) and rice for me; Chickenjoy and pineapple juice for him.Tanmantiong, who is trim with graying hair, wore a bright-red polo embroidered with the words CHOOSE JOY! He told long-winded stories and laughed at his own jokes, which made him seem less like the leader of a company worth north of $4 billion and more like a guy who hangs out in the food court at the mall, albeit one wearing what appeared to be a blue IWC Portugieser watch worth about $13,000. Employees call him Sir Ato, combining respect for authority with the familiarity of a nickname. He has worked at the company since his older brother, Tony Tan Caktiong, known as Sir Tony and now Jollibee’s chairman, founded it in 1978.Culinary ambitions ran in the family. Tanmantiong’s father had cooked at a Chinese temple in Manila before opening a restaurant in the southern city of Davao. In 1975, Tan Caktiong borrowed family money to open two Manila franchises of Magnolia, a popular Filipino ice-cream company established by a U.S. volunteer Army cook. With college graduation and a wedding imminent, Tan Caktiong figured that ice cream was as good a way as any to make a living. But before long, he started serving burgers too, bringing on his sister to develop recipes and Tanmantiong to manage operations. He renamed his restaurants Jollibee, which captured the family’s business ethos: Employees should work as hard and harmoniously as bees, but unless they’re happy, that kind of effort is “not worth it,” Tanmantiong said. Jollibee’s burgers were soon outselling the ice cream.Ernesto Tanmantiong, the global CEO and president of Jollibee Foods Corporation (Sonny Thakur for The Atlantic)The U.S. had seized control of the archipelago at the turn of the previous century, after the Spanish-American War, bringing American soldiers and officials—along with the food they ate back home. Over time, that reshaped the national appetite. Tom’s Dixie Kitchen, a Manila hot spot opened in the 1910s by a Black GI, popularized southern-style fried chicken. After the Philippines was granted independence in 1946, the hunger for American food remained. Local burger chains such as Big 20, 50/50, and Tropical Hut proliferated by serving distinctly Filipinized burgers. The Filipino palate, also shaped by a long history of Indigenous, Chinese, and Spanish settlement, demands maximum levels of sour, sweet, salty, and umami. Tropical Hut, for instance, serves an onion-sweet, heavily seasoned beef patty sandwiched between sweetened buns.Jollibee followed in this same tradition. Its Yumburger—so named because it was “more yummy than others,” Tanmantiong said—appears to be a standard American burger. Yet its patty is sweet and intensely savory (the recipe is kept secret, but amateur attempts to re-create it rely on flavorful add-ins such as oyster sauce, banana ketchup, and MSG). Its dressing—thick, tangy, saccharine—is like Big Mac sauce, distilled into something more potent. The company may prize joy, but its burger recipe is the result of a ruthless development strategy, carried out by Tanmantiong’s father and sister: Copy the competition, then improve it.[From the January/February 2018 issue: Robots will transform fast food]Chickenjoy was designed the same way. Homegrown chicken chains, such as Max’s Restaurant and Classic Savory, were popular, but they didn’t serve the southern-style breaded version that the family had in mind. Tanmantiong sought inspiration abroad, before Filipinizing the final recipe. The chicken is served with a gloopy sweet gravy that Anthony Bourdain once described, not disparagingly, as the “sinister brown sauce.” (He also called the sweet spaghetti—a spin on the pasta dish once served as rations to American GIs—“deranged, yet strangely alluring.”)In Jollibee’s early days, even as it was seeking to perfect American fast food for the Filipino palate, American fast-food chains were racing into the country. Around 1980, Tanmantiong and his brother started to notice American businessmen hanging around local Jollibees. “We already knew that it was McDonald’s,” he said. With just 10 locations across the country, Jollibee seemed to stand little chance against the global giant. Tan Caktiong sought advice from E. Smith Lanning, an American corporate strategist living in Manila. Lanning’s prognosis was grim: Jollibee’s service was too slow, its footprint too small.Perhaps most challenging was the prospect that its identity was too Filipino to compete with McDonald’s. Minyong Ordoñez, a titan of Filipino advertising, warned the family about what some locals derisively called the “American mentality”; people assumed that anything made in the U.S. was better by default, and thus worth paying more for.“We decided to face them head-on,” Tanmantiong said. Unable to fill locations as big as its competitor’s, Jollibee swarmed each new McDonald’s with a ring of smaller stores. It marketed itself as a restaurant where every family could go for an affordable treat; even today, a combo meal of spaghetti, fries, and a drink is cheaper than McDonald’s. (Ahead of my meeting with Tanmantiong, Jollibee corporate staff cautioned that the restaurant might be crowded because it was payday for many workers; it was indeed packed.)A Burger Steak, Chickenjoy, Jolly Spaghetti, and rice (Sonny Thakur for The Atlantic)Most of all, Jollibee set out to convince locals that its food was superior—more flavorful and better aligned with their taste buds—than whatever McDonald’s could offer. During our breakfast, Tanmantiong expounded on a concept that is central to the Jollibee brand: langhap sarap, which roughly translates to “breathe in deliciousness.” The fried chicken is not just meant to be eaten; you should be able to taste it before you even unwrap it. When I ordered the chicken at a drive-through in the Manila suburbs, the closed paper bag filled the car with dizzying richness. It verges on sensory overload, which is the point: Any American meal should seem bland in comparison.[Read: One community’s complicated relationship with SPAM]And more often than not, it does. McDonald’s has tried to adapt its menu in the Philippines to local tastes, and it thrives there today, but it has failed to surpass Jollibee in terms of market share or cultural significance. The bone-in fried chicken I ordered at a McDonald’s drive-through was monotonously salty; the sweet spaghetti tasted synthetic and was topped with a single hot-dog slice. As an American, I found it both disorienting and disappointing to see McDonald’s playing catch-up. As a Filipino, I was appalled that I hadn’t gotten my money’s worth of hot dogs.When I visited the Jollibee Commissary in nearby Laguna, the company’s 24-acre flagship production plant, I didn’t breathe in deliciousness so much as bathe in it. A cloud of steam, perfumed with onions and beef, marked the entrance to the spaghetti room, where sugary sauce bubbled in stainless-steel vats the size of hot tubs. Buckets of diced bell peppers, beef tallow, and textured vegetable protein were stacked next to sealed containers of powder, which I assumed was the company’s secret spice mix. (My guides, in lab coats, would neither confirm nor deny this.) In the pie room, huge metal tubes squirted jammy mangoes and peaches onto strips of pastry. The Laguna plant is one of many, but it is the only one that makes Jollibee’s peach-mango pies (the company insists on using Filipino mangoes). I watched assembly-line workers hand-packing them—tens of thousands a day—into boxes addressed to stores across the globe.[Read: The beloved Filipino tradition that started as a government policy]Jollibee’s growth outside the Philippines initially followed the migration of Filipinos abroad. Since the 1970s, so many Filipinos have left home in search of better jobs that, in 2024, their remittances accounted for more than 7 percent of the Philippines’ national income. Many of Jollibee’s 1,800-plus international locations exist where there are large pockets of homesick Filipinos, which is most places: the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe, and America. Even in areas without a Jollibee, its parent company is at work. Worldwide, Jollibee Foods Corporation operates more than 10,000 stores under the 19 Filipino and international brands it has swallowed up, which include Smashburger, the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and the Michelin-starred dim sum chain Tim Ho Wan. Tanmantiong’s goal is to become one of the top five restaurant companies in the world (one recent estimate ranked Jollibee 17th; McDonald’s is consistently first). He believes it can happen—if Jollibee can win over America.A restaurant in West Covina, California (Philip Cheung for The Atlantic)Jollibee opened its first U.S. store in 1998; by 2020, it had 48. Most were concentrated in regions with dense Filipino-immigrant populations, such as Los Angeles and New York. But those locations have been successful enough that Jollibee has ventured into other markets. In October, when I visited the Times Square restaurant at lunchtime, a steady flow of customers—roughly half were Filipino—cycled in and out of the packed dining area, where Chickenjoy or chicken sandwiches were on nearly every table. Nationwide, average revenues per store were at least double those of Popeyes and KFC in 2024, David Henkes, a food-and-beverage-industry analyst at Technomic, told me.The warm reception from the “mainstream”—company parlance for non-Filipino Americans—has emboldened Jollibee to ramp up its expansion, Tanmantiong said. In 2021, it announced a plan to open 500 stores across North America before the end of the decade, and recently launched a franchising program to accelerate its growth. A few blocks away from the Times Square flagship, a new storefront is preparing to open by Grand Central Station, right next door to a McDonald’s.Tanmantiong’s hopes for expansion rest mostly, but not entirely, on the distinctive flavor of Jollibee’s food. During our interview, about three-quarters of the way into my Burger Steak, we were interrupted by whistles and cheers. Jollibee himself had arrived, and he was bounding toward me in a flame-red suit and black bow tie. The lids of his huge doll eyes fluttered maniacally as he spread his arms for a hug. I let out a little scream—whether from joy or shock, I’m not sure. The staff clapped in unison as he invited me to dance by the counter, his striped thorax—abdomen?—gyrating. A pirouette later, he raised his hands for a double high five. In addition to the fried chicken, this is what Tanmantiong is exporting to America. “Aside from superior taste,” he told me later, in a boardroom in the company’s tower, “you get the joy of eating in a Jollibee store.”How far can Jollibee go in the U.S.? A week after my trip to Manila, my stomach still reeling from my fast-food extravaganza there, I sat down with Beth Dela Cruz, the president of the chain’s North America division. I’d made the mistake of scheduling another breakfast meeting, at a franchise in West Covina, California, a suburb of Los Angeles. Dela Cruz, compact and energetic, had an auntie’s indefatigable determination to compel me to eat more. Our meal included, but was not limited to, fried chicken (regular and spicy), spaghetti, two kinds of burgers, pineapple juice, and peach-mango pie. Across the street from the restaurant was Jollibee’s American headquarters, a glass tower topped with the company logo.Beth Dela Cruz, the president of Jollibee’s North America division, at a restaurant in West Covina, California (Philip Cheung for The Atlantic)I wanted to know how the company, having overcome Filipinos’ “American mentality” decades ago in Manila, was seeking to do so again, in America itself. Chickenjoy may be exceptionally tasty, but Americans do not live on fried chicken alone. Jollibee’s other offerings—which, in addition to the burgers and spaghetti, include palabok, rice noodles slathered in pork- and-shrimp gravy—are not as approachable.Dela Cruz was, unsurprisingly, sanguine. “People freak out” about the sweet spaghetti, she said. “But then when they taste it, it becomes, like, an unexpected experience.” (In the Times Square restaurant, I’d watched a middle-aged flight attendant from Atlanta carefully remove the hot-dog slices from hers; she told me she loved the chicken but wouldn’t be ordering the spaghetti again.) The company has made concessions to its American audience. The spaghetti here is less sweet, and the pies are bigger. A line of Angus-beef burgers, available only in the U.S. and Canada, was designed to meet North American expectations: less seasoning and more sauce, Luis Velasco, the region’s senior vice president and marketing head, told me. Other menu items found in some U.S. locations include baked macaroni and cheese, chicken tenders, and southern-style biscuits, all of which I tasted during my breakfast with Dela Cruz. They were good, but they weren’t all that distinctive. The Angus burger, Dela Cruz said, “has really good flavors, but it’s meant for the mainstream”—a euphemism, I thought, for relatively bland.And as for the joy? Dela Cruz has succeeded, at the least, in importing Jollibee’s colorful branding and goofy mascot. Ty Matejowsky, an anthropology professor who studies Jollibee (yes, really) at the University of Central Florida, told me about a recent proliferation of memes expressing nostalgia for a more fun era of American fast food, before McDonald’s cartoonish red roofs and PlayPlaces and Pizza Hut’s kitschy pendant lamps were given a sterile modern makeover. Jollibee seems to supply something a little like that—a “current of happiness,” he said. The service at the locations I visited was typically about as warm as any I’d experienced in Manila.But happy low-wage workers aren’t always widely available in America. (In 2023, Jollibee settled a legal dispute with a group of employees in New Jersey who had sought better working conditions and higher pay.) Over-the-top friendliness is not the cultural default in the U.S. the way it is in the Philippines, and fundamental elements of the brand are inevitably lost in translation. In the Philippines, Jollibee is an institution; in America, it’s mostly just another chicken restaurant, and may never be destined to be anything more. Even if Jollibee opens up 500 stores in the U.S., McDonald’s has more locations in Ohio alone.Still, Jollibee doesn’t have to topple the fast-food giants, or re-create an era when fast food was a little more fun, to play a part in reshaping the American palate, much as the U.S. reshaped the Filipino palate a century ago. On that front, it has one major advantage. For all of Jollibee’s weirdness, it isn’t entirely foreign. Because it is Filipino, it is also American.This article appears in the January 2026 print edition with the headline “Postcolonial Chicken.”