For Amy Corbin and Patrick Williams, the opening of Braai Bird in Nunhead in November will be something of a homecoming. The couple made their name in south-east London with Kudu Collective, a small group of South African-inspired restaurants that first opened in 2018. After leaving Peckham and Nunhead to open Kudu in Marylebone last year, they kept hold of the Nunhead site. Now they are returning south.
“We’re really excited, we knew we wanted to do something else in south London,” Corbin tells Broadsheet. “We live here, it’s where our children go to school, we love the community. It feels like a nice, full-circle moment.”
Braai Bird will be more casual and family friendly than the Marylebone site. It makes sense, then, that chicken will star, and the menu will revolve around chicken cooked over a 700-kilogram wood-fired rotisserie imported from Spain (most rotisserie chicken in London is cooked over electric or gas devices).
South African braai, the country’s version of a barbecue, is often thought of as heavy on the red meat, but Williams explains that chicken is, in fact, “probably the biggest player in braai culture”. While final menu details are yet to be confirmed, the couple experimented with several iterations, testing “16 or 17” different chickens before settling on the final product, Williams says, is British and ethically reared. The 1.8 kilogram birds – “we want it to feed a family of three or four” – will be brined for 12 hours before being left overnight to dry, then covered in a dry rub containing 16 ingredients, which Williams says hail from various regions of South Africa. It will include coriander, cumin, black pepper, fenugreek, caraway and kashmiri chillies.
London is experiencing a chicken boom, with rotisserie spots opening up across the city over the past few years. As in London, Williams says peri peri was prevalent growing up in Johannesburg, which isn’t too far from the border with Mozambique, where the style originated. “There’ll be a nod to that at Braai Bird, we’ll do our own spin,” Williams says. The menu will include several sauces across a range of spice levels and flavours – sweet, smoky, creamy, herby – and, of course, fries.
Ultimately, they hope Braai Bird will be an accessible spot. Not everyone wants to, or can, regularly splash out on a £98 prime rib, a centrepiece of the Kudu menu in Marylebone. “What we really love as a family is to have something quite wholesome, we don’t always want to go out for a lavish meal,” says Williams. “We wanted something we would go back to every Sunday, or to pick up if we have guests over on a Saturday.”
Braai Bird opens in November.
