Fried chicken shops are where life happens. If it was ever in doubt before, last year’s three-part Channel 4 series The Fried Chicken Shop confirmed it. A fixture on almost every London high street, and across the rest of the country too, chicken shops are a modern microcosm the likes of which you could write an essay on.
But rather than writing an essay, C4 did what C4 does best – they put cameras in a shop, Roosters Spot on Clapham High Street, and let the magic unfold. With all the heart-tugging emotion and only slightly less red-faced swearing than their hospital documentaries (I still maintain they could have called it One Gnawed Every Minute), The Fried Chicken Shop charmed the nation with its tales of friendship, ambition, anger, politics, romance and squeezy condiments.
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There was philosophy from teenage students getting their post-college chicken fix, and wisdom from Clapham locals who had watched the area evolve since the 60s. The whole experience was like smearing a drumstick on a paper bag and holding up the greasy window for us to peer through upon humanity.
Or something. Mainly it just really, really made us want 2pcs, chips and a Fanta.
One year on and Roosters Spot is still clucking. ‘It’s a tourist attraction now,’ says Muhammad Zahid, who has worked at the shop since it opened in 2009. ‘People come in at the weekends and start looking for the cameras in the corner. It’s quite funny. We have many customers from Australia, because Channel 4 has been showing the series over there too.’
Shift manager Muhammad, 26, is the only familiar face left behind the counter now, as all the other staff featured in the programme have moved on to other Roosters Spot shops. Babyfaced Imran has been promoted, and former manager Ali now owns another franchise in Walthamstow. The chain’s Brixton branch also found fame earlier this year on ITV’s* Let Me Entertain You*, giving the big bosses plenty to crow about.
‘After opening our first shop in 2009, Roosters Spot has grown into one of the largest fast-food chains in the UK, with five successful Roosters Spot stores,’ boasts the company website. Yeah, so the stats might not be 100 per cent accurate… but you’ve got to admire that kind of chutzpah.
‘I think they have a long future in this country, chicken shops,’ says Muhammad, and he’s probably right. Where our parents and grandparents might have flirted over pies and pineapple fritters down the local chippy (shut up, I want to believe this is true), today another meat rules the fast-food roost.
Britain’s fried chicken market is reportedly worth between £15 and £20bn – in London there’s a chicken shop for every 1,000 people
Britain’s fried chicken market is reportedly worth between £15 and £20bn, while in London there’s a chicken shop for every 1,000 people. Wrestling through the crowds to get your salty fix on a Saturday night, it can often feel as though all thousand have turned up at once.
Of course, the ethics behind all that chicken production could be fodder for many other documentaries, but that was part of the joy of The Fried Chicken Shop – everything it showed us, it presented without judgement.
Fried chicken is the scent of night buses, the sponge that soaks up our vodka cokes (or Aperol Spritzes – this is Clapham, after all) and the balm that soothes our weekend heartbreak. If that’s not poetic enough, it was also Maya Angelou’s favourite comfort food – though the birds they serve at Roosters Spot come with fries and fizzy pop, not collard greens and cornbread.
Healthy it ain’t, but then we all know calories don’t really exist after midnight. Or when they’re eaten standing up, under a horrible strip light. Or nicked off someone else’s plastic tray.
And Roosters Spot also offers lighter options, like grilled kebabs and wraps, which apparently account for more sales than you’d think. ‘Grilled chicken is very popular – I think more than 50 per cent of our customers buy the grilled chicken, not fried. It’s our bestselling product,’ says Muhammad. ‘And it’s my favourite thing on the menu.’
What makes Roosters Spot so much better than KFC, or the McDonalds a couple of doors down? ‘I think this is much better quality,’ he says. ‘The thing is, they do frozen products and we do fresh products. They don’t do grilled things. Roosters has its own recipes, its own spices, even its own coating on the chips. Our customers love the taste.’
They certainly do, although they also have their own ideas about those magic ingredients. ‘I think it’s the salt,’ says Laura Dawes, a 24-year-old art buyer who we meet in Roosters Spot on Saturday night. ‘The chicken is nice… for Clapham High Street.’
Would she ever go to a chicken shop during the day? ‘No. Even if I wanted to go sober, I couldn’t take it. I can’t handle it on a hangover either.’
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Oh yes, there’s the drinking. Some of the show’s most bum-clenchingly awkward moments were drunken chat – those fluorescent-lit conversations you think are so witty and searingly insightful at 4am, with a belly full of booze and a fist full of crispy thigh meat. Turns out they rarely are witty or searingly insightful, but they do make for magnificent telly.
We might also imagine that a shopload of steaming revellers would make for a pretty hellish experience on the other side of the counter – especially when, like Muhammad, you don’t actually drink yourself. But he’s sweetly generous on the topic, even on the punters who turn aggressive.
‘Basically they don’t know what they’re doing when they get drunk. We understand. We have to stay patient, give them our best service.’ Is it a bit like being a nurse at times? ‘You could say that,’ he chuckles.
One of the loveliest aspects of the TV series was the camaraderie of the chicken shop colleagues, and their willingness to put up with some of the biggest twats in London. We collectively cringed as customers asked the servers for hugs, grilled them on their career ambitions or, in one scene, hurled themselves over the counter for no particular reason.
‘I’m used to it, I’m very patient,’ says Muhammad. ‘If I think I can’t control myself, I go out the back and ask one of my colleagues to do it instead. We look after each other.’
Oana Preda, a sales operations manager who lives in Clapham, thinks chicken shop etiquette is pretty much non-existent. ‘Most of the time you don’t really notice other people – you just want to get your food and get out.’ We met her in Roosters Spot after drinks with friends on Saturday night. ‘I didn’t even know about the TV show,’ she admitted. ‘I just really like their chicken.’
But for every customer focusing on shovelling down fries, there’s another with their eyes elsewhere. From the sort of pick-up lines that make Dapper Laughs look like Cary Grant, to new couples declaring their feelings through mouthfuls of mayonnaise, The Fried Chicken Shop managed to turn £2.99 takeaways into the food of love.
After all, if you fancy someone at 3am under the Bright Lights of Hell with chicken skin in their teeth, it’s probably meant to be.
If you fancy someone at 3am under the Bright Lights of Hell with chicken skin in their teeth, it’s probably meant to be
Laura’s seen it happen in real life. ‘The other day, we were out in Dalston and I came into the chicken shop and didn’t know where my friend had gone, we were all looking for him, and we found him holding hands with a girl over the fried chicken. They were gazing into each other’s eyes. That’s probably the most romantic thing I’ve ever seen in a chicken shop,’ she says.
Muhammad and his colleagues batted off plenty of amorous advances in the show (in some cases, rare examples of female-on-male harassment that made you want to bellow, ‘LEAVE THE MAN AND HIS PAPER HAT ALONE!’ at the TV), but he insists that working at Roosters Spot has broadened his horizons and made him more open-minded.
‘One of my most interesting experiences was Jessi, the man in lady’s clothes? I never saw him in my shop before this TV show, and then he started coming in. I used to look at him out on the street and think a few different things… but then when I talked to him, listened to him share his ideas, I found him interesting. Mind-changing.’
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Already something of a local celebrity in Clapham, Jessi was one of the show’s standout stars. ‘It’s got nothing to do with who I am now, I’ve left it all behind,’ she protested in one memorable scene, when asked by a group of drunk girls what her old name was. ‘I’m the opposite of who I were. Haven’t you been paying attention?’
The nation was paying attention, and Jessi has since published a self-help book called* Journey to Yourself*. Plenty of the show’s other regulars still eat at Roosters Spot too, among them teenage couple Tyrone and Leah, who discovered at the end of episode one that they were expecting a baby.
‘They come back in, and we give them little treats,’ says Muhammad. ‘Not everyone, though. High-level management send instructions on who we can reward for their loyalty.’
You suspect if they started giving freebies to every loyal customer, profits would go through the floor – particularly now they’re London’s most famous chicken vendors.
Do people start as many fights in the shop these days?
‘No… only really at weekends,’ he says, diplomatic as ever. ‘Or sometimes on weeknights too.’
Still, it seems that for all we enjoyed watching them, staff at Roosters Spot have just as much fun observing the life that parades through their doors. ‘Halloween was lively,’ says Muhammad. ‘We see a lot of good costumes, and some of our staff dress up too. We just stay behind the counter, watch and celebrate with everyone. It’s like a show.’
As shows go, it’s probably more entertaining than your average grimy dancefloor. And frankly, in a city of endless queues, overpriced cocktails and dickheads, often the great leveller of the post-club feed can feel like the best part of your night.
Or as my friend Jess once eloquently put it: ‘I love going out. Because then you can have a chicken burger after.’
At the end of the evening I disappoint Muhammad by ordering fried chicken, not grilled. But hey – sometimes grease really is the word.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.