How we ended up with one fryer in a Roath kitchen the size of a bathroom
Hot Bird almost didn't happen. Here's the year between 'we should open a chicken place' and our first night on City Road.
The Sunday market test
Roath Sunday Market on the Recreation Ground takes £25 for a 3m pitch and expects you to bring everything. We brought a portable fryer, 8 kilos of brined thighs, a folding table, and a sign that just said 'KOREAN-FRIED THIGHS · £4.' Sold out three Sundays running. The fourth Sunday we doubled the chicken and ran out by 12:30.
The bit nobody tells you about
Cardiff City Council's environmental health gave us our first Food Hygiene rating before we'd even cooked a customer's meal. They were patient with us — twice rejected our HACCP for missing temperature logs, which felt brutal at the time but saved us when we got busy.
Cathays, a year later
Cathays opened in October 2025 because the Roath kitchen — at 12 square metres — physically couldn't cook enough chicken for the queue. The Salisbury Road shop is twice the size, has the second fryer for double-frying, and was always the plan we couldn't quite afford in year one.
What we'd do differently
- Sign the second-fryer kitchen lease in month one. Single-fryer year-one chicken was good. Double-fryer year-two chicken is what people queue for.
- Charge slightly more from day one. We were £4 for thighs that should've been £5; we put it up six months in and nobody flinched.
- Write the recipe down properly. We lost a brilliant marinade in week six because nobody had logged the salt ratio.