Grace and Flavour: Chooks

Off to Muswell Hill, which I’d quite forgotten existed since my days of flatsharing in Wood Green in the 1990s, when we’d hop on the bus of a Friday — stinking of Giorgio Armani Acqua and Elnett — and treat the très chic Fantail and Firkin mega-pub, La Porchetta pizza parlour and the one nightclub like some amazing suburban Faliraki. There was a lot of kissing apprentice plumbers called 'Lee from Enfield' in The Green Man and giving out your phone number written in Rimmel eyeliner on a Silk Cut packet.

I haven’t been back to N10 since, but was overjoyed to hear that it still exists and now boasts its own pared-down hipster chicken bar called Chooks. The name ‘Chooks’ is so twee it makes me want to destroy a baby grand piano with a claw hammer. 'Are you coming over to mine? I cook a mean chook,' I could coo, and you could turn on me and strangle me and not one court in the land would convict you.

Chooks is a sort of mock-1950s, back-to-basics yet still purse-thumping, hollow, soft furnishing-free, Now That’s What I Call a Rock-a-Billy diner. It is a cacophony of all the things hip London eating has come to symbolise, but tucked away in Muswell Hill so it’s non-buzzy enough for you to have a good long ponder about it all: ‘Would I rather have a napkin than a roll of cheap kitchen roll stuck on every table? Am I in The Royle Family?’ I thought, as I waited half an hour for my bespoke breadcrumbed chicken, while — I can only imagine — the chef chased the bird around the M25. The wine list reads: ‘red, white, rosé’ and is around £4.75 per tumbler. There is a better wine list at my house and I’ve been known to buy wine in boxes just because I liked the pretty illustration. And there are fake battery-powered tealights, because as we know, lighting an actual tealight can be an arduous task.

I wouldn’t have noticed any of this if the place had been mobbed, but it wasn’t. The one thing I was that evening was really very hungry. It was the type of day when a cold can of Heinz Alphabetti Spaghetti at one’s desk while screaming down the phone, ‘Holy God, it’s the Duchess of Cambridge, not Cornwall, who’s knocked up!’ seems like a delicious treat. I’d been out the night before to show support to Caitlin Moran, who was talking at the Royal Institute of British Architects. I say ‘support’. I’d gone to watch Caitlin, as ever, out of sheer curiosity knowing the only grip she has on architecture is watching Grand Designs and the Doozers on Fraggle Rock. We stayed out until late in the company of Jeremy Deller [the artist] and Brian Eno [the music producer], and Caitlin was awarded a beautiful Tibetan bowl to signify ‘eternity’, which she’d lost within two hours.

Anyway, I was feeling delicate. As I got to Chooks I really wanted someone to give me a plate of very nice chicken and maybe a cuddle. We ordered loaded nachos with jalapeños, guacamole, sour cream and spicy sauce, and fried mushroom and feta pops with horseradish aïoli. After 30 minutes — during which the waitresses polished cutlery — the dishes arrived and were wholly unremarkable, the pops tasting mainly of fried breadcrumbs, the nachos merely a plate of appeasing stodge.

I’m unsure what happened to the buttermilk fried chicken, which arrived on a Prisoner: Cell Block H-style tray. The first bite of breadcrumb and meat was too tough to eat and the rest not much more tender. By this point, mumblings of ‘All they need to get right is bloody chicken!’ had surfaced. I ordered a Chooks Philly — shredded chicken, cheese sauce, caramelised onions, pickled jalapeños and sautéed mushrooms, which contains so many of my comfort foods it should really be called ‘Grace Dent’s smutty food fantasy’ but transpired to be a soft white hot-dog roll full of mush and warmed-up roast chicken with lukewarm fries. The chocolate brownie had a base note of chocolate-‘flavour’ icing sugar. I left it hardly touched and I’d normally finish a brownie even if a warden was shouting ‘Tornado!’ at me. I have decided not to go back to Muswell Hill for another ten years. Ha, that’ll learn them.