If you look for a fried chicken takeaway in most British inner cities, you will almost certainly find one. I’ve never looked so never really noticed, but in Tottenham I suddenly realise they’re everywhere. To give you some idea: there are more fried chicken places than there are – that other high-street scourge – estate agents. And they all look the same.
Which one should we try, I ask Ben Rymer but he just shrugs, so we end up in I’ll-Keep-It-Nameless-So-The-Lawyers-Can’t-Object Chicken. The formica tables are chipped and the floor is greasy but, for just £2, we get a huge platter containing seven spicy chicken wings and a great mound of chips.
“Look at that,” says Rymer when I bring it to the table. “I can’t even bear the smell of it. That chicken will be the cheapest of cheap. It’ll be this nasty, frozen stuff which is imported from Brazil. It’s pumped full of hormones. Ugh. It’s revolting.”
It’s the first ever time I have tried any sort of fried chicken and it’s true, it is pretty revolting. It has a spicy kick but the coating leaves an afterslick of grease on the roof of my mouth and the smell is of rancid old oil. Even Nadine Davis, 23, who’s accompanying us and admits that she used to eat these on a daily basis growing up in the area, turns up her nose.
“I wouldn’t even feed it to my dog,” says Rymer, and we end up leaving six and a half pieces on the table. It’s an interesting point of comparison though because in a couple of months, just around the corner, he’s opening a different sort of chicken shop. Chicken Town is a social enterprise he’s created with his business partner, Hadrian Garrard, and in the evenings it will be a proper restaurant serving the kind of hipster chicken and sides that have taken off in London’s more gentrified parts (Wishbone in Brixton Market was an early inspiration). The difference is that, by day, they’ll be using the profits to subsidise £2 portions of the same chicken to schoolchildren and young people and whoever can be lured into eating a healthier version of the fast food we’ve just tried.
So, how will your chicken be different?
“It’s from Swaledale. They’re herb fed. They are basically the happiest chickens in the world.”
They’re free-range?
“They’re literally pampered. They have Jacuzzis and stuff like that. They’re some of the best chickens you can buy. And we steam them so that the meat is already cooked and then they can just be flash-fried in a few minutes in rapeseed oil. Whereas this… is probably cooked from frozen for about 15 minutes in a deep fat fryer.”
It’s a bold project in a landmark building on Tottenham Green: an old Victorian fire station which, on the day I visit, is being used as offices. The occupants are moving elsewhere and the architects, Assemble, who were recently nominated for the Turner prize, are coming in to reconfigure the space.
“We’re not going to create a restaurant that excludes the people of Tottenham and feels expensive and off-putting,” says Rymer, and although it’s slated to open in November, there are still a lot of design decisions to be made.
“There won’t be any chalkboards,” he says, “I can tell you that right now. I can tell you what we’re not doing: hip-hop graffiti. And we’re not doing cheesy minimal. Or shabby chic with lots of crappy furniture. We’re very clear on exactly what we’re not doing.”
It’s a tough brief because Chicken Town is at the apex of two conflicting forces. It’s at the frontline of where deprivation and gentrification collide. It’s in Haringey, the fourth most deprived borough in London, the 13th in the country. But the borough is also being rapidly colonised by people who are being priced out of other places, notably Hackney just to the south. And navigating a path between the two, without alienating either constituency, is the challenge that is at the heart of the Chicken Town concept.
“There’s something like 8,000 fast food outlets in London,” says Hadrian Garrard. “Lots and lots of fried chicken shops. Lots of kids eating fried chicken. And this is in the same neighbourhoods where people are eating brilliantly. In London, there’s this big food scene and yet local teenagers are eating some of the worst food in western Europe.”
And trying to figure out a way to address this inequality is his speciality. He’s the director of a charity called Create and what he’s now trying to do with food, he’s been doing successfully for several years with art.
“There’s a big gap with art, which mirrors what we’re seeing now with food. East London has these big artist communities, but if you live in east London, you’re less likely to go to an art gallery than if you live anywhere else in the country. What we do is commission artists and people who have exciting projects to look at connecting communities in different ways.”
So, where did the idea for a chicken shop come from?
“It literally started from you and me eating some really fancy, delicious fried chicken,” says Rymer. He used to be in the music business and had started opening pop-up restaurants when he met Garrard and they started talking. “We were like, ‘Actually, fried chicken is really nice. There’s a reason that it’s popular.’”
In fact, Daniel Willis, the co-owner of the Clove Club, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Shoreditch, tells me that it was the restaurant’s chicken, created by chef Isaac McHale, that started the conversation. “It was at a pop-up in a disused office block in Canary Wharf which was part-funded by Create. Some of our buttermilk fried chicken was one of the snacks. It’s one of the signature dishes on our menu. And I think it was the first time they’d had that sort of chicken done with that sort of love. They just started to look at it differently.”
Willis is now a non-executive director of Chicken Town and part of the concept is that the restaurant will train local youngsters who will then get the chance to go on and work in places such as the Clove Club. They’ve recruited an executive chef, Giorgio Ravelli, currently running a pop-up in Hackney, who will oversee the menu, and have committed to employing 40 local people within three years.
“There are a lot of restaurants who really like the idea and want to support us,” says Rymer. “Whether it’s designing a limited-edition menu or coming to the restaurant and engaging with the staff. We’ve got these relationships and that’s part of what’s going to make us different.”
And they’ve certainly got the support of both the public and Haringey council behind them. They launched a campaign on Kickstarter to raise £50,000 but ended up raising a staggering £55,000 plus another £35,000 in direct donations. And Haringey awarded them £300,000 in a combination of grants and loans as well as the opportunity to lease the Grade II listed Old Fire Station. It’s part of a pioneering £3.6m Opportunity Investment Fund jointly funded by Haringey and the Greater London Authority to provide employment opportunities in the borough.
Though not everyone is happy. I meet one of the soon-to-be-displaced office workers drinking a coffee outside the building who grumbles to me about the cost of the project.
“It’s still going to be fried chicken, isn’t it? It’s not like they’re re-inventing the wheel. And why they couldn’t just move into a building which already had a kitchen is beyond me.”
But having a beautiful space is crucial to the success of the project, Garrard argues. Create funded an experiment which involved a food truck offering healthier chicken alternatives to fried takeaways, a project Jay Rayner reported on for the Observer two years ago, and one of the biggest lessons they took from it was that the space was as important as the food.
Nadine Davis, backs this up. She’s a “brand ambassador” for Chicken Town and grew up in Tottenham. Eating fried chicken was a lot more than just eating fried chicken, she says. “My mum didn’t allow me to do it but I did it anyway. It’s about having something to do when you don’t want to go straight home after school. It’s a social thing to do.”
There wasn’t anywhere else to go? “Not in Tottenham. There wasn’t a lot at all. There were some youth clubs and parks but a lot of them got shut down.”
She won a place previously on Create’s scheme to help local young people enter the creative industries and now she’s helping the project find ways of integrating with the local community. She’s slim and eats healthily, but she says that as a teenager, she used to eat fried chicken “and then go home and eat again”. And she’s probably not the only one. One in three children in the borough are obese or overweight by year six, according to Haringey’s official statistics.
“I moved to Tottenham quite recently,” Garrard says, “and my teenage children are always in the park. They go to the park in November. They’re jumping over the fence because basically there isn’t anywhere else for them to go. It’s quite unsurprising that kids get angry and don’t feel like they’re part of the fabric of the city.
“Having a space where they’re not being hassled, where it’s not a problem financially for them to sit down, spending only a small amount of money, is really, really important.”
And Rymer hopes they’ll be able to educate them about food without them even noticing. “For two quid we give them the chicken they want but we also can try and introduce them to other foods. To get them eating sweet potatoes and coleslaw and food they know from the usual places just not made out of palm oil and hydrogenated vegetable oil.”
Isn’t there a danger this will be just another trendy joint that will help Tottenham become the next Dalston, and alienate all the locals? Aren’t they going to look at you and say, “Oh my god, the beards are arriving”? (Garrard has stubble and a tattoo. Rymer has directional glasses and a beard.)
Because Tottenham may just be the next area of London to fall to the hipsters but it has a complex history of its own – the new restaurant is next to the town hall, on which a blue plaque notes it was the location of Bernie Grant’s “legendary surgeries”. And it’s not far from both Broadwater Farm, of the 1985 riots fame, and a looted Sports Direct, of the 2011 ones.
“I’ve already been called ‘Hackney Overflow’,” says Rymer, though he doesn’t seem to mind. And, in the end, maybe the grumbling man is right.
“We just want to create a restaurant where everyone feels welcome,” says Garrard. “Where it’s not super expensive and everyone feels comfortable and everyone wants to go. We’re not trying to re-invent the wheel.”
Just make the wheel slightly healthier. With a few vegetables on the side.
Chicken Town opens in November. It is supported by Haringey Council, the Mayor of London’s High Street Fund and Bloomberg; chicken-town.co.uk
