Some dishes don’t belong in restaurants

Even at Katz's

Historically, the pre-Yom Kippur practice of kapparot involved the waving of either money or a chicken over one’s head, before slaughtering it according to laws of kashrut. The money or chicken would then be donated to the hungry, with the preference for chicken (in the Misnah Berurah, a text written by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan in 19th century Poland, money was basically disallowed). 

Why am I telling you this?

Well, Jews and chicken is a thing, a bit like Turks and lamb, or Spaniards and pork. If you’ll allow such crude generalizations, the point is that in general, chicken has a certain hallowed place in the Ashkenazi diet: a Friday night dinner usually involves most of the bird, from chopped liver to chicken soup (using the carcass) to roast chicken. The only missing parts are the hearts and gizzards, but, through explorations into other cuisines, I’ve discovered my love for them too.

Chicken soup is the most venerated in the hierarchy. You don’t fuck with it. It’s “Life, death and chicken soup,” as Molly Pepper Steemson so aptly subtitled her collation of Jewish writers’ Friday night dinners for Vittles.

Its alias ‘Jewish penicillin’ actually misses the point entirely: it isn’t designed to cure, but rather to allure, so it really has to be awe-inspiringly, show-stoppingly good – or at least quite tasty – if it’s to gain gentile fans.

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I’d been lured in by the Insta-fanfare of Pierre Koffman’s beak-protruding Le Grand Coq pie. I really wanted to see it in person, but when I arrived at FOWL, and looked at the menu, there was no pie.

I hadn't got the memo. FOWL is part fried chicken shop, part pop-up concept. Part very good fried Sichuan wings and very ordinary burger; and part opportunity for cooks and chefs to offer us their take on the humble bird.

Chicken is having a moment, and Jewish food is having a moment, so it was only a matter of time before these worlds collided, and with Lennie Ware’s guest menu at FOWL, this was my first chance to try out fowl fixation meeting gourmet Ashkenazi.

Ware offered two dishes to the menu: a matzo ball soup and challah combo, and latkes. The rest is FOWL’s core menu, mostly chicken shop, but some other bits (every dish on the menu has chicken in it, even the two desserts), with some bits from Koffman’s stint.

The latkes were superb. Sufficiently alliumy, crisp as McCoys ridged crisps on the exterior, and soft inside; the toppings of chopped chives, and lines of squeezy bottle applesauce and sour cream were well-judged, delivering an ideal all-in-one experience on the tastebuds. Plainly, the latkes worked. 

This made for a stark contrast with the soup and challah combo. I later found out the soup only originated with Lennie Ware, and then adapted by the team at FOWL. Adapted into what Jonathan Nunn accurately described as “embellished chicken stock.”

The challah was slightly dry but relatively tasty – though the shards of protruding chicken skin, which appear on other dishes (does someone in the kitchen have a spike fetish?), didn’t add to the experience. 

It hit the table and already looked suspect. I’ve been served hundreds of chicken soups across south Manchester suburban households and it is invariably golden, not umber. Still, it can be a deeper shade of gold — sometimes my grandma would cook it in the oven, and a roasted flavour would darken and deepen its hue — so I hadn’t lost hope yet.

The truth is I had been so excited to discover it on the menu that I really wanted to like it. But as I persisted, I learnt that while the matzo balls were perfectly fine, and I appreciated the addition of dill (a herb so underrated), the broth itself was completely insipid. I was so incredulous that I kept going back for more, and then it dawned on me that something else was bothering me.

Have I ever enjoyed chicken soup in a restaurant?

Even when I’ve tasted genuinely good deli versions  – examples being at Katz in New York, and at Lulu’s in Cheadle, a place I tried during my research for the Vittles Manchester Jewish food guide – I’ve always felt an underlying sense of unease whilst eating it.

I’ve since been pondering over why this might be the case and I think it’s a combination of two reasons. I didn’t grow up with a thriving deli culture, so my only reference point has been the home setting, and as a result I am imbued with conviction that it doesn’t belong in a restaurant setting. It has such a strong sense of ceremony, that I just can’t shake off this sensibility. You might now be thinking, ‘could you not say this about latkes too, which are meant to be eaten at hanukkah?’ Well, once a year is less punctuating a ritual than weekly, and perhaps in part because of this, I also grew up with them as a more quotidian food (the Yarden mini latkes which Bake Street tater tots really remind me of). Chicken soup was constant and yet never prosaic. 

I am not saying there isn’t a version of the dish that I could be served in a restaurant and enjoy, but it would have to dive more into whimsical play and err away from mimicry. 

I may come to eat these words one day, but for now, I stand firm in stating unequivocally: if you see latkes on a menu, go for it, but if you see chicken soup, and have never had the benefit of eating a yiddische mama’s ‘version,’ stay clear. Your first slurp is sacred. Every sip is sacred.