Clear and Obvious Fowl Play
A Vittles Review: The worst soup in London. Words by Jonathan Nunn.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants!
Vittles Reviews is a column dedicated to critical reviews of London restaurants, written by Jonathan Nunn. You can read the previous reviews below:
Extraordinary Ordinariness at Uncle Wrinkle
The Last Guardians of Beef Dripping Fish and Chips - Molesey Fish Bar, Knight’s Fish Bar and Marlow Fish Bar
At Peace With Change on Green Lanes - Köfteci Metin
Crispy bhajia and the golden thread of true quality - Tulsi
There’s a thin line between Heaven and Hell - Asian Harvest Butchers
An analogue desire in a digitised world - D&K Gambian Roast Chicken and Rice
In Brockley, fortune favours us all - SikatioA Vittles subscription costs £5/month or £45/year. If you’ve been enjoying the writing then please consider subscribing to keep it running — it will give you access to this column and the whole Vittles back catalogue — including London restaurant guides.
Clear and Obvious Fowl Play
The worst soup in London. Words by Jonathan Nunn
Before you’ve taken a bite of food at Fowl, a new ‘beak to feet’ chicken pop-up from the team behind the celebrated St. James’s restaurant Fallow, you will start to ask yourself questions you’ll soon realise can’t be answered. Like, what exactly makes a chicken shop that is part of a £400 million property redevelopment ‘sustainable’? How did we get to the stage where a restaurant feels like it can serve £2-per-unit chicken wings in a fake KFC-style box and not realise this might be slightly perverse? Why does every single dish, from the fries to the profiteroles, contain some variation on chicken skin? Or, what does the number 24 next to the dish labelled ‘Lennie’s matzo ball soup chicken skin challah’ mean – is it a particularly fiendish cryptic crossword clue, or is Fowl really charging twenty four of the King’s own pounds for a bowl of embellished chicken stock? Certainly I wondered, when I heard the fire alarm going off three times, as it did during my first meal, as each dish was brought to the table, whether Fowl is having teething problems, or if it just has an extremely sensitive bullshit detector.
