Who is Thunderbird Fried Chicken?
FrientificMattodology
The secret to crave-worthy fried chicken.
Part methodpart madnessfull Mattness
How did it start?
That’s Matt (on the left), he’s the guy behind Thunderbird Fried Chicken.
We’ll leave it up to him to tell the story…
The Deep South
The story of Thunderbird Fried Chicken started out behind the wheel of a racing car, strangely.
I had been racing across the UK and Europe in open-wheel cars and Porsches when an opportunity to race in the USA in NASCAR presented itself. I leapt at the chance and moved to the Deep South, but almost immediately found that the financial climate was spiralling downwards.
It was 2008 and any chance of sponsorship evaporated in front of me…
“Unperturbed I chased the dream, travelling the South and eating a lot of fried chicken and BBQ along the way; it was food that didn’t really exist in the UK at the time, and I was hooked…”
The BBQ Lab
I never found that elusive funding and came back to the UK to discover the recession had travelled here too.
So, I got a degree and a crap job and set about hating my life.
Something had to fill the gap that racing left, and it transpired to be cooking. I approached food in the same way that I had with racing, by trying to improve every possible element to its maximum potential.
It rapidly got out of hand, resulting in me starting a food truck under the name BBQ Lab; fusing my love of American food with all things technical. It was hugely successful, as trucks go, but never going to be scalable.
Best Buffalo Wings in London at WingFest
During this time, I was looking for that one special thing that would catapult me forward and it came in the form of wings.
Three months after putting them on the menu, they won the award for the Best Buffalo Wings in London at WingFest. Building on that success, I chose to close down BBQ Lab and focus on creating the best fried chicken I possibly could.
Thunderbird Fried Chicken was born in March 2017. Since then, we’ve gone from strength to strength.
