Is Rotisserie Chicken the Solution?
Jonathan Nunn reviews Norbert's and Spring Street Pizza, two new restaurants from serious chefs and asks: how did we get here? Photography by Michaël Protin.
Good morning and welcome back to Vittles Restaurants. Today’s review is by Jonathan Nunn.
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Recession Rotisserie
Jonathan Nunn reviews Norbert’s and Spring Street Pizza.
If you want some hard evidence to prove the ailing state of the London restaurant industry, you can do no better than count the number of chefs who have professed a sudden interest in serving rotisserie chicken. As concerning as the glut of big name closures so far this year – Lyle’s (RIP), Hill & Szrok (RIP), Norman’s – are new rotisserie restaurant openings like The Knave of Clubs, Flock, and Toum, or the rotissification of Café Francois, Story Cellar and Bob Bob Ricard, all of which have produced an unexpected excess of rotisserie chicken in central London.
My concern can be summed up thus:
Rotisserie chicken restaurants don’t suddenly appear because chefs love to make rotisserie chicken. Almost no chef actively sets out to cook rotisserie chicken – which is less about cooking than it is marinating and waiting around. Instead, places that sell rotisserie are built to be resilient in the face of dire economic circumstances. We’ve seen this before, when the 2008 financial crisis led to the boom in street food, burgers and assorted Americana, which still define the casual food scene in London. We saw it in 2020, when restaurants pivoted to modes of survival familiar to any immigrant-run restaurant in the outer boroughs of London (chicken, sandwiches, pizza), with varying degrees of success. The problem then was translating the mentality that you need to be a great chef to the production of one simple item. Restaurant cooking thrives on a degree of ego – call it ‘cheffiness’ – that is always in pursuit of the new and seeks to distinguish itself from anything else. Cooking a single item requires the destruction of that ego in service of the format; a knowledge that there is nothing more important than the functional user experience of eating a sandwich, a slice of pizza, a piece of chicken. Some chefs understood this; others tried to fit whole meals between two slices of bread.
Five years on into this brave new world of the ‘Recession Restaurant’ comes Norbert’s, a new rotisserie chicken shop in East Dulwich. I was particularly excited about the opening of Norbert’s when I first heard it was in the making. For one, it’s near my house, and two, East Dulwich is just bougie enough to make it acceptable for me to say there is not much else worth eating there (even if I’m devastated that Norbert’s took the place of the old-school Italian restaurant Il Mirto – another casualty of 2025). It’s also an unexpectedly big-name collaboration between John Ogier, the veteran restaurateur who opened Lyle’s with James Lowe in 2014, and Jack Coghlan, who also worked at Lyle’s and was most recently Seb Myer’s top lieutenant at Planque, one of London’s most progressive fine-dining restaurants. As far as new openings go, this is the proverbial ‘killing ants with a sledgehammer’; there is enough talent between the two men to open an ambitious restaurant in any neighbourhood in London. Instead, they have dedicated themselves to a cramped 15-seater on a suburban side street serving rotating poultry.