Chicken tonight
How do you prepare a perfect rotisserie poussin? Chef Joris Bijdendijk presented a superior little chicken from the rotisserie during the second ‘Night of the Chicken’ at Restaurant Rijks.
Nighttime dining parties are becoming increasingly common. The concept: you reserve a ’90 minutes’ table in advance for a nighttime slot, and the menu features no more than 1 dish. Before and after dinner, there’s drinking and partying at the bar with an in-house DJ behind the mixing desk.
Côte de Boeuf Night
Restaurant Rijsel started it all with its hugely popular Cote-de-Boeuf Night. Soon The Roast Room and its sister restaurant Vis aan de Schelde will follow with the Côte de Boeuf & Lobster Night. These are parties with fantastic no-nonsense food that mainly hospitality professionals and foodies know how to find.
Chicken Night
At the fully booked Restaurant RIJKS too, where the After Dark Dinner was held for the second time, hospitality friends and food lovers came and went. On the menu: rotisserie chicken with butter lettuce, fried potatoes and a little bowl of mayonnaise and béarnaise. That’s it. To raise the celebratory mood, the wine list for the occasion consists exclusively of magnum bottles of red and white wine.
The result is a fantastic, buttery-tender, golden-brown grilled chicken that literally makes you lick your fingers (and the melting tarragon butter)
Brining
Once in the hands of a star chef like Bijdendijk, such a deceptively simple dish is prepared to perfection. The chicken, a nicely sized poussin, is (as we learn upon inquiry) brined for 24 hours.
For those who want to try it at home: 50 grams of sugar and 75 grams of salt per litre of brine. The chicken is generously filled in the cavity with tarragon butter and seasoned only with celery and paprika powder. Half an hour at full power in the rotisserie—which is running at full speed this evening—and the result is a fantastic, buttery-tender, golden-brown grilled chicken that literally makes you lick your fingers (and the melting tarragon butter).
The fried potatoes are just as we like them. Floury but crisp on the outside and meltingly soft inside. How does Bijdendijk do it? The potatoes are first steamed until they almost fall apart and then left in the refrigerator overnight to ‘dry’ (as with Blumenthal’s method for fries). Then they are fried until golden brown and—and this is the key—fried a little longer, fully in butter, garnished with finely chopped onion and parsley, giving the fried potatoes a delicious crunch and buttery flavour.
And this is how you make the famous potatoes from Restaurant Rijsel
This is the ultimate proof that good food doesn’t have to be complicated. We can’t wait for the next nighttime dining feast.
Text:
Marcus Polman
Photography:
