(Bloomberg) -- Whole roast birds are a hot ticket this season.
A bronzed chicken, often with a hefty price tag attached, has become one of London’s most popular dishes, even in the height of summer when roasted food doesn’t top most people’s lists. And sometimes, the higher the price, the more appealing it is.
At the popular Bouchon Racine in Farringdon, chef-owner Henry Harris gets eight to 12 chickens a week from a small Basque country producer. Depending on the garnish—sometimes garlic-sauteed white beans—the dish goes for £80-£95 ($104-$124). “I will often sell them out in a day,” reports Harris—no small feat at a 40-seat restaurant with at least 10 entrees on offer.
In early July, Harris got his hands on some extra-fancy birds: poulet de Bresse, essentially the Kelly bags of the poultry world. “I put them on the menu at around £120, £140. I sold them within the first 10 minutes of service,” says the chef. He’ll source more in autumn, when diners are back from summer holidays. “The flavor is stunning,” he observes.
Other restaurants around London are seeing similar success blasting their ovens to roast whole birds. At the Connaught Grill, the £90 spit-roasted whole Racan chicken, sourced from France’s Loire Valley and plated with a side of roasted shallots, is a staple of the menu. The poulet roti is a fixture on most tables even on a sunny summer day at Josephine, Claude Bosi’s new Lyon-inspired dining room in Chelsea. At £56, it’s served in a cast-iron casserole with potato salad.
Chefs say one reason why their roast chickens are selling out this summer is because they’re sourcing breeds that have outstanding taste, from small producers in France. Menus highlight not just the farm names but also details about the animal’s sunny outdoor life—a move that might remind some people of a Portlandia episode.
But whole chicken is also emblematic of the dining spots that are popular in London right now, namely ones that lean into the atmosphere of a brasserie. It evokes the popular-again Sunday roast but is available every day, having the appeal of a humble-seeming dish offered in an invariably fancy setting. And it all comes as consumption of red meat in the UK has been declining. Plus, fried chicken places are also on a tear: Popeyes is projected to open at least 30 places around the UK this year, and the California-based chain Dave’s Hot Chicken has announced its arrival in Britain with its first London location in the first quarter of 2025.
In 2023 supermarket sales of chicken increased £285.1 million from 2022. (The only product with higher growth was vaping brand Lost Mary, whose sales rose £310 million, according to the Grocer.) But that bump is not being driven by sales of whole chickens—chicken parts, especially cheaper cuts, are what’s selling in markets.
Restaurants are where whole birds are in demand, and chicken-focused menus are proving to be popular. At Story Cellar, each of the spit-grilled birds requires about 48 hours of prep, including brining and poaching. Chef Tom Sellers sees people order them all day long, from midweek lunch to pretheater meals and on weekends at lunch and dinner. “I genuinely don’t know why chicken is hitting home so hard right now with diners,” he says.
There’s also the year-old Bebe Bob, where two of the three entrees are roast chicken for two from France: a “rare breed” from Vendée and a milk-fed bird from Arnaud Tauzin in Landes “slow-reared for firmer texture,” for £38 or £78, respectively.
The new modern French restaurant Henri off Covent Garden has a herb-fed roast chicken that goes for £60 and is also a bestseller. The juicy, lacquered pieces arrive piled up on a platter, interspersed with morels. Chef Jackson Boxer says customers ask him why a chicken that costs £7 at the grocery store costs almost 10 times as much at the restaurant. He points to the quality of his birds but also the challenges of cooking them correctly in a busy oven. “Roasting a chicken well under service conditions is not easy—you’re sharing oven space with other chickens, ordered at other times, as well as other dishes entirely.”
Outside of European restaurants, operators are also seeing success with whole birds. At Dishoom Battersea and the Dishoom Permit Room dining spots in Cambridge and Brighton, the new bhatti chicken (£25.20) has become a standout dish, rivaling the ubiquitous tandoori chicken. Chef Rishi Anand marinates the smoky-tasting bird in black spices.
He thinks its popularity has a lot to do with nostalgia: It’s his take on Mumbai’s popular black chicken dish and a dish his father cooked on a portable tandoor oven.
But roast chicken comes with its own challenges. “Taking on the whole roast chicken is fraught with risk,” says Boxer. “At worst, you ruin the restaurant experience by confirming the worst suspicions of your guests: that kitchens exist to massively overcharge for things they could quite reasonably expect to do for themselves.”
Nonetheless, even luxury brands are seeing value in the classics. The best known dish at Parisian restaurant L’Ami Louis is its poulet roti (entier) that goes for €100-plus, or more than $110. In June, LVMH announced that it was adding the century-old bistro to its burgeoning hospitality roster.
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