Grazing the menu of Ancoats delight Street Urchin, you’ll see an array of enticing sharing plates, seafood dishes and vegetarian delights. But one thing you won't have spotted is a dish featuring squirrel. That is, of course, until now.
Located on Great Ancoats Street, the cosy 'English market diner' has become known for its ever-rotating menu featuring locally sourced and seasonal produce since it opened in the summer of 2019. Food critic Jay Rayner once even went as far as describing it as a ‘place where good things happen’.
While the restaurant - fronted by husband and wife team Kevin and Rachel Choudhary - has served the likes of panko mackerel fillet, sticky ox cheek stew, and butternut squash dumplings in the past, the newest 'nutty' menu dish has caught many by surprise.
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Last week, Kevin and Rachel announced they would be serving up a crispy buttermilk wild grey squirrel dish, served alongside a creamy pulled ham hock cassoulet and garnished with nettle pesto and a hazelnut bread crouton.
For many, it was seen as a culinary step too far, with some urging the restaurant to ‘please leave the squirrels alone’. Others said they drew the line at ‘creamy rodent stew’ but, there were also a fair few who were keen to give it a taste.
Co-owner Rachel said the idea for the dish came about when trying to think about sustainable meat options and not to create a viral talking point.
“We didn’t just put squirrel on the menu because it was different,” Rachel tells the M.E.N. “We do try to get game, or wild meat, on the menu, not just because it’s ethical but it’s also more sustainable.
“We’ve often used pigeon and rabbit in the past, and then, one day, we just asked our game supplier if he had any grey squirrels and he said yes."
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), wild grey squirrels are considered to be pests and have been named as one of the worst invasive non-native species in the country. It's estimated that there are around 2.5 million grey squirrels living in the UK.
Grey squirrels are often shot or trapped in a bid to control numbers and to also help protect the UK’s endangered native red squirrel population, which is usually affected by competition and the deadly squirrel pox virus, which has no known effect on greys.
“We’ve had mostly positive comments about the dish but there have been some who do not like the idea of it,” Rachel says. “Some people just don’t understand that it’s going to be culled regardless in a bid to control the wild population. In my opinion, I believe it’s much better to use it than to let it go to waste.”
Describing the taste of squirrel, Rachel says: “I was expecting it to taste more like rabbit but it doesn’t really. It’s a lot less dry than rabbit, it’s quite buttery and fatty. They’re hedgeway foragers, so it is a much richer meat and has a nutty flavour to it. It’s quite boney so we tell people to eat it like a chicken wing.”
The addition of squirrel on the menu has caught the attention of American news outlets like the New York Post and Fox News, which Rachel describes as being ‘completely bizarre’.
“We didn’t think we’d get more than a couple of responses on Facebook about the dish,” she admits. “It’s just been ridiculous.”
Rachel says customers who have tried the £22.50 dish have been ‘unanimous’ in their love for it. It has gone down so well that it has now sold out, with Street Urchin hoping to be able to sell the dish once again in the near future.
“I don’t think anyone has regretted ordering it,” she explains. “We didn’t think it was going to sell as well as it did. I said to my husband that we’d either sell two or all of it, and we’ve managed to completely sell out.
A lot of people have tried it because they’ve never tried it before and wanted to see what it was like. It’s been a really easy sell, to be honest, which has surprised me. I really thought we’d have to work hard to sell it but that’s not been the case at all.
“We’ve had to replace the dish with rabbit now that we’ve sold out of it, but we are working with our game supplier to get more as and when we can. I think it’ll be a nice seasonal addition on the menu for us.”
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