Tottenham has more fast-food chicken shops than anywhere else in London. And it’s about to get one more – with a difference.
In September 2015, Create London will open Chicken Town, a not-for-profit restaurant in a disused Victorian fire station in Tottenham Green. Offering healthy versions of chicken shop favourites, Chicken Town will serve local school children during the day and operate as a self-sustaining restaurant and bar at night.
Create London has a history of resurrecting vacant London buildings, working with creatives and local councils to bring them back to life as community hubs. Previous projects include Folly for a Flyover, a performance and screening pavilion in a disused motorway undercroft in Stratford, and collaborations with secret immersive theatre production company, You Me Bum Bum Train.
For Chicken Town, it is drafting in executive chef Giorgio Ravelli, formerly of Ten Bells and the Ledbury, and restaurant partners including The Clove Club, Quo Vadis and Russell Norman’s Polpo Group.
London has more than 8,000 fried chicken shops, with 34 in Tottenham alone. The area has the highest childhood obesity rate in the capital with one in four children at reception age overweight or obese – a statistic that rises to an alarming one in three by the age of six. Chicken Town’s menu packs in just 30% of the calories and fat found in traditional high street fried chicken.
The restaurant will take over the double-engine bays on the ground floor of the 1901 fire station.
