I want Chick’n’Sours to open up in Birmingham. There, I’ve said it. I know I should be using this opening paragraph to set tone and meter, but fuck it, it’s my blog and I’ll do how I please. I want them to open up in Birmingham really badly. I want the people who think that we have good fried chicken to eat their fried chicken and go ‘woah, hold on there, sister’, and shake their wrists until the fingers on their flaccid hands crack off one another, and dab, and floss, and raise eyebrows like they’ve just witnessed a man taking a shit in a public park. All of these are valid reactions to good fried chicken.
I know they do good fried chicken because I have really good taste buds, and my girlfriend who usually does, but is ill on this particular day, says things like “I can’t taste a thing and they still are really good. I can’t imagine how good they taste to you”, to which I dab and floss and raise my eyebrows in the same way that I did when I witnessed a man taking a shit in a public park on the way to work one day. True story. He didn’t even wipe. We wipe frequently with the baby wipes and the kitchen roll provided, though any of the sauces committed to anything other than the mouth would be a waste. Our lunch starts with pickled watermelon rinds, sweet and perfumed, with only a little vinegar astringency, moving on to nachos with bacon and I think seasoned with chicken skin, that are really quite frantic. It’s difficult to decscribe how the palate reacts to this and a loose cheese sauce, kimchi, with the occasional searingly hot chilli hidden for shits and giggles. Literally both shits and giggles with this amount of chilli and dairy. At times it’s all very fugitive, but also crack levels of addictive. I’ll take this combination over something more cohesive and dull any day of the week.
Chicken tenders are obscene strips of breast meat coated in what looks like poultry armour, a kind of riff on KFC only without the mutant chickens who live in sheds that nobody is allowed in, and those chickens are 20ft high and they don’t know why they are so big, and they look down at all the little chickens and think they are in an aeroplane because they are so small. Do KFC deny this? I think the silence speaks volumes. Anyway, back to this little underground gem in Covent Garden where these tenders are pretty much perfect when dredged through a perky blue cheese dip loaded with umami. Two side dishes appear; the first cucumbers in a sauce I cant really get to terms with, the second pickled watermelons dressed in a complex sauce that has vinegar, sugar, and fish sauce in amongst the mix. These are the second best things you can do with a watermelon; the first being sweet pickling the rinds, of which we are now on our second batch.
And then there are the wings that have me reaching for the tissues once again. Yes, chicken wings do turn me on this much, and no, I really don’t care that we are in public. Two flavours; hot and kung po, both with sauces as thick and reduced as the Tory leadership contest, which dress the fat wings and sit in every crevice like a lycra top a size too small. It’s not just great fried chicken; this is great cooking which plays on the five taste sensations throughout. Seriously skillful and a stupid amount of fun at the same time. It’s the real deal.
The above menu for two clocks in at £16 a head. Yes, you have read that correctly. It has to be one of London’s true bargains. Now I’m bound to secrecy on this, but I have it on good authority that Mr Chick’n’Sours himself is in Brum at the end of July for one night at one of our best (maybe the best) restaurants. I’m guessing it will be a lot more than £16 a head, but I’ll be there, and so should you. And if the main man himself is reading this right now, please do come say hello. I’ll be happy to show you around and maybe point out a site or two where I am positive they’ll be queuing out the doors to eat your food. One night is not going to be enough.
9/10
Can’t wait for them to come to Birmingham ? Let’s all split an A2B and go to London