I hope you haven’t got too long to wait until your next meal, because this is going to make your mouth water and get your tummy rumbling. Paul Hemings and Cara Ceppetelli of Bird, in London’s Shoreditch, are hoping to do for fried chicken what so many innovative restaurants have done for the beefburger in recent times – and that’s elevate a relatively humble form of fast food into something exceptional. To that end the husband and wife team travelled far and wide, to New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, and on to Asia, soaking up all the fried chicken know-how they could, before returning to the UK to release their own free-range take on it to the hungry masses.
The premises they chose was a warehouse conversion, and Bird retains that industrial feel crossed with a few cheeky nods to the typical fast food franchise outlet. Paul Cohen came in on branding and design, and his cute little bird, hatched from a quirk of the Poplar font used in the logo, pops up here and there like a little Where’s Wally – there’s one branded into the back of every chair, for example. The interior design was the work of Michael Marriott with Brinkworth, who picked out the best bits of the owner’s stateside travels while avoiding an Americana/diner cliché.
