The Chicken Triangle
No self-respecting high street in the capital can do without at least a hundred takeaway fried chicken outlets, wafting out their distinctive aroma like magic portals to Chicken Valhalla, that greasy underworld where heroic hens feast on each other for all eternity.*
It's natural to want to sample all of London's fried chicken shops, but if you're just visiting for the day, that's not always practical. So why not complete the famous Chicken Triangle? It's a route designed to take in sixteen of London's world-class chicken shops. This is a true fried-chicken odyssey: you'll want to sample at least a four-piece dinner from every shop on the route. It's a long way, so it's a good idea to drive - and why not really get into the spirit of things by gluing feathers to your car?
1. Good Morning Chicken, Archway
This is the natural place to start your journey, because Good Morning Chicken specialises in fried-chicken based breakfast cereals. As well as Chicken Pops ("They turn the milk chickeny!"), you can choose from Count Chickula, Crunchy Chicken Corn Flakes, Ready Beak, or even Chicken Grahams.
2. Stadium Fried Chicken, Finsbury Park
All the chickens on offer here have been fried in front of at least 80,000 spectators. A marching band plays as the breasts are flipped over halfway through cooking.
3. Hyper Fried Chicken, Islington
Originating in Roswell, Nevada, the tasty secret behind Hyper Fried Chicken's chicken3 is guarded even more closely than the Colonel's.
4. Jelly Fried Chicken, Smithfields
The slogan of this franchise is: "You say, 'Chicken!', we say, 'Blackcurrant of lime?'"
5. Beak House, Bermondsey
Classy, Sunday-serial style costume-fried chicken, cooked by Andrew Davies.
6. Chicken Chicken Everywhere, Deptford
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's favourite chicken shop. Basically, it's a huge revolving iron drum full of warmed-over wings, legs and breasts - you pay a fixed fee to enter (and to hire galoshes) and are entitled to as much chicken as you can keep down.
7. HMS Chicken, New Cross
All the chickens at HMS Chicken are sourced from a unique floating farm in the North Sea. As soon as they hatch, the chicks are taught how to tie knots and use radar. After six months, they are fired out of a tornado tube and into a hot pan.
8. Chicken Igloo, Lewisham
Look under the frozen floor of this restaurant and select your hen - it'll be fished out through a hole in the ice with a traditional whalebone hook and flash fried in seal blubber. There's a husky to pet while you wait.
9. The Chicken Lab, Catford
This is probably the most accurate fried chicken you will ever eat. Every hen (cloned from a Nobel-winning specimen) is whirled around in a centrifuge until all the different components - white meat, grey meat, feathers, beak etc. - are separated out. These chicken 'elements' are accelerated to 98.4% of the speed of light in a cyclotron until they collide and recombine. The resulting 'Platonic' chicken is decanted into a test tube and fried with gamma rays until it's cooked to 128 decimal places.
10. The Prime of Miss Jean Chicken, Forest Hill
Rest assured that this fried chicken, made only from hens who've graduated from an exclusive Edinburgh girls' school, is the most refined you can get. These hens have spent most of their short lives balancing books on their heads, so their necks are especially succulent.
11. Chicken Fried Chicken, Tooting
Bite-sized morsels of chicken, each one fried inside another living hen, via the magic of a tiny frying pan and cooking techniques adapted from keyhole surgery.
12. Fort Chicken, Streatham
One of the best-defended chicken shops in London, you must know the password (it's 'chicken') to get in.
13. Ascent of Hen, Brixton
The only multi-course fried chicken shop, Ascent of Hen marries haute cuisine and time travel to take you through some of the evolutionary stages, past and present, of the noble bird. The set menu begins with a soup of single-celled chicken-like amoebas and finishes with a brûlée made from the icy cooling fluid bled from the mechanical legs of the monstrous cyborg chickens that will - it turns out - rule over the Earth some 300 years hence.
14. Baby Fried Chicken, Vauxhall
Is it safe to let an infant use a chip pan? This franchise proves it's both safe and delicious.
15. All The President's Hens, Mayfair
Every chicken you'll eat at this unique franchise is sourced from the White House's presidential chicken coop - they're flown in daily on Air Force One. Tenderised using Ronald Reagan's patent 'gippering' technique, this is the only fried chicken in London which enjoys diplomatic immunity.
16. Nuclear Waste Storage Silo Fried Chicken, Camden
Something of a delicacy from this takeaway parlour - all Nuclear Waste Storage Silo Fried Chicken's chicken comes from the lead-lined bunkers deep beneath Australia where the meat left over from making fuel for nuclear power stations is kept. The chefs wear haz-mat suits and there'll be a Geiger counter on your table, but don't worry - if it's fried properly, uranium-enriched chicken is perfectly safe.
If you manage to complete the Chicken Triangle three times in a single-day - anti-clockwise, as suggested - make sure you look up into the night sky afterwards. Some fried chicken acolytes who've completed the feat have reported seeing a ghostly hen's face looming above them amongst the stars. For most, the apparition is not frightening - in fact, one woman (a high court judge) claims to have seen it wink. Whether the phenomenon is a genuine mystical entity or simply a neurological side effect of eating almost two hundred fried chicken wings in a 24-hour period is a matter for Arthur C Clarke.
*Chicken Valhalla happens to be the name of a fried chicken shop in Stoke Newington. It uses 'Odin' hens, carefully bred to have only one eye.
It's natural to want to sample all of London's fried chicken shops, but if you're just visiting for the day, that's not always practical. So why not complete the famous Chicken Triangle? It's a route designed to take in sixteen of London's world-class chicken shops. This is a true fried-chicken odyssey: you'll want to sample at least a four-piece dinner from every shop on the route. It's a long way, so it's a good idea to drive - and why not really get into the spirit of things by gluing feathers to your car?
1. Good Morning Chicken, Archway
This is the natural place to start your journey, because Good Morning Chicken specialises in fried-chicken based breakfast cereals. As well as Chicken Pops ("They turn the milk chickeny!"), you can choose from Count Chickula, Crunchy Chicken Corn Flakes, Ready Beak, or even Chicken Grahams.
2. Stadium Fried Chicken, Finsbury Park
All the chickens on offer here have been fried in front of at least 80,000 spectators. A marching band plays as the breasts are flipped over halfway through cooking.
3. Hyper Fried Chicken, Islington
Originating in Roswell, Nevada, the tasty secret behind Hyper Fried Chicken's chicken3 is guarded even more closely than the Colonel's.
4. Jelly Fried Chicken, Smithfields
The slogan of this franchise is: "You say, 'Chicken!', we say, 'Blackcurrant of lime?'"
5. Beak House, Bermondsey
Classy, Sunday-serial style costume-fried chicken, cooked by Andrew Davies.
6. Chicken Chicken Everywhere, Deptford
Samuel Taylor Coleridge's favourite chicken shop. Basically, it's a huge revolving iron drum full of warmed-over wings, legs and breasts - you pay a fixed fee to enter (and to hire galoshes) and are entitled to as much chicken as you can keep down.
7. HMS Chicken, New Cross
All the chickens at HMS Chicken are sourced from a unique floating farm in the North Sea. As soon as they hatch, the chicks are taught how to tie knots and use radar. After six months, they are fired out of a tornado tube and into a hot pan.
8. Chicken Igloo, Lewisham
Look under the frozen floor of this restaurant and select your hen - it'll be fished out through a hole in the ice with a traditional whalebone hook and flash fried in seal blubber. There's a husky to pet while you wait.
9. The Chicken Lab, Catford
This is probably the most accurate fried chicken you will ever eat. Every hen (cloned from a Nobel-winning specimen) is whirled around in a centrifuge until all the different components - white meat, grey meat, feathers, beak etc. - are separated out. These chicken 'elements' are accelerated to 98.4% of the speed of light in a cyclotron until they collide and recombine. The resulting 'Platonic' chicken is decanted into a test tube and fried with gamma rays until it's cooked to 128 decimal places.
10. The Prime of Miss Jean Chicken, Forest Hill
Rest assured that this fried chicken, made only from hens who've graduated from an exclusive Edinburgh girls' school, is the most refined you can get. These hens have spent most of their short lives balancing books on their heads, so their necks are especially succulent.
11. Chicken Fried Chicken, Tooting
Bite-sized morsels of chicken, each one fried inside another living hen, via the magic of a tiny frying pan and cooking techniques adapted from keyhole surgery.
12. Fort Chicken, Streatham
One of the best-defended chicken shops in London, you must know the password (it's 'chicken') to get in.
13. Ascent of Hen, Brixton
The only multi-course fried chicken shop, Ascent of Hen marries haute cuisine and time travel to take you through some of the evolutionary stages, past and present, of the noble bird. The set menu begins with a soup of single-celled chicken-like amoebas and finishes with a brûlée made from the icy cooling fluid bled from the mechanical legs of the monstrous cyborg chickens that will - it turns out - rule over the Earth some 300 years hence.
14. Baby Fried Chicken, Vauxhall
Is it safe to let an infant use a chip pan? This franchise proves it's both safe and delicious.
15. All The President's Hens, Mayfair
Every chicken you'll eat at this unique franchise is sourced from the White House's presidential chicken coop - they're flown in daily on Air Force One. Tenderised using Ronald Reagan's patent 'gippering' technique, this is the only fried chicken in London which enjoys diplomatic immunity.
16. Nuclear Waste Storage Silo Fried Chicken, Camden
Something of a delicacy from this takeaway parlour - all Nuclear Waste Storage Silo Fried Chicken's chicken comes from the lead-lined bunkers deep beneath Australia where the meat left over from making fuel for nuclear power stations is kept. The chefs wear haz-mat suits and there'll be a Geiger counter on your table, but don't worry - if it's fried properly, uranium-enriched chicken is perfectly safe.
If you manage to complete the Chicken Triangle three times in a single-day - anti-clockwise, as suggested - make sure you look up into the night sky afterwards. Some fried chicken acolytes who've completed the feat have reported seeing a ghostly hen's face looming above them amongst the stars. For most, the apparition is not frightening - in fact, one woman (a high court judge) claims to have seen it wink. Whether the phenomenon is a genuine mystical entity or simply a neurological side effect of eating almost two hundred fried chicken wings in a 24-hour period is a matter for Arthur C Clarke.
*Chicken Valhalla happens to be the name of a fried chicken shop in Stoke Newington. It uses 'Odin' hens, carefully bred to have only one eye.
(Source image: Chris Lewis, licensed under Creative Commons 2.0)
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