At the time of writing this, the ‘About Us’ section of Slim Chicken’s website cannot be found which is either, like their cooking, a technical error, or, like the food served, is just half-arsed work. I was only looking it up to add some breadth to this piece. I wanted to tell you why they curiously chose the word ‘Slim’ in the name of a fried chicken shop, though I can’t find it, so we’ll have to assume they based it entirely on the odds of me ever going back. I was also hoping to get some news on their chicken welfare, though I’ll have to guess that they live on a salt plain, eating a diet of salt. Despite my intentions to hunt them down on the internet I know nothing about Slim Chicken other than the meal I ate, which, I can tell you from experience, is already far too much for my liking.
Things don’t get off to the best of starts. I order food at the latest of Grand Central openings which arrives in record time, although it’s someone else’s order and not mine, which would have been forgivable had we all not been given table markers with order numbers on to stop this. Maybe an abacus would have worked better. Mine does eventually turn up, though because they’ve already taken away our number they can’t locate us, and when they do they don’t believe we have an order because we don’t have a board. This food isn’t worth this level of hassle. It’s not worth any level of hassle. It’s rudimentary fried chicken, straight outta… well I don’t know, because the ‘About Us’ section still isn’t working.
The low down on the chicken is simple: the quality of the meat isn’t great, the coatings aren’t very crispy and it’s salty. Really salty. Not salty in the way the yoof of today used to describe things, but salty to the point that eating this isn’t going to help your blood pressure. The tenders are at least tender; the burger with buffalo sauce not something that I would ever want to go back, given that it all gets very soggy very quickly. The fries are straight out of a bag and need salt, whilst the sauces are straight from a factory and need binning. They do however have phone chargers on the table and sport on the screen, meaning that Slim Chicken is a decent choice to have a pint of Camden Hells whilst charging your phone. Decent provided you leave the food alone.
The bill for this is £18 for one. Not much, but too much considering you could eat good fried chicken at Bonehead a minutes’ walk away, even better fried chicken two hundred metres away at The Meatshack, or get a multi-course set menu a train journey away at the unbelievably excellent Chick’n’Sours for exactly the same price. But hey, Slim’s are the ones paying the big rents to feed the through-traffic of Grand Central. I’m sure some customers will take the below mediocre food purely to charge their phone.
4/10
A2B Radio Cars took me and my indigestion home.
