Carl Clarke is adamant that before I try his new dish I should touch it. “Go on, feel it,” he implores. “Give it a good squeeze. Can you feel how squidgy that is? Ohhh.” He lets out an orgasmic groan.
His new dish, which he is confident will conquer London — and then Britain — is a £4.95 fried chicken sandwich. It comes packaged in a disposable paper wrapper like a McDonald’s cheeseburger. However, before I am allowed to unwrap the Straight up Chik’n, I have to press my fingers into it.
I am not sure what is the right reaction to squeezing a bit of fried chicken in a bun, but Clarke is looking at me anxiously. So I go with: “Yes, squidgy.”
He nods sagely. “That’s because we’ve redeveloped the bread roll. It’s taken us a year to get this right — it’s got potato in it. Real potato scooped out of a baked potato, not potato flour. Potato makes it very light, very squidgy. You can feel it.”
Clarke, superclub DJ turned chef, takes fried chicken very, very seriously. He is the owner of Chick ’n’ Sours, which has two outlets in London. They serve strong cocktails, loud music and exotically spiced fried chicken to hipsters with tattoos. Pierre Koffmann, a man who once held three Michelin stars, has declared “everything is perfect” about Chick ’n’ Sours.
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Clarke now wants to revolutionise high street fried chicken by starting his own chain of takeaway shops called Chik’n. He’s not a fan of vowels. And he wants to do it with what the Americans call the chicken sandwich — deep-fried breaded chicken in a bun — but using free-range birds from a farm in Somerset.
He is not the only one. The upmarket chicken sandwich has started to crop up everywhere. The ultimate antidote to avocado on rye, it is the new dirty burger, its inexorable rise proof that not only is the poshification of fast food far from over, but also that chicken is the protein of choice for millennials.
In the past few weeks Shake Shack, the US company that is partly responsible for the huge growth in upmarket hamburgers in Britain, has brought over its £6.25 Chick’n Shack from America, saying it is “honoured and humbled” by how customers have embraced (and instagrammed) the new dish.
Even Yo! Sushi has got in on the act. In April the chain, usually associated with raw fish, added to its menu the Chicken Katsu Sando (£4.70), an intriguing Japanese version of the fried chicken sandwich. “You get it everywhere in Japan,” explains Mike Lewis, the executive head chef at Yo!, “from 7-Eleven style convenience stores, train stations, to high-end department stores and premium restaurants too.”
The Chicken Katsu Sando is a prime example of yoshoku, a term used in Japan to describe European cuisine that has became japanised. The chicken thigh is heavily breaded, deep-fried and then immediately dipped in a tonkatsu curry sauce, giving it that distinct sweet-sour taste. It is then placed between two slices of crustless English bread and cut up into fingers to make it look like a cucumber sandwich served for afternoon tea.
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“The soft white bread really works. It’s comfort food — it’s like a fish-finger sandwich. People really like that crunch with soft white bread,” Lewis says. “It’s a guilty pleasure — carb on carb.”
I ask him who supplies Yo! with its bread, expecting him to name a specialist manufacturer. “It’s a good white loaf,” he says, slightly cagily, before confessing: “It’s a Hovis. Thick white.”
It works, especially if you like the vinegary tang of a tonkatsu sauce. Yet it is very restrained compared with its American cousin.
One of the first restaurants to introduce Brits to the posh fried chicken sandwich was Bird, which has four outlets in London, including one in Shoreditch (of course). Like Chik’n, it uses British free-range meat.
Bird was started three years ago by Paul Hemings, a former investment banker, and his wife, Cara Ceppetelli. “When we first put it on the menu,” says Hemings, who comes from Canada, as does his wife, “we called it the fried chicken sandwich, because that’s what it is called in North America. I am not sure why. I think it’s just that people associate burger with beef burgers. But people in the UK didn’t quite get it. Even though it was clearly explained on the menu, they tended to think of it as, well, a sandwich.” As in a Pret chicken and avocado.
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Perhaps it’s because of the potential confusion that Red Rooster, the Harlem restaurant frequented by Barack Obama, left its Crispy Bird sandwich off the menu when it recently opened an outlet in London.
Still, Bird’s fried chicken sandwich, like the forthcoming Chik’n one and the Chick’n Shack, is very much a burger — a large piece of fried meat between two halves of a bun, slathered in mayo and pickles. “But the moment you call it a burger, customers get it and they go straight to it,” Hemings says.
Also, like all its rivals, the chicken is marinated overnight in buttermilk and seasoning before it is floured and deep-fried. Clarke explains the importance of this process. “There are a lot of things buttermilk does,” he says. “Dairy permeates so much more than other wet marinades. It seasons it to the bone, it keeps it so moist.”
I meet Hemings and Ceppetelli to discuss the chicken sandwich phenomenon on a quiet Thursday lunchtime and ask them which dish I should try. The classic chicken burger at £7 looks the obvious choice, but Ceppetelli steers me towards something else. “I can’t believe I’m even saying this, but the one that gets instagrammed the most is the waffle burger,” she says.
It is fried chicken, bacon, American cheese (the plastic orange stuff), barbecue sauce, mayo, hot sauce and Canadian maple syrup served between two thick waffles. “It gets all the senses going,” Ceppetelli adds. “It’s hot, it’s sweet, it’s crunchy, it’s soft, it’s salty. It encapsulates everything.”
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What? Everything wrong with American civilisation? I feel it is my duty, however, to try it. And, indeed, it is pretty instagrammable — an improbable, hulking heart attack on a plate. Neither Hemings nor Ceppetelli (both of whom are pretty trim) will reveal the calorie content, but figures for similar-sounding sandwiches sold by American chains range from 390 to 650 calories. I could live without the large quantities of sauce, but it’s not as sweet as I’d feared — the maple syrup is only fleetingly drizzled on top — and the crunchy fried chicken with the soft waffle works very well. I intend to have only a bite and end up demolishing it.
So why is upmarket fried chicken enjoying such a moment in the UK? “Roast chicken is front and centre for British palates,” Hemings says. “Fried chicken, however, is a different matter. A lot of people have never eaten it. There’s always been a bit of, er, stigma with fried chicken.”
And here we have hit the crux of the matter. Fried chicken, in the eyes of many Brits, is akin to the Iceland chicken tikka lasagne or the Greggs sausage and bean melt — common food for common people. “Well, we’re Canadian, so we don’t want to get into class,” Hemings says. “But there is a certain perception barrier for British people. They crossed that barrier when it comes to pizza and they crossed it when it comes to burgers, but I’m not sure we are quite there yet with fried chicken.”
Bird has done it in north and east London. The restaurants are bright and airy, with American diner-style banquettes, charming staff and middle-class customers uploading photos of their dishes to social media.
Clarke wants to pull off the same trick, but in a fast-food format. The first branch of Chik’n, on Baker Street in central London, is scheduled to open in July. It is backed by Active Partners, the group of investors (including the Carphone Warehouse co-founder Charles Dunstone) behind Leon and Soho House. At Chik’n you will order from a counter and take away, or eat at high tables, sitting on stools.
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“We have aspirations for it to be on every high street in Britain — the chicken shop that everyone wants,” Clarke says. “But we’ve got to get the first one right.” A second branch is being planned in Islington, north London.
Clarke points out that in America there is no snobbery attached to fried chicken. “Fried chicken is a classless luxury, it’s enjoyed by everyone — from the president all the way down. It’s only in Britain that chicken shops have got a bad rap, because there are these gutter fried places that don’t care about anything apart from making money.”
He hopes that the free-range chicken from Somerset, fried in British rapeseed oil, will win over the critics. “I think the public will get behind anything that’s British.”
The same impetus that is driving young people towards blueberries and avocado is causing them increasingly to choose a fried chicken sandwich over a beef burger, Clarke believes. “People perceive it as healthier. People are eating less and less red meat. Chicken is now your go-to protein.”
Clarke does not look like a paragon of good health. For years he was a £2,000-a-night DJ at Turnmills in London and had the diet of a raver. He still has a weakness for “dancing in fields with complete strangers; I do it once a year. It’s good for the soul.” His other vice is Lucozade — “it’s my special treat, once a week” — and was horrified when last month the sports drink cut down its sugar content. “It’s horrid now.” He rapidly bought a couple of cases of the old recipe from his local corner shop.
He insists that he can eat all the fried chicken he likes because he kickboxes “semi-pro”. I point to his slight paunch and suggest that he might not be at the top of his game. At this point he stands up and insists I feel his stomach — a bit like his chicken sandwich. “My body is granite. I’m agile, fast.”
Luckily for him, his chicken sandwich is a great deal more impressive than his six-pack. It is, as he says, a dish that “makes you smile”. It may not be that long before the fried chicken sandwich overtakes the burger in people’s affections.