The Holy Birds, 94 Middlesex street, London E1 7EZ (020 3610 0185). Meal for two, including drinks and service: £100
Over the past year London has been overrun by an outbreak – a flock, if you will – of chicken-based restaurants. We’ve had Fancy Funkin Chicken in Brixton and Clockjack in Woolwich, Randy’s Wing Bar in Stratford and Absurd Bird in Shoreditch and many more besides. And why not? Chicken is the David Attenborough of food; it’s hard to hate. Chicken cooked by a restaurant is the homely dinner you can’t be fagged to cook at home.
The Holy Birds in Shoreditch, which is rather less divine than its name suggests, takes this one step further. It’s not just about chicken. It’s about all things feathered: duck and goose and guinea fowl and so on. But mostly, to be honest, chicken, which are offered whole as standard, off the rotisserie or roasted with a beer can up their jacksy. The problem is that most of us have roasted a chicken ourselves. We can take a view as to what makes a good one. That means there is nowhere to hide.
In the case of the Holy Birds, this is literally so for it contains a big open kitchen. Being Shoreditch it is occupied by chefs with fearsome beards, intensely basting birds on the rotisserie, as though the very meaning of “now” is embedded in this relentless activity. The room in front of that kitchen is orange. Very orange. It’s like they’ve broken Donald Trump down for parts and used them to kit out a dining room. There’s an orange counter, orange dangly lights and orange banquettes, plus various bits of midcentury modern furniture and wood panelling. If the art director on Mad Men had got completely off their tits on Fanta and then set to work, it would look like this. I can’t pretend. Their “hip” and “stylish” is my “exhausting” and “Can I go home now, please?”
The food doesn’t help. A pigeon pastilla should be the very definition of sweet meat, the slow cooked bird turned into a confection by the application of sugars and nuts before being wrapped in filo. These faux Moroccan pastries are dry, bland and entirely devoid of sweetness. Alongside is an under-dressed green salad which is wet, as if it hasn’t been properly spun after being washed. A pork and goose terrine is served in fridge-cold slabs so tastes of almost nothing. As it warms up it improves, but not enough to become an exemplar of the art.
There are many ways with quail in London: there are the smokey quails of the Turkish mangal restaurants, for example, or the crisp deep fried versions with chilli offered by the Chinese. The chargrilled quails here are fine, though expensive at £16.50; the accompanying “burnt” onion is exactly what it says it is: a fat half onion all but incinerated at its tips. It goes uneaten. And so to the rotisserie chicken, £14 a half. For me the best of these are to be found in the street markets of France, where they are cooked long and slow, until the skin is crisp, the meat is sagging, and the fat gathers at the bottoms to be used for sautéed potatoes.
When eating one there, never think too deeply about the quality of the bird involved. Because it’s France we assume it’s a quality hen. The next time you order one, just look at the price and reach your own conclusion. The chickens used here, on the other hand, are clearly very good. They have been allowed to grow and mature slowly. That does make for denser, more flavourful but sometimes tougher meat, which they have tried to mitigate through brining and it almost works. There are various brine options. We choose garlic and herb over citrus and peppercorn or paprika
The problem is twofold. First, there’s the finish. Sure, the skin is dark, but only in places. Elsewhere it’s soft and floppy. Secondly, it tastes not of garlic or herbs, but salt. Roasted chicken skin should be one of life’s filthy pleasures. This is a disappointment fashioned from calories. The menu offers “extra gravy” at £1.50. I take this to mean gravy in addition to that which already comes with the bird. Except the chicken doesn’t come with gravy. Weirdly this “extra” gravy has a deep meatiness but none of that meatiness tastes of chicken.
Duck fat potatoes turn out to be soft overcooked new potatoes in their skins drenched in the greasiest bit of the duck. By now I am irritated. But the lacklustre food is not helped by the service. Writing about these things is tricky. It can look peevish. It can look haughty. But the effect is cumulative and therefore has to be reported. As ever I have booked under another name, but the maître d’ makes it clear he knows who I am as he introduces himself. I thank him, but ask to be treated like any diner. Apparently this includes trying to bring side dishes we didn’t order because he thought we might like them. I send them back.
He overhears my companion mention the fact it’s her birthday. So now the dessert we order turns up on a plate with a birthday message piped on. For what it’s worth, which is a lot, she had told me she didn’t want a fuss made. Otherwise I would have asked for something like this. (That dessert is a passable trifle, topped with cream that has been over-whipped to the point of splitting).
At the start of the meal when I’d asked about sparkling wines he’d mentioned Babycham, God help us. Now, as he brings the bill, he announces that he saw my companion’s eyes “light up” at the mention so here’s a bottle for your birthday. They didn’t light up. She hates Babycham, but was trying to be polite in the face of aching Shoreditch drink irony. We decline it (as we would any freebies).
Maybe you think mentioning all this is unfair. Maybe you think it’s just hospitality on overdrive. Fair enough. But let’s just say there’s an art to being genuinely hospitable; it’s one which has not yet been acquired here. Halfway through lunch my companion nips to the loo – it says “hens” and “cocks” on the doors, of course it does – and stumbles across a waitress in tears, being comforted by a colleague. She lends her mascara. If I was less of a gentlemen I might portray this as some clumsy sort of commentary on the whole damn meal, but that would be cheap, which is something I never am. Much like this lunch.
Jay’s news bites
If you fancy a bird-only menu you might do better at chef Carl Clarke’s Chick ’n’ Sours, the second of which has just opened in Covent Garden. As the name suggests they do sour cocktails and chicken. But oh, what chicken: buttermilk fried, with big flavours. It comes with ‘seaweed crack and pickled watermelon’, as disco wings (naked, sticky or hot), and in buns (chicknsours.co.uk).
There’s cash in cornflakes. The Cereal Killer Café concept – a selection of breakfast cereals, sold by the bowl – is to follow its third UK site, in Birmingham, with new franchised branches in Jordan, Dubai and Kuwait. Apparently a sheikh Snapchatted his visit, turning the original Shoreditch café into a point of pilgrimage (cerealkillercafe.co.uk).
Progress! The devoutly French classical Bocuse d’Or cooking competition has announced its theme for 2017 and for the first time it is about non-meat cookery. The competing chefs will have to create 14 identical dishes using vegetables, fruit, cereals and seeds.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @jayrayner1
