Chicken Shop, Holborn

It occurred to me the other day that a good number of the "wishlist" dishes or cuisines I've griped about not having access to in London over the years have, gradually, one-by-one, been ticked off. For a while it was burgers, where years of crushed hopes and disappointment were finally answered in a little white van in Peckham and since then we've had more than enough decent options. Then attention turned to Mexican food where following a disastrous false start at a grotty US chain, suddenly like the buses Breddos and El Pastor opened in the same month, and now I don't need to wait for a twice-yearly trip to Southern California to get my taco fix.

So what's left? Well, I enjoyed trying the Salvadorian cuisine of San Francisco, with their pupusa and curtido, although perhaps not quite enough to start a campaign, and besides the chances of us being able to scrape together enough El Salvadorians in London to run a lemonade stall never mind a full restaurant are slim to none. The generally lacklustre offering of Greek food is perhaps harder to excuse - there's a pretty healthy Greek community in London and yet if the best it can come up with is Lemonia, something's gone wrong somewhere. I've had high hopes for a few places not least the relaunched Real Greek and they've all come up short so here's hoping some budding entrepreneur fills this gap in the market in the near future.

But there's one thing I've been desperately searching for almost for the entire time I've lived in London, which despite certain steps in the right direction has remained stubbornly just out of grasp, and that's Mediterranean rotisserie chicken. In Catalonia, every small town boasts at least one (in fact usually two or three) pollo a l'ast peddler, with banks of stainless steel spits full of birds, rubbed with obscene amounts of salt and herbs, slowly bronzing away. For the best results, and at the best places, you put your name down earlier in the day and turn up just as they're cooked, to whisk it home to eat with pan con tomate and salad, but even lesser pollo a l'ast from tourist spots near the beach can be well worth the effort. In Barcelona, as you might imagine in the regional capital, the humble roadside rotisserie chicken as been given the full posh treatment in places like Chez Coco but even here the concept is the same - plump birds rubbed with salt, lemon, thyme and bay, served with a salad or patatas fritas. Wonderfully simple, and simply wonderful.

Now, I should say in case you think this post is building up to something, Chicken Shop is not the answer to all our (ok, my) rotisserie chicken dreams. It's great, and I love it, but there's not the same depth and agression in the seasoning, or crunch in the skin. Perhaps I'm on a hiding to nothing expecting a chain of London restaurants to be able to exactly recreate the experience of a trip to Kan Kilis in l'Escala of a hot summer afternoon but even so I'm holding out hope that one day someone will get their act together.

In the meantime, anyway, Chicken Shop is very good. The seasoning, though not particularly complex, is still fairly robust - mainly lemon and salt which means the skin has a good colour and citrus tang. The flesh is - remarkably - never in the least bit dry, a result I believe of a day of marination and some fiendish steaming process, which means that yes some of the fire and flavour of the Spanish style is lost but hey, at least on quiet days you don't run the risk of recreating the National Lampoon's Christmas dinner scene. It's not perfect, but it is the best rotisserie chicken in London, by quite some stretch, which is of course to be much applauded.

On top of this, the crinkle-cut chips are great, the sauces are fantastic (particularly the chilli which is great to dip chips into), and they do a genuinely lovely butter lettuce and avocado salad, not to mention a great big apple pie and ice cream for £6. Oh yes that's the other thing worth pointing out about Chicken Shop - it's cheap; a whole chicken for £19 and on weekday lunches you can get a quarter chicken and chips for £8.50. For Holborn (my usual haunt), this puts it in direct competition with Chicken Cottage over the road. And I know which one of those is more deserving of your lunch money.

So though the wait goes on for the truly authentic Catalan experience, perhaps forever, us Londoners really should be grateful for Nick Jones, whose attention to detail and sense of style and occasion made Soho House such a runaway success and which make Chicken Shop such a friendly and reliable little spot to have a chicken dinner.

8/10

Wing Stop, Covent Garden

I have moaned before about the lack of Buffalo wing options in London, in fact I've moaned quite a lot, so by rights I should have been pleased at the news that huge American chain Wing Stop had landed in Cambridge Circus. Americans invented Buffalo wings (in, er, Buffalo, NY) and though there are mediocre examples available on both sides of the pond it's fair to say that the average American is more clear what they expect when ordering the things - namely, jointed chicken wings (no tips), fried then covered in a sauce of 50% hot sauce (by default Frank's Red Hot) and 50% butter, served with a blue cheese dip and somtimes little sticks of celery and carrot. It's not a complicated dish, but variations in the quality of the chicken, the style of hot sauce and - with the most potential for disaster - the blue cheese dip means that truly excellent Buffalo wings do not come along very often. And don't get me started on the crimes committed in the name of Buffalo Wings in most pubs in London.

So I really wanted to love Wing Stop. Despite the tourist-trap location, the overlarge menu that didn't once mention the word "Buffalo", and through an ordering process that involved waiting patiently while the entire, seemingly completely foreign concept of choosing what to eat and then paying for it was slowly explained to the people in front of us, I managed to keep a tight hold of my optimism. Even when presented with a bill for £14.30 for 8 wings, fries and a drink and was encouraged to mill around aimlessly waiting for my buzzer to go, even through all that I thought it still might be worth the effort.

It wasn't. Most importantly, in fact really the only important thing all said and done, the wings were poor - tiny, gnarly, feeble little bits of bird, flesh stained black and bones exposed, clearly from animals that had not had a good time on this planet. The sauce they were in was decent, enough of a kick of chilli and nice and glossy with butter, but this did not make up for the chicken at all. For a while I attempted to eat around the dark sloppy patches of seeping hemoglobin (a common side effect of using frozen chicken, but let's leave it at that), and to avoid the crunchiest bits of overcooked cartilage but eventually I got to the point where it just wasn't worth wasting the calories. Fries had skins on - because which multinational fast food chain has time to peel potatoes these days? - and were seasoned with sugar. No, I don't know why either.

Oh, weirdly though, the blue cheese dip was lovely. And I like the fact they have those multi-flavour drinks machines so you can order a pint of half-and-half caffeine-free peach-flavour Diet Coke and lime tango, if you feel the need. But there are far better, far cheaper ways to get your wings fix in town - Meatliquor do a giant pile of them for about £8, and there's good old Sticky Wings on Brick Lane doing 11 excellent wings, with fries and a dip, for a tenner. Did Wing Stop do their market research do you think? Did they buggery.

Anyway let's not dwell on it. Life's too short for bad wings. Next time I want to spend £14.30 on lunch on a giant American chain in Covent Garden I'll go to Shake Shack over the road, who - and I really mean this - are excellent. Get the double cheeseburger with bacon and all the salad, or the Shack Burger. In fact get whatever you want. Just don't go to Wing Stop.

4/10

I didn't have my Big Camera with me for this lunch. It's not a deliberate ploy to make the wings look bad, though, they really were that terrible.

CheeMc, Walworth Road

With deep and heartfelt apologies to those who call the area their home, there aren't too many convincing arguments to visit Walworth Road of an evening unless you have a particular fondness for betting shops, nail bars and standing traffic. Caught in a bit of a no-mans-land between the heaving Elephant & Castle roundabout (more recently less of a roundabout than a strange C-shape, but still heaving) and the genuinely enticing restaurant options of Camberwell, it's more of a conduit than an area, and up until quite recently its most significant impact on my life has been making me late for dinner at Silk Road. And I really do not like being late for dinner.

But, the merest hints of a dynamic food culture are flickering into life. As with so many (for want of a better word) unlovely areas of town, rents tend to be lower and with the freedom to be a bit more experimentational with your concepts and not worry too much about paying large investors back, London's restaurateurs can spread their wings a bit. True, Louie Louie wasn't quite my cup of tea in the end, but I like the fact that it's there, an okonomiyaki restaurant in South London, because why the hell not, a pleasing example that there are some people out there taking risks.

I wish I could tell you that I had a more successful evening at CheeMc than at Louie Louie, that I'd finally found my Korean chicken nirvana and that Walworth Road finally deserves to be spoken about in the same breadth as Camberwell Church Street or Brixton's Market Row. Sadly, we're not quite there yet, but it's still heartening to see a quirky, independent little operation like CheeMc pack them in on a rainy Sunday evening even if, in my usual tedious way, I could still find fault with a lot of the food served.

Partly my gripes were with the menu, which was large to the point of overwhelming and included a rather geographically ambiguous mix of Japanese staples like ramen, katsu, udon and takoyaki as well as Korean classics like bibimbab and soondooboo jigae. Had the food which appeared been better, I could have overlooked the game attempts to be Jack of all trades, but once a rather lacklustre bowl of udon ramen appeared, tasting of packet stock and raw onions, it quickly looked a lot less like idiosyncrasy and a lot more like an identity crisis.

Japche glass noodles were better, containing nice fresh vegetables and a confident hand with the sesame oil, and were pretty easy to enjoy in a straightforward kind of way. £7.90 does seem like quite a lot to pay for a some stir-fried vegetables and noodles, though. I could have them delivered to the door for that from a few places on Just Eat.

Bibimbab was good. Not astonishing, but good. More interesting once doused with gochujang, certainly, and there wasn't really anything significantly wrong with it, it just did its job as much as as a bowl of rice with various bits of veg on top can do.

The only real disappointment was the chicken. I don't pretend to be any kind of expert, on this or anything else, but I've had good Korean fried chicken, and I've had bad, and this was not good. Poorly butchered, in fact hacked into a strange collection of misshapen bits of pieces with broken bones jutting out at ugly angles, they were no less upsetting to eat than look at, being overcooked and tough, and coated in a chilli sauce that tasted of nothing much more than dry chilli powder. We soon wished we'd ordered a half portion instead of a full (£18.90), but even that would have been far too much to pay for a fairly mediocre pile of wings. Even an included bowl of sweet pickled daikon couldn't make this value for money.

With a drink each, the bill came to £16.31/head, great if your life's ambition is to eat vegetable noodles and poor fried chicken, not so great if it isn't. And I'm very much in the latter camp, so it seems my search for the Best of Korea goes on. Perhaps I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and travel all the way back to New Malden; if they can't get it right there then there's no hope for anyone. And for now, the Walworth Road will go back to its primary function of slowing me down on the way to dinner in Camberwell. If anything changes, though, you'll be the first to know.

5/10

Wingmans, Kilburn

There was a time, not so long ago, when we thought we knew burgers. Available on every pub menu in Britain, not to mention all of the familiar international chains on every high street, they were as familiar to the average Briton as fish and chips or bacon sandwiches, a staple of the late-night kebab shop and Saturday afternoon back garden BBQ. Bun, minced beef, tomato, lettuce, ketchup, done. What's the big deal? What's the drama?

It took a wobbly streetfood van in the corner of a car park in Peckham in the summer of 2009 to wake us from our collective delusion. Britain had not, it turned out, actually known burgers. At all. Oh sure, we thought we had - we'd known things that looked like burgers, that had the vague form and texture of burgers, that were labelled as "burgers" on menus. But no, we hadn't ever known real burgers because here Yianni of the Meatwagon finally was to show us how it should be done, and how utterly misguided we were as a nation in thinking those sad, grey little piles of watery mince hiding inside floury bread rolls were anything approaching the real deal. No, the Meatwagon made real burgers, and a nation's eating habits were transformed.

The problem with the state of burgers in the UK pre-Meatwagon was that people thought they were already in their final form and never really put much of an effort into discovering they were wrong. And much can be said about the state of the country's Buffalo wings. Properly done, Buffalo chicken wings - named after the city of Buffalo in upstate New York and nothing to do with bison - are the ultimate American drinking food, the combination of spicy cayenne sauce (usually Frank's) cut with butter, crisp fried wings and fresh chunky blue cheese dip hitting all of the sour/sweet/hot/soft/crunch pleasure points. But order them from the majority of pubs and bars in the UK and you will be presented with chicken that has been any combination of smoked, grilled or baked, covered in anything from BBQ sauce to sweet chilli. And as for a decent blue cheese dip? Well, good luck with that. A trip to the Peckham "WingJam" last week confirmed the sad state of wing affairs in the capital - out of eight or so stalls, only one - from Brother Bird - were any good at all.

There are precious few wing specialists in London - and therefore the UK - offering anything approaching an acceptable product. My previous favourite was Orange Buffalo, who make probably the best blue cheese dip around, but their "Buffalo" sauce, nice though it is, is made using mango and is therefore non-standard. I'm a strong believer that you have to get the basic recipe correct first before experimenting with variations, and was happy to discover Wingmans (stupid name I know - should there be an apostrophe there? Why not Wing men?), newly installed on Kilburn High Road, seem to be playing things fairly straight. Frank's buffalo sauce, celery, blue cheese dip. Hopes were high.

First the good news, and it is very good news. The chicken wings themselves are basically perfect. Large, healthy looking things with a delicate fried crust, the flesh was moist and firm, and the sauce just exactly the right balance of tangy cayenne heat and dairy. Unfortunately (and it's a very big unfortunately) they'd seen fit to offer them with quite the worst "blue cheese" dip I'd come across outside of Domino's pizza, a horrid thin and artificial pile of gloop with no discernible texture and very little taste other than a faint note of chemical grease. The fact the same kitchen could make chicken wings so good and saw no issue in serving them with this travesty of a blue cheese dip is genuinely baffling. What were they thinking?

A couple of days before my trip up to Kilburn I'd found myself in the Temple Brew House, a friendly little spot near the office with an astonishing selection of draught beers. More out of hope than expectation I ordered their "Buffalo wings" and wasn't entirely surprised to discover they were disgusting - soggy, formless little things so overcooked they'd dissolved into mush, in an insipid "Buffalo" sauce that tasted more like Heinz tomato soup than anything involving Frank's Hot Sauce. However, bizarrely, the blue cheese dip they came with was wonderful - fresh and vibrant with huge chunks of blue cheese, it was everything a blue cheese sauce should be. Someone should get these guys together; with the Temple Brew house dip and the Wingmans chicken, they'd have an unbeatable combo. It would be like when Yianni met Scott Collins.

Wingmans (I hate saying that word) also do the usual Asian-influenced variations. Shanghai Oriental was decent, with the same good chicken and addictive crunch of the Buffalo paired with ginger, spring onion and coriander. I've certainly had far worse. And "Jamaican Me Crazy" wings were certainly the advertised "HOT!" although I'd quite liked to have seen scotch bonnet chillis being used instead of red for extra Carribbean authenticity.

Truffle parmesan fries were good, although leaving the skins on always smacks slightly of laziness. And a bowl of "spicy Korean gochujang and sesame cucumbers" was underpowered, tasting of little more than rubbery cucumber. So yes, the sides need a bit of work.

I don't know how to come to any easy conclusions about a restaurant that can get one half of a dish perfectly right, and another half incredibly wrong. I really want to give 10/10 for the chicken and 1/10 for the blue cheese dip, but that way madness lies so instead I'll just go for a score that vaguely reflects my overall satisfaction with the place; namely, not very satisfied but not completely disappointed either. Plus there's every chance that one day soon Wingmans may realise their blue cheese dip is a disaster and will have another shot at it. Until then, the search for the perfect product goes on. Is anyone out there ready to be the Meatwagon of Buffalo wings?

6/10

Wing Wing, Euston

The last few months saw the opening of two brand-new chicken concepts in London. To be honest, there have probably been a whole load of other new chicken concepts open in London, but I didn't get press releases about any others so they don't matter. One - Chik'n in Baker St - is from the guys behind Chick'n'Sours and is, predictably, brilliant; high quality chicken matched with a variety of interesting Asian-Fusion sauces and sides, and all for barely more than you'd spend at your local Chicken Cottage. It's great, and you should go.

The other is Wing Wing. And it's not terrible, or even particularly expensive, it's just not what I was hoping it would be. For a start, they call themselves Korean. And what do you think of when someone mentions Korean Fried Chicken? For me, it's piping hot wings in a medium-crunchy batter, doused in a bright red sweet/sour sauce and coated in sesame seeds. "Dakgangjeong" I believe they're called and I've found no better example recently than these, which were a special collaboration between Gizzi Erskine and Tonkotsu a couple of months back.

It's hardly Wing Wing's fault that I'm projecting my own expectations of what Korean food should be on people that - let's face it - are perfectly entitled to decide that for themselves, but shouldn't that style at least be an option on what is quite a large menu? There's room for katsu bao, chicken burgers, wraps, fish & chips(?), rice boxes, salad boxes and god knows how many desserts but the main event itself - the chicken - comes either as wings or drumsticks (no thighs or breast or option to have whole half or quarter pieces) and brushed with three "glazes" that are so lightly applied that they all just end up tasting identical.

On my first visit I tried six "hot" wings, which were certainly hot in terms of temperature but barely registered at all on the Scoville scale. The chicken itself was strong and healthy-looking, with good firm flesh and nice big bones. And I suppose there interest in the skin, which was delicate and gave with a nice crunch. But it just didn't taste of anything; not spices, salt, even MSG would have been something - it was as if some crucial part of the cooking process (ie. a nice sweet/sour sauce) had been missed out.

Drumsticks suffered from all the same issues as the wings, and despite choosing the "soy garlic" glaze had the same dry coating and tasted completely indistinguishable. They weren't bad, just boring, and animal welfare issues aside if I had the choice again I'd stick with Chicken Cottage. In fact, I don't know how Wing Wing treat their chickens as their website doesn't say, but they do seem a little more robust than your average high st place so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that.

Other menu items fared little better. A chicken wrap was probably the best of the things we tried, containing plenty of chicken and an interesting kimchi-spiked (I think) coleslaw.

But katsu bao was very weird, the bun tasting more like deep-fried brioche than the usual steamed style and the chicken suffering from the same lack of seasoning and excitement that affected the wings and drumsticks. Kimchi coleslaw on top was nice though.

So, little to love but little to hate either. For a place that on the face of it at least appears to be trying to stand out from the crowd, with its bold interior design and alcohol license, the only thing remarkable about Wing Wing is in the end how unremarkable it is - it's just another fast food place amidst the tourist tat of Euston, easily ignored. Which is a shame, really, considering what could have been if they'd just done some proper Korean fried chicken. And maybe they will, one day. Until then, I'm stik'n with Chik'n.

5/10

Sorry forgot to take a photo of the 2nd bill

Dimanche Poulet at Hélène Darroze at the Connaught, Mayfair

The idea for the Dimanche Poulet at Hélène Darroze at the Connaught came out of one of the side-effects of having your fine dining restaurant hosted inside a 5-star hotel. If you're a standalone operation like Gordon Ramsay on Royal Hospital Road or Five Fields, then you have the freedom to open Monday-Friday only and give yourselves a couple of days of well-needed rest on the weekend. And nobody at all will blame you for doing so. But hotel guests need feeding on weekends too, and refusing to do anything as ordinary (or, let's face it, English) as a usual Sunday roast, Darroze decided what she'd do is introduce Londoners to the joys of Landes chicken from her homeland of south west France.

The roast chicken itself, then, is the centrepiece of the meal and we'll get to that soon. What makes Dimanche Poulet a real experience is the dozen or so elements - canapés, consommés and various bitesize bits of loveliness - that utilise the other parts of the bird and also showcase other ingredients from France. First to arrive was Bigorre ham, moist slivers of top-quality pig sliced dramatically tableside using a very shiny and expensive-looking contraption, draped seductively over sticks of breadcrumbed cheese, and a few pea shoots.

Alongside the ham, a cute teapot of "gazpacho", tomato consommé poured into ceramic shot glasses containing tiny cubes of summer veg. A good clean flavour from the consommé and a marvellous presentational flair (inside the teapot were floating red and yellow cherry tomatoes, very pretty) meant this was great fun to eat.

And finally in the trilogy of amuses (bear in mind we haven't even got to course one of the lunch menu yet) these cones of smoked mackerel paté topped with dill purée. As the only bit of seafood in the whole menu they stood up very well, a rich savoury mackerel flavour balanced with a metallic, bright-green herb, a delicate pastry cone giving way to soft seafood filling.

House bread was described as "French country" and was pretty much perfect in its own right, moist crumb bound by a good solid crust. But with it was this tower of flavoured butter - chilli as well as various other spices I believe - and made a pretty much perfect bread even better. Which was as much of a relief as a delight as I have to say the colour of it reminded me of a tikka-flavoured cheddar I was unfortunate enough to suffer a few years back.

Next the first named course, and I have a feeling "L'oeuf coque directement sorti du cul de la poule" means something a bit rude in French so I'll leave it untranslated. All you really need to know was that it was a golden hen's egg filled with a surprisingly powerful Parmesan mousse - an almost blue-cheese taste - bits of smoky Alsace bacon and a good amount of lovely smooth yolk. Unlike so many of the egg yolk dishes you'll see in London these days, there was no silly slow-cooking going on to get a strange fudgy texture; this was commendably un-messed-about with.

My favourite bit of the whole meal came next - a wonderfully deep and complex chicken consommé, poured over teeny ravioli containing more of that Bigorre ham, some cutely balled vegetables and - the killer ingredient - toasted chunks of that country bread which soaked up the consommé brilliantly and meant every bite released a mouthful of rich chicken soup. And this would all have been lovely enough but we were instructed to leave a bit of the consommé at the bottom of our bowls and soon a waiter added to it a shot of armagnac, turning it into a kind of hot chicken cocktail, heady and decadent.

So yes, my favourite course wasn't the showpiece roast chicken. It was very nice, don't get me wrong, but perhaps the World's Best Roast Chicken I'd invented in my head could never hope to live up to anything that actually is able to exist in the real world. Carved expertly tableside and presented alongside a selection of geometric nibbles including a "boudin blanc" of white mousse and Scotch quail's egg surrounded by herby chicken meat, it certainly looked the part. But the breast meat was unfortunately a tad dry, and the skin a little too flaky and insubstantial (and verging on burned) for it to really steal the show.

A taco made with the confit leg meat had an interesting Hoi-sin-style sauce, topped with pickled veg. Again, it was fairly enjoyable but stood out as being rather homestyle and clunky amidst the gastronomic fireworks that preceded it. Or maybe I'm just a taco snob, which is probably more likely.

Desserts were very French. Ille Flottante took me back to childhood memories of holidays on the continent, with a good light ille topped with silver leaf, looking very pretty. However I did think the flottante (yes I know it doesn't really work but you know what I mean) was less like crème Anglaise and more like single cream, which was weird. Crème caramel was just the right side of eggy, with an even consistency and subtle caramel topping. I completely forgot to take a picture of it though, sorry.

And, after a Madeleine or two each, we were done. Reading the last few paragraphs you may feel like I'm winding up towards a fairly low score so it's worth stressing that plenty enough went right in the meal to ensure we felt like we'd got our money's worth and then some. Yes, I wasn't quite as bowled over by the chicken breast as I hoped I'd be and the desserts were more satisfying than spectacular, but in the context of things like the consommé with Armagnac and the parmesan golden egg and the incredible house bread and butter, not to mention literally perfect service and one of London's most luxuriously comfortable dining rooms, £95 for two people is an absolute steal.

If anything, it's made me want to go back and try the full Hélène Darroze tasting menu proper, and I'm sure one day I will do. Meantime if you want to try the Dimanche Poulet yourself remember it must be booked well in advance and isn't on every Sunday; it depends on the availability of the chickens, which are only released to the public from the deepest French countryside when they're at their absolute best. But as a celebration of these magnificent birds, the Connaught's idiosyncratic and inventive flagship restaurant has come up with a menu like no other in town, and I'm sure you'll realise it's worth the wait.

8/10

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