If, while sitting in Slim Chickens fried chicken shop on Cambridge Circus in London’s Soho, you found yourself hungry for chicken, you could cross the road to Wingstop. Were you to become peckish (!) while on your way from Wingstop to Dave’s Hot Chicken (three and a half minutes on foot down Shaftesbury Avenue) you could take a short detour to a second branch of Slim Chickens, on the corner of Leicester Square. And in a matter of weeks – thank God – lunch can be rounded off at new franchise, Raising Cane’s, behind the National Gallery. Guess what they serve – don’t rush.
The fried-chicken-fast-casual concept is taking over the British high street with alarming force. To meet this growing demand we have almost doubled our chicken imports over the past five years (with thanks to Poland, Ukraine, China and Thailand). To prove the true extent of this new era of poultry hegemony? I could gesture limply to some data, but you can navigate Chicken Village, née the West End, and see for yourself.
Chickens are about one degree more conscious than moss, so I don’t intend to get particularly worthy about any of this. Though I am minded to point out that one “small” box of wings from Wingstop contains five pieces – that’s 2.5 souls; at Slim Chickens, the most ascetic order available is a side of three “tenders” – or 1.5 lives. How about this? We eat 1.3 billion of the birds a year on this island alone. Life is short, and I will not dedicate mine to questions of chicken liberation. But karmic debt is karmic debt, and if there is a great, moralising chicken in the sky then we humans are toast.
Enough of that. Is it any good? To Slim Chickens in Bloomsbury for a weekday lunch to find out. It is not clear what the aesthetic ambition is here, or down the road at Dave’s, or at Lucky’s Hot in Covent Garden. Their interiors blend into an exposed brick, pseudo-industrial, 2014 Brooklyn hipster singularity. If I were a chicken, I would be displeased to be sacrificed at this altar of bad taste. And then there is the music – loud enough to kill an infant I reckon. The air is thick with hydrogenated fat. You will leave smelling like you too have been battered and boiled in oil. God willing, I might be.
Fried chicken goes well with Champagne, and though I possess no Protestant aversion to a lunchtime glass of Blanc de Blancs, I probably draw the line at 1pm on a Monday. And so I order three tenders, some ranch and a water. It is important to keep the request simple, restrained: like judging the technical abilities of an artist by his draftsmanship, not his flashiest canvas. And what is there to say? It’s fried chicken: salty and greasy and hot. I wouldn’t tell you anything other than the truth and so here it is: yum! It’s a shame about literally everything else.
Slim Chickens might look like a pastiche of a parody of a fried chicken shop in New York from 11 years ago but its poultry is British, and I suspect fresher than that. You shouldn’t always be so sure. Take this recent discovery from the Tories down at the Countryside Alliance: hundreds of Welsh schoolchildren are being served poultry sourced as far away as China and Thailand. It’s cheaper than what we produce here – the welfare regulations are looser, the birds are bred at higher volume, and little Brynn or Rhys are hardly going to notice that their dino-nugget started its life as a chick in Shandong.
I am also willing to bet that chickens know close to nothing about comparative trade advantage, but they don’t have much of a say in any of this in the first place. It is neither their fault nor the WTO’s that, when fried, they make such an excellent lunch. These are poor victims of their own success, like sweet-fleshed rabbits and whatever we have to kill to make Fanta.
The merits or failings of globalisation aside, I have perfectly good evidence for the principle’s proud march through history here – from our Americanised high streets to our Mandarin-speaking school dinners.
[Further reading: World Cup tickets are a scandal]
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