Lucky Yu, 53-55 Broughton Street, Edinburgh EH1 3RJ (0131 259 7719). All dishes £7-£14, desserts £7, cocktails about £10, wines from £28
Let’s start the year with one of life’s great philosophical questions: is there such a thing as bad fried chicken? You, the non-meat-eater at the back, put your hand down. We know your answer. This one is for the rest of you. Obviously, there can be better fried chicken and great fried chicken but, rancid oil aside, can it ever be so dreadful that you are not willing to entertain the idea of eating it? We’ve all heard the saying that “There is no such thing as bad pizza.” While I’m more than capable of worrying over the chewiness or otherwise of a blistered crust, or kvetching about sauce and topping ratios, I get the point. Speaking on behalf of my inner 13-year-old, it seems obvious that a day with pizza in it is probably better than one without, however lacklustre the pizza might be. Ditto fried chicken. The appeal is just so obvious: a shattering, highly seasoned crumb, which coats folds of crispy skin, giving way to the meat within. On the bone or off, it is one of life’s great, visceral pleasures.
It is the Japanese-style fried chicken or karaage at Lucky Yu in Edinburgh, where they serve many other bluntly pleasing Asian-inspired dishes, which raises the question. Even allowing for the youth-friendly low lighting here, it’s clear when the heaped £12 bowls of bird arrive, that it is dark. Very dark. Karaage generally is darker than, say, southern fried, on account of the soy and garlic-based marinade the meat should first go through, but this is a long way towards “dark velour sofa” on the brown food scale. It is “too long in the deep fat fryer” dark. Which suggests that the meat will be dry. Obviously, I must check this. I check it repeatedly and with great commitment. And yes, it is. A hyper-crunchy exterior, of crusted skin which curls back on itself to provide a matrix of crevices, gives way to dense fibrous bird. This is not the best chicken karaage ever.
But it is still fried chicken. I am still eating it and I am doing so with enthusiasm. Occasionally I drag it through the accompanying bowl of a sprightly yuzu mayo. This is either a gross failure of self-control, or proof that certain foods will always call to us. Which can be expanded to describe the entire repertoire of salty-sweet, miso-slicked, soy-bathed, yuzu-dressed dishes which attract so many British-born chefs, eager to serve up flavour bomb after flavour bomb.
Lucky Yu began life in Edinburgh’s Bruntsfield district before moving here early in 2023, when chef Duncan Adamson, of the recently closed Gardener’s Cottage, was installed in the kitchen. It’s quite the change for Adamson. At Gardener’s Cottage, located in a slab of the city’s parkland, they did hearty things with pheasant breast and pearl barley, smoked carrots and whipped cheese. It was a well-executed pastoral fantasy, which pretended the city was not at the door. Lucky Yu, in Edinburgh’s New Town, is a different kind of fantasy, drawing on the urban and modern. On a dark winter’s night it glows a deep, comforting pink from the dull neon scribble across the frontage. It is a glow that continues inside. By daylight there’s a pared-back aesthetic of both sandstone-coloured walls and raw New Town stone, with a little jade blue tiling around the bar. But at night it is womb-like, encouraging you to lean in, chopsticks raised.
Before the chicken arrives, from a short list of daily specials, we have large prawn crackers, stacked with a mix of diced prawn, pickled ginger, katsuobushi (or smoked and dried tuna) with chopped leaves. It’s a cheery Japanese seafood salad reimagined as one-handed canapé. Alongside the chicken, we have a lightly fatty steak of pork, first braised to a spoonable softness, then glazed with a Korean BBQ sauce. It is topped with crisped and crushed pork skin. On the side is a heap of dressed bean sprouts. The cut of meat apparently changes by the day and you are invited to ask what it might be, but after this much strident braising and saucing I doubt it would make a huge amount of difference. The caramel depths of this stand in contrast to slices of lightly cured trout, the orange of barley sugar twists, laid across a salad of radish, fennel and, for nose-tickle, horseradish. Prices struggle to get beyond the low teens per dish.
Non-meat-eaters are well looked after. Curling hunks of aubergine, roasted until the skin is chewy and the flesh soft, are given the full nasu dengaku treatment, so glazed with sweetened miso, grilled and then sprinkled with sesame seeds. There’s a rugged cucumber, courgette and carrot salad, and a platter of pak choi, grilled then drizzled with a dressing made with fermented black garlic before being sprinkled with furikake, that killer seasoning of blitzed dried seaweed, sesame and a whole bunch of other good things. Given the entire menu could be titled “the ballad of umami”, calling the sauce with crispy potatoes “umaminaise” is slight overkill, although it isn’t a bad way of describing Kewpie, the famed Japanese brand of mayo. For the record their crispy potatoes really are: golden cubes that shatter along their edges as you bite in. For further carbs, order the fried rice, mixed with finely chopped pieces of shrimp and short rib, pork belly and braised brisket then topped with chilli, coconut and katsuobushi. It feels like the dish guaranteed to use up any kitchen leftovers. This is a good thing.
Service is enthusiastic. They may ask you to name your favourite (possibly the pork steak. Maybe the pak choi. Oh, and the stacked prawn crackers were great). They will tell you that everything will arrive when it’s ready. Everything will then turn up at once, so you’re moving plates around, to make space. It’s an amiable, relaxed kind of chaos. In the next room, a large party is creating their own kind of chaos, laughing noisily in a way that makes you wonder whether anything can ever be that funny. Perhaps calculate that scenario into your night out. Or join them by hitting the sakes or the cocktail list, which has offerings called True Romance, For Figs Sake and Japanese Slipper. The dessert list is so short as to be perfunctory: a plum and apple compote with miso custard or a chocolate and sesame parfait. Neither of these appeals hugely so I pass. The truth is I’m full. Whisper it: I ate too much of that fried chicken.
News bites
What British hospitality has long needed is a restaurant themed around a TV drama full of murder, torture and revenge. Happily, that gap has now been filled courtesy of Shelby & Co, a Peaky Blinders-themed restaurant that has recently opened at Birmingham airport. The 1920s-style designed concession has a menu featuring a pizza called the Shelby Supreme, a Shelby Stack burger and the Piggy Blinder, a Yorkshire pudding wrap filled with Cumberland sausage, bacon jam, chips and gravy. Delight in the full menu here.
And in a similar vein, the food brand company Sessions, which has more than 300 franchised kitchens across the country, has signed a two-year deal with Netflix to create a range of menus tied to the streamer’s hit shows, including Bridgerton and Stranger Things, designed for home delivery to ‘enhance the experience of fans watching’. It kicked off recently with a menu of Korean fried chicken, which has been made available via Just Eat, tied to the release of the new series of Squid Game (sessions.co.uk).
Leeds restaurant the Swine That Dines has announced a move and name change. It will reopen at the end of January as the Swine Bistro, on the Otley Road in Headingley, a relocation paid for courtesy of a successful crowdfunder. Owners Jo and Stu Myers have also brought in their first head chef to take over the kitchen. Kirsty Cheetham joins from the Queen o’ t’ owd Thatch in South Milford, a two-time winner of the Observer Food Monthly’s Best Sunday Lunch award (swinethatdines.co.uk).
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk
