The chef behind Nottingham's Michelin-starred Alchemilla has revealed his latest concept - a fried chicken restaurant with soft serve ice cream. It will be called Mollis, a subspecies of the plant alchemilla after which the restaurant is named.
Alex Bond is aiming to open the new venture in November next door to the fine dining restaurant in Derby Road, near Canning Circus. Soft serve ice cream will also be on the menu, plus cocktails, craft beers and natural wines.
Nottingham is saturated with fried chicken joints - KFC, Jollibees, Crunch Munch and coming soon Popeyes - but this aims to be a notch above in Alex's own inimitable style. He said: "In essence it is fried chicken but with our spin on it and our understanding of food and cooking and flavour.
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"It'll be nothing bonkers - just banging. We're not inventing the wheel just putting new spokes on it."
The menu has yet to be finalised but it's likely to be a mix of free-range wings, thighs and drumsticks and for boneless fans, chicken breast. "I will use the whole bird. I don't want to be buying tubs of wings and I hate strips because they're dry. We may do a burger and we're contemplating doing our own chicken sausage or something like that," he said.
Rather than southern fried chicken style, it will be glazed with four or five different flavours available. The poultry will be brined in shio koji, a Japanese marinade, which he said, works in a similar way to buttermilk but better.
"They'll have their own own sticky loveliness. At the moment we're working on a fermented chilli lobster hot sauce. We're doing one with a kimchi glaze as well."
Likewise the ice cream will be anything but standard. Think roasted kombu seaweed with luchuensis vinegar and vanilla oil and you're on the right lines.
The new restaurant will take over the former premises of One More Chinese takeaway. Before that it was known as Scruffy's. Alex said there will be around 50 seats and the look will be different to Alchemilla.
It's not his first foray with fast food. When the restaurant was forced to close during lockdown the chef served a takeaway DIY Dirty Burger & Wing Box. Alex also attempted to recreate a KFC Zinger Burger on Channel 4's Snackmaster series.
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