Whether it’s fried, grilled or given the rotisserie treatment, London’s obsession with chicken has been mounting for some time. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a menu without it. Not at Fallow, though — at least not until now.
Dreamt up by Jack Croft, William Murray and James Robson, their new pop-up, Fowl, is a result of the team eventually finding a suitably sustainable bird, reared on a regenerative farm.
‘At Fallow we try to focus on using animals that have lived for a different purpose, such as the ex-dairy cow, ex-ewes or spent hens, so we didn’t put chicken on the menu,’ says Murray. ‘Then The Ethical Butcher told me about this new small chicken supplier based in Devon, which has the most ridiculously free-range chickens that basically live in a forest.’
The difference, Murray continues, is their diet. ‘Most chickens are fattened up on soy but these are pasture fed. Essentially this is what wild chicken would have tasted like, and fowl is what the domestic chicken came from.’
Plump and juicy with a deeper, richer flavour, the bird’s applications are just as intriguing. ‘A celebration of chicken culture,’ according to Murray, the ‘beak-to-feet’ offering ‘is all the best chicken dishes, like parfait, Caesar salad and banging triple-cooked wings.’
Plus, each month they’ve got a celeb in the kitchen. ‘We didn’t want it to be just another guest chef concept,’ says Murray. ‘We wanted to focus on food icons, people in the food sphere who don’t have a restaurant.’
This month, Pierre Koffmann is serving up a chicken leg corn dog and ‘la grande coque pie’ containing confit chicken hearts, livers and cockscombs. Then up next, hosts of the Table Manners podcast, Jessie and Lennie Ware, will be rustling up hearty chicken matzo ball soup to warm winter cockles.
Sounds clucking good to me.
Norris St, St. James's Market, SW1 (@fowlrestaurant)
