PARIS — It’s barely 11 a.m. in the kitchen of the Popeyes restaurant in Paris’ 13th arrondissement. Mauna Rauguy is already preparing dozens of fried chicken strips. With her hands in the flour, the manager mixes the pieces marinated in Cajun spices 20 times, after dipping them in the buttermilk batter, a recipe Popeyes keeps secret.
The fast-food chain founded in New Orleans in 1972, is a subsidiary of Restaurant Brands International, which also owns Burger King and is trying to snag some of KFC’s business in France. It has to be said that since the restaurant in the 13th arrondissement opened in mid-September, the dining room has not been empty. That location is the 15th in an offensive launched in February 2023 by Popeyes, which aims to open 250 locations across France within a decade.
After restaurants in Montpellier and Toulouse failed to take off in 2018, the timing now seems right for Popeyes, whose fried chicken sandwich shook up the U.S. chicken sandwich market in 2019.
“The first time, the locations weren’t right and the prices were too high compared with the competition,” says CEO Olivier Rego, who was convinced enough by the Popeyes project to leave his post as managing director of the Monop’ grocery stores last year.
Nugget fiends
Popeyes and KFC are not the only chicken chains trying to make it in France: Texas-based Wingstop has enlisted the services of Silman and Samba Traoré, the founders of the French chain O’Tacos. Over the past decade, the Traoré brothers have opened more than 300 restaurants serving these tortillas filled with chips and meat drenched in a cheese sauce — an invention from the Grenoble region that has little in common with Mexican gastronomy.
This is invaluable know-how for the chain of wings and tenders marinated in a range of sauces: barbecue smoked with white walnut wood, parmesan and garlic, mango and habanero pepper, etc.
After a pop-up that attracted 75,000 customers in the 10th arrondissement of Paris this summer, the group has been offering its dishes on Deliveroo in the Paris region since September and is preparing to open a restaurant next year.
This is latest example of an intensification of the Americanisation of French society.
For Jérôme Fourquet, director of opinion at Ifop (Institut français d’opinion publique), the arrival of these two fried chicken specialists is the latest example of “an intensification of the Americanization of French society,” following the recent arrival of Five Guys burgers and Krispy Kreme doughnuts.
Fourquet, who wrote a report on the “McDonald’s generation” for the Jean-Jaurès Foundation in 2022, points out that “France is McDonald’s second largest market in the world, and the company paved the way for the success of fried chicken with the massive consumption of nuggets.”
Changing habits
In these fast-food outlets, which are nibbling away at the market share of traditional restaurants, the French are devouring more and more poultry. In 2019, fried chicken did not appear in the Top 5 most ordered dishes in restaurant chains. In 2022, it was in fourth place — even surpassing pizza — according to Food Service Vision.
The trend can also be seen on delivery platforms. On UberEats, fried chicken comes just behind pizza and burgers in searches. Deliveroo, which has seen sales of this food triple since 2020, has even opted for a fried chicken burger for its back-to-school advertising in the Paris Metro.
We haven’t yet reached the stage of the United States, where fried chicken sandwiches feature on 47% of menus, according to Technomics data. Nor have we reached the stage in the UK, where only three postcodes on remote Scottish islands do not have a chicken shop.
Late-night eats
In France, the number of outlets has risen from 331 in 2019 to 510 in 202, with a visible increase in the suburbs and on the outskirts of major cities. “As soon as a location become available in working-class neighborhoods, it’s usually a fried chicken chain that sets up there,” says Pierre Raffard, author of Géopolitique de l’alimentation et de la gastronomie (Geopolitics of Food and Gastronomy).
Allô Poulet, Le Chick, Professor Wings… With their inventive names, these shops, often open late into the night, compete with kebabs. While in New York, they are run mainly by Afghan immigrants, in the UK and France, they are run more often by Pakistanis, as at Chicken Spot, a chain founded in 1994 in the suburbs of London, which now boasts some 60 outlets in France.
These entrepreneurs focus on chicken because it costs less than other meats. This is the result of optimizing the animal’s yield over the shortest possible period, through cross-breeding, battery farming and antibiotic consumption. A standard chicken now reaches 1.8 kg (3.9 lb.) in 36 days, five times more than in the 1950s.
“Its gargantuan shape means it can no longer walk. If humans grew that fast, a 3 kg (6.6 lb) baby would reach 300 kg (660 lbs) in two months,” says chicken historian Emelyn Rude.
A universal dish
Beyond its low price, chicken has the advantage of being a universal dish on all five continents. Its consumption almost doubled worldwide between 2004 and 2019, when poultry overtook pork to become the most widely consumed meat.
In France, pork is still No. 1, but chicken’s share of meat consumption has doubled in 20 years, to 28% of the total. It is the only meat the consumption of which is increasing.
These offers owe their success to the fact that they go against all dietary recommendations.
Other advantages of chicken include a carbon footprint that four times smaller than beef and a protein to fat ratio that is healthier. The latter benefit disappears, however, when the chicken is eaten fried. And it seems consumers seek this calorie-bomb aspect — judging by the popularity of fried chicken and waffles.
Small chains such as Uncle Bumpy and Crispy Soul have reinvented this recipe popularised in 1930s Harlem by jazz musicians devouring the leftovers of the previous day’s fried chicken with waffles in the early hours of the morning.
“As with O’Tacos, these offers owe their success to the fact that they go against all dietary recommendations,” Raffard says.
Sunday roast chicken
These recipes are a far cry from the traditional way of eating gallus gallus domesticus in France.
“The French have loved chicken for a long time. But for them, it was the whole roast chicken they brought home on Sundays,” says Bernard Boutboul, chairman of the Gira food industry consultancy.
“France is the country of sauces, so the chicken was more Basquaise, with vin jaune [yellow wine from the Jura] or with Riesling,” say Mireille Sanchez, author of Poulet Voyageur (Traveling Chicken), a compendium of over 1,200 recipes from around the world. Of her 59 recipes for fried chicken, none are French — but 15 are American.
Across the Atlantic, fried chicken has been a staple of the diet for decades. But it wasn’t a foregone conclusion: for the English, chicken was long intended only to be eaten in soup when the weather turned cold.
Beef, associated with masculine strength, was the meat par excellence.
Poultry, which were mainly used to obtain eggs, had so little value in the eyes of the colonists that they did not prohibit slaves from owning them, unlike cattle and pigs. As a result, some — and especially some women — began cooking them and selling easily transportable fried chicken at markets and railway stations.
KFC’s rise
The dish conquered the whole of America, becoming one of the favourite dishes of Yankee soldiers during the American Civil War. It became even more democratic during World War II, with many African-Americans working in army kitchens. But it was during the post-war era that it became a benchmark dish for all Americans.
The responsibility lies with Harland David Sanders, a native of Indiana, whose life resembled an adventure novel. After running a ferry company, working as a lawyer and even delivering babies, he opened a service station in Kentucky in 1930. In the adjoining room, he offered fried chicken marinated in a blend of 11 herbs and spices. Instead of cooking it in a cast-iron pan, he invented a covered deep fryer.
“That way, the chicken is much juicier,” Josh Ozersky explained in his book Colonel Sanders and the American Dream. This technique is “far less glamorous than a secret blend of herbs and spices, but far more important to KFC’s success.”
Many French people still have preconceptions about the brand.
It was such a success that the governor of the State of Kentucky promoted Sanders to the rank of Colonel in 1936. In 1952, the first franchise opened in Salt Lake City. Five years later, Sanders introduced another key element in the success of Kentucky Fried Chicken: the takeaway bucket that appealed to housewives wanting to escape the drudgery of cooking.
In the 1980s, the company accelerated its expansion abroad. While the chain took off in China, it struggled in France, where KFC arrived in 1991.
“In the first decade, we opened 11 restaurants,” recalls CEO Isabelle Herman. Since then, the pace has quickened: in September, Herman inaugurated the group’s 370th establishment, in the chic suburb of Versailles. The location that illustrates just how much KFC has expanded its audience.
In 2017, the mayor opposed the opening of a KFC in the royal city. Eight years later, it has not provoked an outcry. But the battle is not won, Herman says, “Many French people still have preconceptions about the brand.”
Fried chicken in cheese naan
KFC will not achieve its target of 40 openings this year, as it did in 2023. Is that due to increasingly fierce competition?
Even before the arrival of American competitors, a number of French companies were positioning themselves in this niche. Among them is Chicken Street, based on the principle of O’Tacos but with chicken fried in cheese naan.
There’s nothing Indian about the recipe. “It’s typically French, because with our ethnic mix it’s our custom to innovate and try new things,” says Sufyan Renucci, co-founder of this chain which has 70 restaurants in France and eight abroad.
After opening his first shop in Argenteuil, a northwestern suburb of Paris in 2012, Renucci joined forces with competitors in Ivry-sur-Seine, a southeastern suburb, before expanding into a franchise from 2019.
Halal success
“The success of fried chicken is being driven by the growing weight of Muslim populations, where pork is banned,” Ifop’s Fourquet says.
At Chicken Street, the chicken is even halal, as it is at Pepe Chicken, a company that in three years has become one of the Top 10 most ordered brands for delivery, with 300,000 orders per month. It has no restaurants, but it does have a hundred or so dark kitchens, allowing it to cover 75 towns and cities.
Pepe Chicken was created by Charles Gilles-Compagnon, an influencer who is the ‘record holder for fast food tested around the world’ and who has 6 million subscribers on his YouTube channel FastGoodCuisine and 4 million on Instagram and TikTok.
On TikTok, young girls post their Pepe Chicken orders.
In a former foundry in a trendy district of Paris, where his studios and 25 employees are based, the thirtysomething from Alsace explains that he doesn’t need any advertising: “On TikTok, young girls post their Pepe Chicken orders under the hashtag #girltherapy, which they enjoy while watching Disney films.”
His company was developed with Taster, a company that creates brands just for delivery, and which is enjoying another success with OutFry, focused on Korean chicken.
Fried chicken is also increasingly consumed in Asian versions by a young generation fond of Japanese anime, K-pop and Seoulese cosmetics brands. Since last year, Bonchon, a chain that originated in Korea but has developed mainly in the United States, has opened two restaurants in Paris.
Michelin-starred chefs
Chefs have taken note of this trend. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, Mory Sacko, founder of the Michelin-starred Parisian restaurant MoSuke, set about creating a higher-quality version of fried chicken. This month, he launched MoSugo, a brand that is opening a third address in the capital, using the same suppliers as his gourmet restaurant, but at affordable prices (€13 for a burger and €21 for a menu).
“For the marinade, I took inspiration from soul food in the United States, because that’s where Americans are strongest: a base of Cajun spices and a little fermented milk. I prefer the breading used in Japan. We pass the filet through the tempura batter, then into the panko breadcrumbs, which are made up of small, very airy flakes,” Sacko explains.
The chicken is served in a pretzel bun, created by an Alsatian bakery near his restaurant, in a brioche burger from the Mamiche bakery, or with a Scandinavian version of a fine waffle at his new address in the Sentier.
Champagne and fried chicken
Buck Fried Chicken, which combines natural wines and fried chicken, also wants to reinvent the “cheap” in a chic version. It is run by entrepreneurs with very different profiles to the Chicken Street or Chicken Shop franchises: Alexandre Slama and Balthus Levin, who met on the benches of a private high school in the 7th arrondissement of Paris.
“We wanted to make something that had become a bit trashy sexy,” says Slama, who used to work in the digital sector.
There’s something paradoxical about it that’s fun and appealing.
“Fried chicken is crunchy, drippy and a bit messy, but here it’s served with a nice bottle of Italian wine, in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, and everyone is well dressed: there’s something paradoxical about it that’s fun and appealing,” says the 28-year-old restaurateur, who set about creating a kosher fried chicken, without milk, but imitating the chemical reaction between chicken proteins and lactic acid.
Their restaurant only serves 14 tables at the moment, but they are already thinking of moving up a gear with a restaurant combining fried chicken and champagne. Their inspiration? Coqodaq, a restaurant that has been a hit since it opened in New York at the beginning of the year. On the menu: nuggets with caviar, buckets of fried chicken served on a pedestal and 400 champagnes — the most extensive collection in the United States!
Importing chickens
This new craze for fried chicken is of little benefit to French farmers, however. Most of the meat comes from other European countries: 100% from Poland for Chicken Street and half for Popeyes, and 52% from the Netherlands for KFC.
In three years, the No. 1 in the market has nevertheless increased its share of French chicken from 20% to almost half, but finds it difficult to go further, as the cost is 20% higher. Popeyes also complains about cuts that are unsuitable in France, in particular the absence of filets flat enough to fit in a burger.
This mismatch between supply and demand was condemned in a report by the Court of Auditors published at the beginning of September, which deplored the fact that one out of every two chickens in France is now imported, compared with a quarter at the start of the millennium. According to the report, this is due to a “move upmarket that began in the 1980s,” which is “out of step with the drive for savings in the catering industry.”
France stands out from its European neighbors because 20% of its production is labeled, 16% of which is Label Rouge. Yet Label Rouge now accounts for just 10% of total consumption, 12 percentage points less than 20 years ago. Only Mory Sacko and KFC (for rare limited edition wings) source from Label Rouge. Proof that the home of roast free-range chicken has not yet adapted to the reality of modern-day France.
