inthekitchen
Red Top Drive-Inn
■ Chicken Dinner
Call it fried chicken
with a twist. At Red
Top, the chicken
dinner (below)
goes its own route.
A “broasting” process, which
combines pressure cooking and
deep frying, results in extremely
tender and juicy meat with the same
crispy hallmarks of conventional
fried chicken. There’s no overpowering
the natural flavours of the
bird on this fried-to-order fowl,
either. Seasoning is light and right.
Owner Stavros Athanasiadis
vowed to remain in lockstep with
the processes put in place by
former owners, the Scouras
family, when he took the reins in
2019. This can’t-beat classic is
proof he’s sticking to his word.
Magic Bird ■ Fried Chicken
From the first crunch through this fried chicken’s (left)
golden-battered exterior to the last finger-licking bite,
Magic Bird makes good on its namesake: it fries up one
fine fowl. This joint won Winnipeg’s 2019 Fried Chicken
Festival and it takes one bite to discover why. Country
fried and mild options are accessible for any eater, but those unafraid of
working their way up the Scoville scale can kick it up a notch with hot or
scorcher seasoning. Chef Mike O’Connell’s pièce de résistance is his spin on
a comfort-food classic. Tender chicken strips, served with curly fries and
unique topping combinations, accompany an eye-popping and tastebudtingling
house-made honey dill sauce. O’Connell’s dill steeping process
turns this Manitoba honey staple into a new shade of green.
ciao! / summer / two thousand twenty 19