The duo maintained different specialties, and even kept separate studios echoing Claude’s recollection that criticism from one could cause the other to restart a project.1 Broadly, Claude focused more on flora and the human body, while François-Xavier specialized in fauna. The latter was more fond of making functional objects—in keeping with his famous line that “the supreme art is the art of living”—leading Claude to tease that he was “so afraid of being taken for an artist that he forced himself to make useful objects.”2 🫣🛋️

There are chicken cameos in their works, as egg cups, planters, and stand-alone sculptures. 🐣🌱But my favorite is Claude’s Choupatte: a cabbage with chicken feet. Made initially as a gift for François-Xavier (chou being a common French term of affection), the piece began initially as a cast of the hardy produce until Claude attached chicken feet to it, a move that she later described as providing a critical emotional element.3 🥬🐓

The humble brassicacea continued to inspire Claude with François-Xavier once joking that “the cabbage leaf is to Claude what the acanthus leaf was to Greek art.”4 Four years after Claude first exhibited Choupatte, she made L’Homme à la tête de chou (The Man with the Cabbage Head, 1968), which would famously serve as Serge Gainsbourg’s fictional muse. The French crooner apparently walked by Galerie Alexandre Iolas fifteen times before purchasing it, then installed the sculpture at his home on rue de Verneuil, where it “told” him the plot that would inform his 1976 album L’Homme à tête de chou.5🥬🕴🏻🎵

In the album, Gainsbourg offers a contemporary update on the tale of Carmen, narrating the story of a journalist who becomes obsessed with a young stylist. His jealousy curdles into violence: he murders her with a fire extinguisher then descends into psychosis, convinced that his own head has turned into a cabbage. Which does make me wonder what might have happened had he brought home any of Ugo Rondinone’s Moonrise sculptures instead…

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The Lalannes also cooked prolifically and even contributed to Daniel Spoerri’s Le Dîner Cannibale, held at his Eat Art Galerie in Düsseldorf, where they served vol-au-vents cast from François-Xavier’s body.6🥧🦵🏻

But the leaf + chicken combo made me think of a less anthropophagic dish: the Chicken Caesar Wrap, which has joined matcha and avocado toast in the What Is Wrong With Millennials^TM discourse.7 Tammie Teclemariam’s 2022 Grub Street piece proclaimed the wrap at Bobwhite Counters as NYC’s best, while my informal poll produced multiple Lenwich loyalists. But, my perhaps polarizing personal pick is Ploo in Olly Olly Market in the Starrett-Lehigh building in Chelsea.

Ploo’s version is a true Gesamtkunstwerk for me. It is a belief system, a social contract and, as far as I’m concerned, a luminous beacon in a sea of irrational consumer options. Here’s my seven-part impassioned defense: 1. this is the chicken they use in their tacos so it is actually seasoned; 2. there is pickled cabbage, onion and pico for perfect acidity; 3. the buttery-soft tortilla is properly warmed on the flat-top; 4. the sauce always comes on the side (mock me, for I will revel in the ability to modulate my sauce intake);5. the Olly Olly bar sells $12 Happy Hour martinis with a sidecar, which is a perfect accompaniment; 6. the building has clean bathrooms and good Wi-Fi making it the only reasonable place to work in between gallery visits and openings in Chelsea; 7. there is an excellent reward program and can you tell me in 2026 that you’d pass on a loyalty program?♨️🌯💰

“Your obsession with this wrap makes me vaguely concerned for your wellbeing.” –Tim Schneider, the François-Xavier to my Claude

There is also some logic to getting your Caesar from a Mexican-leaning restaurant. The Italian immigrant and restauranteur Caesar Cardini is often credited as inventing the dish in 1924 at his Tijuana restaurant.8 Then Manny Wolf, the head of the writer’s department at Paramount Pictures, apparently brought the recipe back to LA in the late 1930s, and a decade later the dish became all the rage in Hollywood.9 🎥🥗By 1995, the salad had become so ubiquitous that the Washington Post declared, “Chicken Caesar Salad has become the yuppie equivalent to a burger and fries.”10

But how did the Caesar go from an improvisational dish in Tijuana to a wrap available at a JFK vending machine? All fingers point to one Melinda Lou Thomas, aka the face that launched a thousand burgers at Wendy’s. Wrap culture was already thriving in the 90s thanks to newly health conscious consumers and the on-the-go corporate lunch culture.11 By 1997, fast food chains such as KFC, Taco Bell, and Long John Silvers gleefully hopped on the trend.12 Of these, Wendy’s notably debuted the Chicken Caesar Pita, bringing what they called “a fresh, new approach to lunch” to mass drive throughs to appeal to salad consumers.🍗🥗🥙

Fast-forward three decades and it looks like this yuppie dish never went away, unlike blue ketchup and clear Pepsi. Instead, an April 2026 Vox article described the Chicken Caesar wrap as “comfort food for a swath of burnt-out millennials,” owing to early aughts mall food court culture (of which Wendy’s remained ever present) and subsequently as a dish my generation has remained “feral for.”13👹

Still, I don’t think any of our love for the Chicken Caesar wrap quite matches Gainsbourg’s ferality for cabbage man—and perhaps that’s a good thing, since none of us is about to bash another customer with a fire extinguisher…right?

Ploo: 7/5 for all reasons outlined above.

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Cue Diogenes of Sinope, the Most Cynical Man Alive™, who was known for living in a large wine barrel in the Athenian Agora with basically no possessions; walking the streets in broad daylight with a lantern looking for “an honest man”; masturbating in public as a demonstration of the Cynics’ rejection of artificial social norms; soliciting alms from a statue to practice being refused; and hazing prospective students by making them publicly carry around a stinky fish (or maybe stinky cheese).

He also once told off Alexander the Great for standing in his sunlight and, according to one account, attempted to prove the uselessness of cooking by eating a raw octopus…which spectacularly backfired as he might have died of colic thereafter.2 🐙🙊

Plato was a particular target of his mockery. On one occasion, Diogenes trampled across Plato’s fine carpets with the proclamation, “I trample upon the pride of Plato.” And, as mentioned, when Plato defined humans as “featherless bipeds,” Diogenes plucked a chicken, brought it into Plato’s lecture room, and announced: “Here is Plato’s man,”—an incident well represented in art, from paintings by Hendrick Bloemaert and Friedrich Georg Weitsch, to, my personal favorite, this little WIP sketch by Delacroix. But perhaps the most famous image is Ugo da Carpi’s monumental print of Diogenes at his barrel, accompanied by the famous plucked chicken.🪶🤌🏼🍗

This landmark of Renaissance color printing was made using a technique called chiaroscuro woodcut, in which multiple woodblocks—in this case four—were printed in different tones to produce shadows, volume, and effects that could resemble drawings or watercolor.3 Parmigianino is thought to have worked closely with Ugo on the design, and Vasari later singled it out as Ugo’s “most beautiful print.”4 👍

The image would prove influential in Renaissance representations of the philosopher. For instance, this sixteenth-century Urbino maiolica stand borrows directly from Ugo’s print combining the isolated depiction of the philosopher with the moment of Alexander the Great’s visit. Such objects served to demonstrate the owner’s own fluency in classical teachings.5 So think about that the next time you encounter a plucked chicken: maybe you’re not just looking at dinner but also contemplating your humanist bonafides.🧠🧐

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Diogenes was also once out-asceticized by a child. He saw a boy drinking water from his cupped hands and promptly threw away his own drinking cup, then saw another using a piece of bread to scoop up lentils and threw away his bowl too.6🚮

Which naturally reminded me of what I thought was a classical Greek dish served in a bowl: avgolemono soup. One of my favorite places to order this standard is at Pi Bakery in SoHo, a perfect respite during a Tribeca gallery crawl (and you’ll need it this month as you tackle 550+ gallery openings in NYC).

Avgolemono combines the words avgo (egg) and lemoni (lemon), and it’s not just a soup but a thickening technique. 🍋🥚 Food historians have often connected the technique to agristada, an egg-and-acid sauce central to Sephardic cooking in Spain. Early preparations used sour agents such as agraz (verjuice) and bitter orange instead of lemon.7

How did this technique migrate from Spain to present day Greece? Well, the Spanish Inquisition’s ugly legacy rears its head here, as it evolved from witch hunting to prosecuting Conversos and Moriscos suspected of secretly practicing Judaism and Islam respectively. In 1492, Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering practicing Jews to convert to Christianity or leave the Iberian Peninsula, leading large numbers of expelled Sephardic Jews to settle throughout the Ottoman world, including present-day Istanbul and Thessaloniki.8

Over the following centuries, related egg-and-lemon preparations appear across Sephardic, Greek, Turkish, and Arab cooking. The mixture crosses religious holidays: in Cyprus, egg-and-lemon soup is traditionally eaten on the eve of Easter Sunday, while Sephardic Jews from Turkey and the Balkans break the Yom Kippur fast with sopa de huevos y limón, a close cousin of avgolemono.

And because this is New York, there are now versions that include champagne, including Pylos’s Avgolemono me Sampania. Unlike Diogenes, however, I recommend keeping your bowl and utensils. Just try not to dwell too much on the central tenets of Cynicism, lest it forces you to bail on those other 549 or so gallery openings.

Rating: 🐓🍋🥚🥣/5

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2026 is officially the Year of Brâncuși in Romania, marking 150 years since the sculptor’s birth. The art market has been buzzing accordingly, including the record-setting sale of his Danaïde (1913) at Christie’s NY for $107.6 m with fees. The promo materials even featured the newly single Nicole Kidman circling the sculpture while dancing to David Bowie’s “Golden Years.”🏆💫

But bird really was the word for the Romanian. His interest in avian forms began with Maiastra (1910–18), inspired by the phoenix-like bird Pasărea Măiastră from Carpathian folklore. 🐦‍🔥✨ In fairytales, the măiastră is a fairy or a princess transformed into a golden bird whose magic song could restore youth—a kind of symphonic Tretinoin🎶🧴—and who, in some versions, turns back into a beautiful woman to lure and punish cheating men.2

Brâncuși spent decades evolving this top-heavy borb into the gleaming obelisk of Bird in Space, trading in the fantastical hot chick for a symbol of aeronautical progress and the human urge to transcend gravity 🧑‍🩰🚀.3

He approached his Coqs similarly, reducing the rooster to its erect, serrated comb. As was his custom, Brâncuși molded his Cocks in everything from wood (the last surviving member is at the MoMA) to bronze.4

His relationship with birds didn’t end at sculpture. Brâncuși was an avid home chef, famous for roasting chicken in the forge of his Montparnasse studio, making his own pickles and, by his account, buying “steaks by the yard.”5 The playwright Eugène Ionesco recalled being served homemade yoghurt, pickled cabbage, and mămăligă (a type of polenta) with Champagne; after dessert, Brâncuși would sometimes perform a belly dance while his female guests drank Turkish coffee...🕺🤔6

So next time you see a Brâncuși, perhaps at the MoMA retrospective opening this October, consider that somewhere in those pristine modernist forms linger the fumes of extravagant, wine-soaked chicken dinners past.

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If Brâncuși spent his life stripping birds down to their essential form, what chicken dish does the same thing? It has to be Hainanese chicken, the gently poached chicken served with chicken-fat rice, broth, and an assortment of sauces.

It turns out that Hainanese chicken is a Qing-dynasty dish as terroir-driven as Champagne. Crucial to the dish is Wenchang chicken, an indigenous breed named for a region of Hainan, the tropical island off southern China. Traditionally, the birds foraged on banyan seeds and coconut pulp, supposedly giving the meat a unique flavor. 🐤🌴🥥🐔 It eventually merged with cooking techniques similar to the Cantonese white-cut chicken preparation, evolving into the recognizable Hainanese dish of today.

Despite its Southern Chinese roots, Hainanese chicken is now considered a Southeast Asian dish, with variations including Thai khao man gai, Vietnamese Cơm Gà Hải Nam, Cambodian bay moan, Malaysian nasi ayam and, most famously, Singaporean chicken rice, with the last two still squabbling over who can claim it as a national dish.7 Each of these versions are served with variations on sauces and aromatics—sweet and hot chilis, dark or sweet soy sauces, ginger, garlic, green onion, and more—but the cooking method remains the same: slow poaching a whole chicken at sub-boiling temperatures 🥶.8

New York has excellent versions at Eim Khao Mun Kai, West New Malaysia, Uncle Ray’s Chicken Rice (recently spotlit in a NYTimes’s “Where to Eat in New York City Right Now”), and Lou Yau Kee. I recently revisited the last with my friend Erik, a fellow Hainanese-chicken enthusiast always game for a chicken side quest. The chicken arrived with salty broth, ginger, soy, sweet and hot chili. Its thin gelatinous skin was akin to a sheet of aspic coddling exceptionally supple meat.

But how did a Hainanese dish spread so widely across Southeast Asia? Like my dating history when I lived in Murray Hill in the early 2010s, we can blame some dude from Connecticut. 🏌️👕

In this case: Edwin Stevens, a Yale grad who went to China as a missionary in 1832, where he would later share a Christian tract with Hong Xiuquan.9 Drawing on missionary publications and local religious concepts, Hong came to identify himself as Jesus’s brother, and established the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a theocratic insurgent state that attempted to overthrow the Qing Dynasty. This ultimately unsuccessful Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), contributed to the broader instability of 19^th-century southern China, accelerating the ongoing Hainanese migration (and Hainanese chicken) across Southeast Asia.10

Given this, what is the present state of Hainanese chicken in Hainan? As Saveur reported in 2016, the indigenous birds are still largely raised in traditional ways, including a diet centered on banyan seeds and coconut pulp. But the cooking method never became fixed and local island versions of the dish can be poached, fried, or even salt-baked, underscoring that the true identity of Hainanese chicken lies in the landrace itself.11

So when MoMA’s Brâncuși show opens and you end up arguing with a friend about which Midtown Hainanese chicken is the most “authentic” remember, unless it uses actual Wenchang chicken, it’s all just sparkling chicken…which doesn’t make it any less delicious.

Rating for Lou Kau Yee: 🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓/5

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In Other News:

• Irate Chicken got a mention in Artnet News!

• Did you see Vogue featured Raising Cane’s dogue Cane III? Check out Tim Schneider’s Irate Chicken guest post for more on Raising Cane’s!

• I’m excited to read Financial Times’s “How Chicken Conquered the World.”

The next issue will look at a famous philosophical kerfuffle over chicken and a dish tied to the Spanish Inquisition. Thanks for reading and subscribe below to receive the hentertainment directly in your inbox!

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I like to think of myself as an open-minded maniac, which explains why, two days before surgery, I hit up Raising Cane’s New York flagship in Times Square for art’s sake. The goal was an IRL viewing of Cane’s Anthem (2026), a mural that the Oscar-winning actor/self-styled multimedia artist/celebratory gum-slinger Adrien Brody just completed to celebrate the store’s third anniversary. Untangling the what, how, and why of this alleged “masterpiece” (according to the firm’s website) demands going down a cultural, culinary, and corporate rabbit hole more surreal than anything I experienced while on post-op painkillers.

Described by Brody as a product of “admiration and respect for [his] friend Todd Graves,” the chain’s founder and majority owner, the piece supposedly charts Graves’s 30-year odyssey turning a single humble fast food joint in Baton Rouge, Louisiana into an international juggernaut with more than 1,000 locations daisy chained across at least six countries. But as the Queens-born-and-bred Brody outlines, neither he nor his mural would exist without the influence of the Empire City:

“Layered with found wheat-paste fragments, torn advertisements, and weathered street ephemera that I have gathered throughout New York City along with the playbill from my Broadway debut in The Fear of 13 - the work echoes the grit, perseverance, and entrepreneurial spirit that defines Graves’s journey, the spirit of NYC, and an urban aesthetic that has always spoken to me growing up here.”1

This is all a florid way of saying that Cane’s Anthem follows the lineage of several works featured in Made in America, Brody’s 2025 solo show at the Madison Avenue location of Eden Gallery.2 Full of classic cartoon characters strapped up with weaponry, wheat-pasted magazine clippings and scrawled phrases with all the faux edge of a Fisher Price knife set (see: “I ❤️ TOXIC WASTE”), and appropriations of first-thought-only-thought art references like Jean-Michel Basquiat’s crown icon, it was the street art version of the worst finance guy you know recording a rap album.

On one hand, Made in America and the press flurry around it—capped with a feature in the New York Times, no less—transformed Brody into the art world’s lankiest punching bag. Amping up the ire were a few knee-buckling results for his works at benefit auctions: €250,000 (around $275,000 at the time) in 2016 for Tiger on Last Legs, a type of jungle scene that you can see superior versions of airbrushed onto vans owned by old stoners, and $425,000 in 2025 for a collage of Marilyn Monroe in his (ahem) mature style.3

Brody joins a lineage of actors, filmmakers, and pop stars vying for respect as studio artists, from Jim Jarmusch and John Waters to Brad Pitt and Sylvester Stallone. Some contrarian critics have even argued that Brody bolsters the Horseshoe Theory of Taste, by which some work is so radioactively awful that it loops all the way back around to being genuinely good. 🧲 ⭕️ (I, for clarity, think it’s OK for things to just be bad.)

But Cane’s Anthem also represents an about face for the actor. In a 2025 conversation for Interview, Brody lamented that Americans as a society are (emphasis mine) “inundated with imagery and cartoon imagery and acceptance of all of this fast food and mass media and all of that we’re kind of feeding”—a sentiment he doubled down in an interview with Cultured. He translated this critique onto canvas by including occasional logos of burger and chicken chains, including Raising Cane’s.4

Now, I can’t tell you how to square Brody’s repeated flaying of fast food in his artwork in 2025 with his proud celebration of a fast food chain in his artwork a year later. That is between him, his god(s), and his business manager.💸😇 What I can tell you is that any artist interested in money, mass visibility, or both should listen carefully to any offer from Todd Graves and the colossus he’s constructed from chicken fingers, particularly when it comes to his mandate that each Raising Cane’s location feature a mural celebrating the brand.5

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Like Brody’s art practice, the histories of chicken fingers and Raising Cane’s make a convoluted collage. Weirdly, they bring together high-stakes culinary innovation, spontaneous linguistic mutation, and the great American art of the ad jingle.

From the start, Graves’s restaurant concept hinged on serving only five items: chicken fingers, fries, Texas toast, coleslaw, and a “signature sauce” that, like so many others, is just a Thousand Island-esque aioli. But his choice of the nomenclature “chicken fingers”🐓✌🏼is notable, since multiple sources online agree that the chain strictly fries up chicken tenderloins—a vital distinction among poultry purists.

Tracing the chicken tender’s origin leads us to the great income tax-free state of New Hampshire. In 1974, a line cook at The Puritan Backroom, a restaurant in the town of Manchester, pioneered a preparation for the chicken tenderloin, a thin, previously unloved strip of auxiliary breast meat.

The pectoralis minor, as biologists and butchers know the muscle, merely helps hold a chicken’s spine in place on one half of its body, meaning the tenderloin never gets toughened through exercise (hence the name). And since butchers and supermarkets still only sold chickens whole in the US in the early 70s, the tenderloins also had an annoying habit of simply flopping loose whenever a cook went through the hassle of breaking down the carcass. 🪽

Cue the ingenuity of that Puritan Backroom cook, who was ready to “Live Free or Die” trying to make margins. His solution? Marinate the tenderloins in a mixture of pineapple juice and spices indebted to the stone fruit-based “duck sauce” most commonly served with egg rolls in American Chinese restaurants, then batter and fry ‘em up. The result eventually became a new signature dish for the Puritan Backroom, which now serves four to five tons of tenders a week, according to ownership.6🤩

Yet it took years for the chicken tender to become a national sensation. Enter Burger King: after five years spent simmering 😤 over the runaway success of McDonald’s Chicken McNugget, BK clucked back in 1985 by releasing its Chicken Tenders (capitalized here for a reason).

The product was an instant sensation. Tenders were marketed as 100% white meat rather than a Frankenstein’s muncher of agglomerated, artificially shaped, and fried poultry parts. Burger King even crowed about the difference with a $20 million ad blitz soundtracked by the uncannily soulful jingle “Ain’t Nothing Like the Real Thing, Baby.” 🎶 The chain quickly sold out of tenders nationwide, forcing executives to temporarily halt the campaign. 🛑🍗

But Burger King didn’t just brand and mass-produce chicken tenders. It also registered “Chicken Tenders” with the US Patent and Trademark Office, arguing that the phrase was primarily recognized by consumers as a specific product pioneered by, and exclusively available from, one corporation.7

So how did we go from Chicken Tenders™️ to its widespread use as a generic phrase? The short answer is that the evolution of language can destroy trademarks. In this case, it seems that US consumers’ understanding of the magic words shifted from a particular corporation’s particular product, to just another poultry part.8 Contributing to this transition were advancements in butchering technology that led to chickens being piecemealed into specific cuts, including tender(loin)-only packets.

By 2024, Pete Wells reported, the tenderloin had become the most expensive cut of chicken in America on a pound-for-pound basis. And their popularity has only revved up in recent years, with industry data showing Gen Z consumers flocking to the tender/finger more frequently than any other fast-food chicken format.

Given that Graves launched Raising Cane’s only six years after the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld BK’s trademark on Chicken Tenders, it’s no surprise that he went with “chicken fingers” instead of challenging Goliath over verbiage. And by god, has that turned out to be a wise business move.

This year Forbes estimated Graves’s net worth at a hallucinatory $22 BILLION, making him one of the 150 richest human beings in the world.9 Again—and I cannot stress it enough—THIS IS FROM CHICKEN FINGERS. Don’t get me wrong, I respect every entrepreneur with a strict vision and the will to carry it through (provided it’s not hurting anyone in ways that they don’t want to be hurt). But if we as a civilization didn’t already have enough reasons to consider temporarily pausing to re-evaluate this whole thing from first principles, the cause and effect here tips us over the limit.

For better or worse, I hadn’t reached this conclusion after I visited Raising Cane’s Times Square flagship to see Cane’s Anthem, despite that journey including an all-day live DJ set cranked to volumes typically reserved for psychological warfare (sorry to Lykke Li’s “I Follow Rivers” [The Magician remix], you deserved better in 2026) and a mob of beaming Cane’s fanatics lining up almost nonstop to shoot selfies with Brody’s work—all on a Monday at approximately 5pm. That’s because the scene clarified that this collaboration is satisfying the desires of all parties involved, whether directly or indirectly.

The art world once again got an excuse to feed Brody’s studio practice through a butchering mechanism as efficient and unforgiving as any that the modern meat-processing industry has ever concocted. → Graves got his mural by hiring a friend and celebrity whose love-hate profile as a sometimes-artist would only reinforce Raising Cane’s pop cultural brand equity. → And Brody gets the continual ego boost of seeing hundreds of fans a day who don’t give a fuck about art industry airs happily posting his work all over their socials as if it’s the greatest, most satisfying thing on earth besides… well, the chicken tenders being served up by the ton week in, week out around the globe, from local diners and fast food counters to would-be buzzy restaurants and private chefs’ tables.

Just as a fried tender falls short of being the most evolved culinary expression of the chicken, none of the activity above shows any of us at our best. But whether in the kitchen or in the wild, the truest reflection of who we are and what we want seldom does.

Tim Schneider is a writer, speaker, and private consultant specializing in the systems shaping the fine art and collectibles industries. You can subscribe to The Gray Market here, his conversation-starting newsletter about the art industry’s collisions with other cultural sectors and non-art businesses.

Thanks for reading this inaugural guest post! I’ll be back in two weeks with a deep dive into Brâncuși, his irate cooking, and a diasporic chicken dish that’s as terroir based as champagne.

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Wait what? Behold the Hönstavlan!!

This feathery masterpiece is attributed to Johan Pasch the Elder and was commissioned by Tessin as a Christmas gift to himself.1 Best remembered as an arts patron, collector, and all-around Francophile, Tessin brought continental Enlightenment approaches to art and science to the Swedish court.

He was also an infamous Peeping Tom—according to the Nationalmuseum, don’t @ me—who was inspired after he stumbled upon ladies from the court of Crown Princess Lovisa Ulrika getting dressed.2

And yes, the rooster lurking behind them is supposed to represent Tessin as the…erect cock lording over his mutant flock of six hens.3 Because all of this was apparently too subtle, Tessin added an accompanying French verse that translates as “What accursed rooster would not crow, O hens, on seeing your features and charms?”4 Basically, who would not want to…rise to the occasion, having seen what he saw? 😈

But don’t be fooled into thinking this was merely a private perversion. The resulting painting was presented at a court gathering attended by the hens themselves.5 Tessin even had the image turned into gaming counters (basically like poker chips), as part of his broader efforts to entertain, flatter, and curry favor with members of the court.6 Which goes to show that the “what’s the matter sweetheart, can’t you take a joke” approach has been around for centuries.🤡

Fortunately for us all, this zoomorphic trope is its own genre. One important prototype is Giacomo Franco’s La Chasse à la chouette, a late-sixteenth-century composition that spawned numerous painted copies.7 Franco’s image refers to a method of owl hunting in which a live owl was tethered to attract other birds. Here, the hunting strategy becomes an allegory warning young men not to fall for a pretty face. 🦉💅

Over time, this bird-human hybrid would recur as an aristocratic in-joke—see Louis-Antoine de Gontaut, duc de Biron, depicted as a peacock, which feels fairly self-explanatory—and eventually into political satire where the “bird brain” insult continues on today.8

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If the Hönstavlan is a lady stuffed inside a hen, the Chicken Kyiv is apparently a vessel for anything and everything. Here’s the convoluted history: the dish emerged from a Franco-Russian tradition of breaded and stuffed poultry dishes.9 It is often linked to the Continental Hotel in Kyiv, but by the 1910s, the dish and its recipes were embraced widely by Soviet diners with bourgeois aspirations. These early dishes were made from minced chicken or veal, pounded together with egg, bread, milk, and butter, then wrapped around another lump of butter and fried into something resembling a meat croquette.🧈🧈🧈

By the 1930s, this artery-busting ball crossed the pond to appear in Russian-themed restaurants in Chicago and New York. In 1946, The New York Times published their Chicken Kyiv recipe, helping the dish shrug off its haute-cuisine origins and become a synecdoche for a pan-Soviet cuisine (and in turn, the Sovietization of Ukrainian cuisine).10

I recently ate Chicken Kyiv at two places that are themselves a hodgepodge of cultural referents. The first was at Tatiana, the Brighton Beach stalwart, for our friend Tatiana’s birthday party, where I vaguely remember chomping through some chicken between bouts of dancing and drunken clapping. The second was at Aleksandra, a Russian-themed restaurant aboard a Tallink overnight ferry connecting the Baltics.11 Both restaurants served the long-Westernized version: breaded chicken breasts rolled around garlic-and-parsley butter, far removed from those early versions from the Soviet Union.

The dish’s current ubiquity, however, probably owes more to Marks & Spencer than to any Soviet chef. A young product developer, Cathy Chapman, suggested a ready-to-cook meal that was breaded and flash fried. The British department store launched its ready-to-cook “Chicken Kiev” in 1979, and it sold so well that M&S established a separate factory dedicated to its production. In the decades since, it has become a ready-to-eat staple. And I am horrified to report that 2023 mutations of the dish at Iceland (the frozen food grocer in the UK) have included Nacho, Tikka, and Hoisin.😵‍💫

Then again, what dish could be more emblematic of the past two centuries of imperialism? While it originated as a traditional continental cuisine designed for aristocratic tables, it then passed through the Russian Empire and the Soviet project of standardizing national cuisines, to end up serving the last empire still standing: the capitalist demand for convenience.

So go forth and stuff a Chicken Kyiv with Mango Chutney Butter. Fill that saucy unit with gochujang and kimchi. Convert it into a cheese dip. Turn it into whatever your cardiovascular system can withstand. And should you encounter some hot people you would like to stuff inside chicken bodies, please make sure you paint them as the plumpest, fluffiest, and sexiest chickens possible.

Tatiana’s and Aleksandra’s Chicken Kyivs: 🐓🐓🐓🐓/5 for ambiance: burlesque at the former, red velvet interior lit by midnight sun at the latter.

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^{Doucai ‘Chicken Cup’. Sotheby’s Sale, April 8, 2014.}

The Chicken Cup refers to a specific type of small porcelain wine cup first popularized in China during the Chenghua period (1465–87), with a shape inspired by ancient ceremonial ware. These 15th-century cups are a type of doucai ware, a porcelain technique that undergoes multiple firings to allow cobalt-blue underglaze outlines and colored overglaze enamels to shine through.

The motifs are both historically grounded and engage in contemporary wordplay. Chickens have long been featured in ancient rituals and recur in Chinese portent treatises as well as Song dynasty literati scrolls.1 Beyond this, the cups feature the fowls alongside the cockscomb plant, which apparently sound together like the auspicious phrase “may you continuously rise in rank.”2

^{A chicken wine cup in the 1676 edition of Sanli tu, a 12th c antiquarian text}

For these august-to-charming reasons, the wine cups commanded astronomical prices from day one and continued to be coveted by emperors. The director of the imperial kiln in the Chenghua period reportedly described them as “rarer and more precious than dragon spoons or ancient vessels of bronze,” and noted that “wealthy people prefer them to books or any other antiques.”3 Two centuries later, the Qing scholar Cheng Zhe wrote, “a cup of tea in such a Chenghua cup is dearer than wine…and dearest and most appealing of all are the so-called chicken cups with pecking and confronted chickens.”4

The aforementioned Shanghai collector Liu Yiqian—who paid the $36 m with his Amex Centurion Card (for the points!!)—did drink tea from the cup, apparently to make some kind of a point about Chinese art collectors. Though given that he’s now offloading his collection, perhaps the true moral is that no one escapes the poultry-industrial complex unscathed.

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I have been feeling like a confronted chicken in my quest to locate some kind of a chicken martini.5 🍗🍸

As a tax-paying denizen of the Frankentini capital of the world, a.k.a. New York, I’m no stranger to the maximalist ’tinis. This long list includes the garlic bread martini at San Sabino, the MSG martini at Bonnie’s, the Feta Brine Martini at Mr. Melo, the Sour Cream & Onion Martini at the Corner Store, the Pizza Martini at Bar Valentina, the Borscht Martini at the Russian Samovar, the kimchi martini at Golden Hof, an oyster martini at Bistrot Ha, with an honorable mention for the Fish Sauce Vesper at Smithereens.

While there is apparently a McNugget tini currently being rolled out to the ultrarich in the East End, the “chicken-tini” is still elusive for those of us on this side of Long Island.

Bar Snack no longer serves the bouillon-flavored, chicken-chicharron topped Boat Snack Martini, although my visit was worth it to witness the bartender gamely respond to another patron’s prompt for a drink “that pairs well with nicotine gum.”

Instead, there are three kinds of currently à la carte chicken-adjacent martinis in New York: a butter chicken-flavored martini at INDN6, a karaage martini at Shinji7, and, finally, the yakitini at Sip, the downstairs savory Valhalla of Sip & Guzzle.

I personally trekked to Sip, an underground den of tech bros, tourists, and Lean-and-Tan-WASPs^TM trying to curry favor with their temporarily disillusioned daughters at NYU. The menu identifies three ingredients for the $28 Yakitini8: dirty martini, binchotan, and schmaltz—none of them ingredients in and of themselves but a combination of cooking processes. When pressed, the bartender told me that it’s a vodka and shochu mix clarified in chicken fat, and served with a freshly torched single piece of green onion, pre-doused in tare and chicken fat.

^{Behold, the yaki-schmaltz-tini}

Your experience of this cocktail will depend greatly on when you decide to eat this fragrant garnish. Without it, the cocktail tastes like the best alcoholic chicken broth; after it, it transforms into drinking shochu with the backwash of someone who has been eating yakitori all night long.

Is it a better cocktail than the uni sour that my curiosity made me order at Corima? Sure. Would I like to see how many pounds of chicken-terrine topped “fantasy salad” $28 will get me at Tashkent’s buffet just two blocks away? That’s an answer for a mayo-enthusiast to answer on my behalf.

But if you owned a chicken cup, you could bring the tcup to Sip and ask them to serve the martini in it (and ask for a side car for volume parity), and it might be like the last scene of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Which character you are in that clip may depend entirely on your net worth.

Rating: 🐓🐓/5

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The painting also features a handful of poultry-licious proverbs, including:

• Who knows why the geese go barefoot? (everything has a reason, even though it may not be obvious)—a more Calvinist version of “why did the chicken cross the road?”

• To keep the hen’s egg and let the goose’s egg go (to make a bad decision)

• To be a hen feeler (to be stingy, i.e. feeling whether the hen is about to lay an egg before you slaughter it)

  

^{Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Image in the public domain}

Made for an unknown patron, the painting would have appealed to the proverb-pilled literati, who were drawn to these didactic devices for their marriage of wit and persuasion with ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. While proverbs had been embraced by orators and writers in clerical, courtly, and religious settings since the late medieval period, vernacular proverbs became prevalent through publications such as Erasmus’s Adagia (1500) and artworks such as Frans Hogenberg’s The Blue Cloak (ca. 1560)1—largely considered the predecessor to Bruegel’s dense masterpiece.

Paintings such as Netherlandish Proverbs would also have appealed to contemporary patriotic sentiments. The art historian Margaret Carroll suggests that, against the backdrop of Habsburg Spanish rule in the Netherlands, Bruegel’s compilation of vernacular proverbs would have been received as a response to “emerging ethnic and political self-consciousness.”

^{This man is really feeling the hen 🫴}

Even though the painting was a mirror of Bruegel’s turbulent social and political moment, its satire of wealth, privilege, and the inversion of social hierarchies remain evergreen. In fact, many of the phrases are still easily identified by contemporary Dutch and Flemish speakers, so check out the full list of proverbs before you hit on a lingering member of the Orange Army or ascendant Red Devils this World Cup season.

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Long before Julia Child famously said that “the only real test of a good chef is a perfectly roasted chicken,” the gourmand Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin declared, “one becomes a cook, but one is born a rôtisseur.”2 The roast chicken at The Fly proves that they’ve got some born roasters in their Bed-Stuy kitchen.

^yom

As someone who’s chased rotisserie chickens in more than 30 different countries, The Fly is the gold standard. They don’t have the advantage of using rare breeds like poulet de Bresse or Yeonsan Ogye, nor does the stainless-steel tray presentation come anywhere close to the $250 baroque horror that is the “Chobster”, a confusing combination of chicken and lobster at Daniel Boulud’s Maison Barnes, presented in vintage lobster “armor.” 🦞⚔️

^{Incredible sensory play tray}

According to an Eater article from 2019, the armor-less chicken at The Fly is dry rubbed with Indian fennel, coriander, Spanish paprika, garlic, Aleppo pepper, and Greek oregano, then finished with tomato jus and olive oil. It arrives soaked. It squelches, and you can’t tell if it’s skin, thigh, or breast melting on your tongue like a savory flan, gliding from sweet to umami in one titillating stroke. Amid the rotisserie chicken wars in New York, where a half chicken can get up to $80-plus, The Fly charges a tidy $34, which is still both obscene for non-NY standards and hardly more than two happy-hour martinis with tip.

The humble poulet rôti is a relatively new addition to culinary history. Humankind has been cooking animals on a spit since the dawn of time, but prior to the Industrial Revolution, roasting jacks were sometimes powered by water (check out Cragside House) or even by a special kind of small dog called a turnspit dog, a teeny-tiny breed that ran on a wooden treadmill to make sure meat roasted evenly.3 🥹

^{Taxidermy of “Whiskey” the turnspit dog. Abergavenny Museum, Wales.}

Up until the 19th century, however, other game birds like geese, duck, and pheasants dominated the spit roast. Chicken was largely a luxury meat reserved for special occasions or eaten as the product of cockerels and unproductive hens culled from the laying flock (see: the “hen feeler”). It was only after WWII, that industrial farming and the invention of the electric roaster together demoted the roast chicken from a luxury item to a mass-market dish.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a roast chicken in a bag. But if you feel like you’ve been tossing feathers in the wind, and don’t want to be a hen feeler, try the roast bird at The Fly.

^{Dish Rating: 🐓🐓🐓🐓🐓 / 5}

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