[233/365] "Manchester-style"

[cosmolinguist]

It's funny when you live a place for a long time and you don't know what other people know it for.

And this obsession is set to spread, the spicy chicken burger is beginning to move out of Manchester. Until recently, it was exclusive to the city region, with reviewers coming from Birmingham and London to try it. But “Manchester-style” chicken burgers are cropping up more and more down south, and people are looking to cash in.

“The spicy chicken burger is going to go all over the country,” says Ali. “Once it gets to London it’ll go bigger, then probably international. I know some of these brands are already thinking of going to Dubai and the US with spicy chicken burgers.” He’s had people from McDonald’s calling about partnerships — he wouldn’t work with them, they’re not halal — and gets “probably 20 messages a day” from reviewers in London asking about spicy chicken burgers.

This whole article is wild,

The owners of the shop are shrouded in secrecy and, like a lot of the information and rumours that swirl about Manchester’s chicken shop scene, word-of-mouth reigns supreme. “The thing with Miami Crispy is they're a bit of a mystery,” says one local reviewer. “No one really knows who runs it.”

...

Nobody knows what’s in it, but everyone agrees: it’s all about the secret sauce. The sauce that the burger is dipped in after it is fried is what makes it so special.

These secret sauces, whose recipes are fiercely guarded — “these guys don’t even tell their wives, their mothers, what is in the sauce,” Ali tells me — are apparently variations on an original recipe created in the 90s. This “mother sauce” was invented at Kansas Fried Chicken, a franchise with shops dotted around Manchester and Oldham. The original sauce had a soft curry flavour and a mild spice to it — think Katsu. “The guy who created it, all we know is his name was Doctor,” says Riz Zeb, 41, an ex chicken shop worker who has been part of the business for decades.

One insider, who asked to remain anonymous due to the “beef” that exists amongst competing shops, tells me apparently, this is the way it works. Instead of buying recipes, shops buy staff, kind of like Premier League transfers. “Recipes don’t get sold, they get moved.” He tells me to imagine I’m working at a viral chicken shop and “someone says: ‘right mate, I’ll give you £10,000, you come with me, I’ll put you on £600 a week, happy days.’ So, you go over, you’ve got your ten grand, you work there a couple of months and you have a big falling out with the boss. So then you get some investors together and open another shop two doors away,” and so the chicken shop wars rumble on.

Comments

[haggis]

Miami Crispy is just around the corner from us so we see the queues when we go to Tesco's.

I am intrigued but not prepared to stand in a queue for ages!