Dave’s Hot Chicken is open on Shaftesbury Avenue
What is it with men (yes, it is men) and hot chicken? There are dissertations waiting to be written about masculinity and its inextricable connection to hot chilli eating contests, but the trend is more significant in America than the UK. But London is getting a (red hot) taste of hot chicken hype with the opening of the first Dave’s Hot Chicken in the UK, now open on Shaftesbury Avenue.
To give some idea about the online popularity of Dave’s Hot Chicken with the TikTok youth, four-hour-long queues formed when the new London restaurant opened. One furious fan queued all afternoon only to be turned away ’cause the restaurant doesn’t take cash (Dave’s took pity on the fan and handed him the food for free in the end. Imagine going home hungry after all that queueing…).
If you can stomach red hot chicken at 11am, that’s when to go to avoid the queue. You might get lucky in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, but otherwise prepare to dawdle in a part of town you’d normally go to great lengths to avoid.
Dave’s Hot Chicken: Don’t order The Reaper. Get a different hobby. Grow up.
The downstairs seating area at Dave’s Hot Chicken
Get inside past the doorman, like a security guard outside a club, and there’s brash graffiti emblazoned on the walls celebrating London’s iconic buildings. They’re designed by the same street artists who decked out the 283 Dave’s Hot Chicken stores in the States. But the fuss is all about The Ripper, the hottest tender in the capital that everyone in the store gently tries to convince you not to order if you try to order it.
I signed a waiver that told me eating the tender might cause shortness of breath and even a heart attack. “It has legal grounding,” my server told me without a scrap of comedy.
My guest pointed out that the tender smells like death – and she’s right, it really does. The terrible stench of The Reaper is thanks to the Carolina Reaper chili pepper, one of the hottest chillis in the world, which scores over 2.2 million on the Scoville Heat Unit test, making it more than 300 times hotter than a jalapeño pepper.
I rip off a fingerprint-sized piece of tender. For thirty seconds, it tastes like any other chicken tender. And then it felt as if a tiny human cut an inch-wide hole in the back of my throat and light a bonfire in it where powerful flames danced for the next eight to ten minutes. This feeling was so strong that I felt as if I could picture the actual miniature flames working their way through my tonsils. I experienced mild panic. A milkshake was seen off in three or four mouthfuls.
Don’t order The Reaper. It is a ridiculous little thing that suggests more of us really should get better hobbies. To give you more of an idea how hot it is, the UK Reaper-eating contest winner could only see of two-and-a-half tenders. But do order the other chicken, it’s pretty nice. I went for the hot, and it’s a nicely balanced secret recipe with a honeyed sweetness and an interesting chill mix that doesn’t cause palpitations (my dinner guest had those when he first tried The Reaper.)
Grow up, order some nicely hot but not ridiculously hot chicken, and you’ll have a great time at Dave’s Hot Chicken, part of the new London trend for high quality junk food.
40 Shaftesbury Avenue, London; daveshotchicken.com