They’re bold, the owners of Bird. What else can you call it, opening a fried chicken restaurant in Shoreditch, the high-end chicken heartland of London? This postcode is already so rich in buffalo wings on kimchi purée that Cara Ceppetelli and Paul Hemings must be pretty cocky, pun absolutely intended, to have decided there’s room in the market for their new restaurant on Kingsland Road.
To figure out if that boldness is justified I’m going with an open mind, but also an unshakeable value system. It’s one born of some thorough empirical research into the best chicken offerings of East London, and it’s this: fried chicken should feel like it’s doing you good and doing you harm, in equal measures. If you don’t leave heartwarmed, painfully full, and powerfully aware of your own mortality then it wasn’t soul food you were eating, just some Kentucky Fried mockery of it.
So that’s the rule I’m assessing Bird against. And they’re doing well so far; that corner of Kingsland Road is already infamous for Bird’s Doughnut Hatch, a self-explanatory window onto the street selling filter coffee and enormous, reverentially-flavoured doughnuts – pistachio, Oreo, honeycomb.
It’s a stroke of evil genius, preying on vulnerable commuters in the dark hours of the morning. It’s a place that, going once, will make you equally mournful and grateful that your journey to work doesn’t take you past it daily. And it’s the first sign that the people of Bird are already masters of that subtle craft of making you feel bad-good.
Make it inside the restaurant instead of just gazing Dickens urchin-esque through the Hatch, and it’s part American diner, part factory canteen. With a hint of Dadaist nightmare, thanks to the huge portraits of roosters in bikinis hanging around the bar.
The menu is unflashy. Chicken in all shapes and stripes. All of it free range, most of it fried, and a range of formats running from the pure Americana of the chicken-waffles-syrup hat-trick, through to the Korean stamp on the Gochujang glazed wings.
They don’t deal in things like starters and mains here, and so we tackle the menu with no aim other than finding some kind of balance between the dishes that sound seductively hot and the ones that sound threateningly hot. It’s not that they’ve run mad with power and chilli in the kitchens of Bird. It’s just that these hot sauce-covered sirens are the clear winners, from a menu that also offers the weak and elderly of Shoreditch things like Asian chopped salad with grilled chicken.
The Nashville hot sliders are fried tenders in a cayenne glue, with pickles and Japanese mayo. The cayenne sauce isn’t playing any games, and the sliders delicately remind you it’s a fine line between knowing you can handle more heat, and being reduced to tears in front of your date by a tiny burger.
The portions are generous, borderline insane, and we over-order by a phenomenal amount. The jalapeño corn pudding – which we order as an afterthought, being afraid that the twelve chickens’ worth of chicken we’ve already ordered might leave us wanting – is, as a side dish, larger on its own than a main course would be in most nearby bars. It bears some witness to the quality of the food, but mainly to our strength of will that my date and I clear everything – sliders, slaw, four variations on chicken, that ocean of jalapeño corn – on the table.
And then a honeycomb sundae. Because we’re animals.
We leave proud, sleepy, and heated by the fire of a hundred jalapeños. And the verdict on Bird? It hurts. But it hurts so good.
Bird, 42/44 Kingsland Road, London E2 8DA. Website.
