There’s some spectacular fried chicken in Manchester. Choices abound - there’s US style, dipped in Nashville hot sauce, like from the excellent Mumma’s (find them in Mackie Mayor and Altrincham Market). There’s Korean style, there’s Japanese karaage.
There’s southern fried and there’s Indian-style ‘65’, so named as it was created in 1965 at the Buhari Hotel in Chennai. There’s Thai style with chilli and fried lime leaves. Or perhaps a slab of crisp, panko-covered joy served in a warm hoagie with jalapeños and hot honey, like at Fat Pat’s, the superlative sandwich place in Chinatown.
Every which way you can think of to disassemble and fry a chicken, we’ve probably got it. So trying to pick the best isn’t something to simply wander into without thinking carefully about it. Pleasingly, three of the best in town are located in what from now on will be known as the Oxford Road Chicken Triangle.
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There’s newcomer Bird Of Prey, on Charles Street, which opened up last year and has been feeding the students around the Circle Square development ever since. There’s Chimaek, just a minute away on Hulme Street. And then follow the hypotenuse (or adjacent, or opposite, not sure) and you get to Yoki Social Table at the Society food hall.
These three do some of the very best chicken in Manchester. And they’re all close by, so why not pit them against each other in a fight to the death (likely mine, in the future, from clogged arteries).
Bird of Prey does wings, burgers, strips, dips and some elaborate sides (and a new smashed burgers too). The ‘messy chick fries’, for example, come with fried chicken strips, squirty cheese sauce, turkey bacon, jalapeños and white Alabama BBQ sauce.
But that all feels a little bit extra. We’re here for the wings and the chicken pieces, how all these places will be judged. Here the wings come in fives for £6, 10 for £12 or 15 for a round £15. The classic Buffalo Hot come slathered in Frank’s buffalo sauce and with the equally classic blue cheese sauce.
They’re sharp and hot, the Frank’s sauce tangy and vinegary, and the blue cheese ranch is just right, cool and soothing. Foolishly, a portion of the ‘insanity’ wings gets ordered too. Everything seems fine to start with, then the heat slowly starts to gather, and before long it’s a hallucinatory ordeal. Not wholly recommended, if I’m honest.
But this is solidly good chicken, and the towering burgers are excellent too, notably a La Cucaracha (£8,50), which comes bathed in sriracha mayo, American cheese, pico de gallo, jalapeno, and sharp pickles. It’s a fine, messy start.
Once fingers have been wiped and jowls cleansed, it’s off to Chimaek, over the road. Chimaek quite literally means chicken and beer; chi, short for chicken, and maek from maekju, meaning beer.
In South Korea, they’ve been making fried chicken since around the 1400s. So as a nation, they know what they’re doing, and pairing it with beer as part of the eating culture is something that I can very much get on board with. This chicken is double fried, so it’s ridiculously crispy. Ridiculously.
A combo for two is £22, and for that you get 10 pieces of chicken and a big bowl of fries, along with a choice of sauces and ‘sprinkles’ - spicy mayo, hot pepper, sweet and spicy, soy and garlic, honey and garlic, chilli pepper sprinkle or curry sprinkle.
I can confirm that dredging a piece of Chimaek’s double fried chicken through the sweet and spicy dip is an eye-rolling, almost religious experience, and I feel that they’ve probably already won the gold medal. It’s majestic fried chicken. Fried chicken elevated to an art form.
They also do a thing called a ‘tornado potato’ (£3.80), a potato that has been spiral cut and pulled open like a slinky, then deep fried and sprinkled with curry seasoning. It’s like eating freshly fried crisps on a skewer, and it’s a thing of beauty.
With an almost impossibly high bar to surmount, it’s away to Yoki Social Table at Society. It’s more Korean style chicken, but the pieces are fried first and then tossed in hot, sticky, sweet and spicy sauces.
Ordered is the honey butter garlic chicken, the sweet and spicy and the Korean sweet and sour. It’s all excellent, the bite-sized chunks of thigh chewy and crisp at the same time. The sweet and spicy sauce wins here, and the fries are superb too, dunked in the sweet and sour sauce like an upscale McDonalds.
This is first rate fried chicken, no doubt whatsoever about it. It's spectacularly good, in fact, and the crisp pork dumplings thrown in with the combo meal were excellent. The fries are considerably better than the pretty average fries at Chimaek too. But the winner of the inaugural Oxford Road Chicken Triangle challenge has to be Chimaek, though it’s an extraordinarily close call.
Maybe it's the double frying. Maybe it's the sticky sauces. Maybe it's that crazy slinky potato. Whatever, all hail the fried chicken.
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'The pink café in Trafford Palazzo has lost its mind if it thinks our food was worth £70'
