Offal has turn into a staple on restaurant menus throughout the UK, with cheaper cuts attracting cooks with sustainability objectives and tight budgets, boosted by the affect of nose-to-tail pioneers resembling Fergus Henderson at St John in London. Now many are going additional, creating dishes with animal heads watching diners from their plates.
At Fowl in central London, which describes itself as a “beak-to-feet hen restaurant”, the Sunday roast comes full with hen claws. At Manteca in Shoreditch, east London, you may discover half a pig’s head, clearly identifiable, in your desk. Newly opened Camille in Borough Market, south London serves a chicken-neck sausage, together with the chook’s head.
Final yr, Fowl launched its Le Grand Coq pie in collaboration with the French chef Pierre Koffmann, who is usually credited with popularising the pig’s trotter. The pie incorporates hen hearts, livers, cockscombs – and a complete head protruding of the pastry, very similar to a standard Cornish stargazy pie, which options pilchards’ heads.
“The chicken-head pie created quite a lot of buzz on-line,” mentioned Will Murray, Fowl’s chef-owner. “It even featured on Snoop Dogg’s Instagram story.” He admits it’s a “confrontational dish”, however believes it helps friends come “nose to nose” with provenance.
Utilizing the entire animal is essential for Murray, whose different restaurant, Fallow, sells 400 cod’s heads in sriracha butter every week which, he says, prevents them from being thrown again into the ocean. “Inventive cooking with sustainable pondering has all the time been our philosophy,” he mentioned.
Manteca takes the same method– there’s even a mannequin pig’s head comprised of reclaimed oak hanging above the doorway. Chef and co-founder Chris Leach receives two or three pig carcasses every week, and makes use of the whole lot. When the heads are was fritters they’re “very straightforward to promote”, mentioned Leach, however a extra visually difficult intact pig’s head dish can also be common.
“It’s essential to not draw back from the very fact we use entire animals,” Leach mentioned. “It additionally permits folks to confront the very fact they’re consuming one thing that was as soon as alive.” There are a most of six parts every week, which are inclined to promote out in a single night. However clients discover chickens with the claws connected extra arresting, Leach mentioned. “Lots of French and old-school Italian delicacies has executed that. We need to proceed that custom.”
It’s a related scene at Camille, the place a former St John chef, Elliot Hashtroudi, serves pig and hen heads and “99%” of friends find it irresistible. “I do know it’s difficult for some, nevertheless it’s to interrupt boundaries, and to point out that offal and difficult cuts are among the tastiest bits,” he mentioned.
When the roast pig’s head is on the specials board it “simply flies out. As quickly as folks see it, everybody desires to order it.”
Leach believes it’s a part of a restaurant’s responsibility to show folks extra about what they eat: “Whether or not that be regenerative farming or serving to folks perceive the significance of upper welfare, pasture-raised meat, eating places and cooks have a giant function in educating folks.”
When the north London restaurant Westerns Laundry added a stuffed duck’s neck, together with the pinnacle, to its menu in 2022, it went viral, making headlines worldwide. It acquired a combined response. “This dish jogs my memory of all of the struggling inflicted on animals by me and all people within the identify of ‘vogue’,” wrote one person on X.
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At Twenty Eight in Chester, offal dishes, resembling barbecued ox coronary heart, are agency favourites, in keeping with the pinnacle chef, Jay Tanner. “Nonetheless, we’ve discovered that something too visually polarising hasn’t been common,” he mentioned. “A gentler method appears to be higher acquired.”
However stunning your clients might be good for enterprise, too. Fowl acquired loads of criticism for its chicken-head pie, however going viral is “one other type of advertising and marketing”, mentioned Murray. “We don’t make meals for social media, however we’re conscious of the ability and influence it could possibly have. All the pieces on the menu is there as a result of it’s scrumptious, and we think about it an excellent dish folks will need to spend their cash on and revel in.”
Trevor Gulliver, co-founder of St John, is happy to see extra eating places utilizing the entire animal. Whereas a lot of St John’s fare is predicated on liver, coronary heart and bone marrow, it has served fried pig’s tails or entire pig’s heads.
“It’s by no means a gimmick. It’s provided that it’s the right technique to current one thing,” Gulliver mentioned. “It was by no means to shock. For us, it’s simply pure.”
