Restaurant News

Merivale’s The Chicken Shop opens this week

Ben Greeno’s long-awaited side-hustle, The Chicken Shop, is opening on Australia Day, right next to The Paddington.

By Sophie McComas
The Chicken Shop's rôtisserie chicken
Ben Greeno's long-awaited side-hustle, The Chicken Shop, is opening on Australia Day, right next to The Paddington.
Serving up rôtisserie meats, salads and sandwiches from a small shopfront on Oxford Street, The Chicken Shop is the first straight takeaway venture for Merivale and the fourth venue it has opened on the same block in just over a year, joining The Paddington, Fred's and cocktail bar Charlie Parker's.
Aside from the same French-style rôtisserie chicken found at The Paddington and a selection of other proteins that'll change each night (ocean trout, pork belly, lamb rump, glazed ham and beef rump among them), it's the sandwich section that has chef Ben Greeno particularly buzzing. "I've actually wanted to do a sandwich place for a while," he says. He'll be using Brickfields bread to sandwich fillings such as glazed leg ham with Comté cheese, Dijon mustard and pickle, a hot chicken number with jalapeño and pickled carrot, and (our favourite) fish fingers with soy beans and togarashi, a riff on the fried-fish-with-mushy-peas days of Greeno's British childhood. On the sauce front, there'll be yoghurt harissa, aïoli, green chilli and a hot sauce with an exclamation mark after it.
The Chicken Shop. 
Side dishes are along more classic chook-shop lines - cos with avocado, radish and pumpkin seeds, a chickpea salad with tomato, cucumber and feta, some green beans, a potato gratin - but they roll with the laid-back vibe that Greeno is aiming for. "Sometimes you want nothing more than to grab some takeaway and have an easy night," he says. Amen.
The Chicken Shop, opens Thursday 26 January 2017, 382 Oxford St, Paddington, NSW, open daily from noon-9.30pm, merivale.com.au/thepaddington
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