Kricket Soho

James Cochran, who runs 12:51 and Around The Cluck, describes the dish to order better than any menu does: Deep South fried chicken carrying Indian spices, with mayonnaise infused with curry oil, turmeric and black mustard seeds, deep-fried curry leaves and mooli.

Why go

Will Bowlby cooked for two years in Mumbai at the Cheval Bar and restaurant, then opened a shipping container at Pop Brixton with his college friend Rik Campbell. In January 2017 the operation moved into Denman Street, just north of Piccadilly Circus (Andy Hayler). The name is a deliberate statement about the shared culture of India and the UK, and the cooking follows it: Indian technique across a tandoor and a robata grill, run on seasonal British produce, so a Coronation treatment lands on smoked mackerel with gooseberry chutney (The Nudge). Samphire pakoras and the Keralan fried chicken came up from the container and stayed.

Order this / avoid

• Order: the Keralan fried chicken. Then the samphire pakoras, bhel puri with raw mango, lamb chops off the robata with black stone flower and sweet yoghurt, and bone marrow and cep kulcha to mop with.
• Avoid: Sundays, when it is shut, and a large booking. The counter is the seat worth having and there are a limited number of them.

What locals & experts say

• James Cochran, chef-patron of 12:51 and Around The Cluck, asked for the best fried chicken in London: "The Keralan fried chicken from chef Will Bowlby has to be on the list. It's that traditional Deep South style fried chicken but with added Indian spices." ref
• Rianne Shlebak, The Infatuation (February 2024), 8.1/10: "dinner at this sharing plates-style, modern Indian spot in Soho is bound to be buzzy," and the same chicken is "excellently crispy." Her reservations are about the room, which she calls dim and loud. ref
• Andy Hayler (2017), marking dishes individually, on the bhel puri: "the balance of the sweetness of the tamarind and the gentle acidity of the mango spot on, the blend of textures working well," 14 out of 20. He was less kind about a lasooni scallop the same night. ref

Good to know

• Where: 12-14 Denman Street W1D 7HJ. Counter seats around the open kitchen on the ground floor, three communal tables below.
• Timing: lunch and dinner Monday to Saturday. Those hours come from a 2022 source rather than the venue, so check before a long trip.
• Booking: reservations are taken, tables are held back for walk-ins, and there is a virtual queue.
• Sites: three Krickets. This row is Soho. Kricket Brixton and Kricket Canary Wharf are separate premises with their own food-hygiene records and their own rows, and the reviews above were checked against a printed Soho address before being used here.
• Hygiene: FSA rating 5, inspected 10 January 2025, with structure and confidence in management both scoring a clean zero. ref
• Michelin: nothing recorded. A Bib Gourmand from 2024 circulates in open search with no bylined source behind it, and the guide itself is not fetched by this project, so no claim is made either way.

Jeff's take (his words)

Nothing. His saved-places export carries an empty Note for this row, checked against london/data/_src-part3.csv. The master CSV's "Modern Indian small plates; counter seats" line came from an enrichment pass. Both halves check out against Andy Hayler and The Nudge, and were rewritten from those.

Verdict (Chef Jeff ladder)

should-visit — Worth rearranging an afternoon for, and the seat you want is at the counter. Will Bowlby cooked two years in Mumbai and came back to run a shipping container at Pop Brixton with Rik Campbell, and this Soho room, open since January 2017, is where that went permanent. The dish that carries it is the Keralan fried chicken, and the best description of it belongs to another chef: James Cochran calls it Deep South fried chicken with Indian spices, served with mayonnaise infused with curry oil, turmeric and black mustard seeds, deep-fried curry leaves and mooli. That is a working chef-patron spending credibility on somebody else's plate. Around it the kitchen runs a tandoor and a robata over seasonal British produce, which is what the name is about: the shared culture of India and the UK, stated as the point rather than as a garnish. The Infatuation scores it 8.1 and the complaints are the room, dim and loud, rather than the food.