How Your Sausage Is Made

How Free Are Chickadee Chick’s Free-range Chickens?

A Grub Street commenter objected to the term “handspun” on Chickadee Chick’s menu, but it wasn’t the milkshakes we were curious about — it was the “free-range” chickens. If the place was going to plaster the term all over its signage and menus, the owner could probably tell us a little bit about his sourcing, right? Not exactly. When we finally reached Eddie Low (also an owner in Williamsburg’s Tacu Tacu and Wasabi), he couldn’t tell us whether the chickens are entirely free-range or whether they’re just the sort that get let off the leash every now and then, for show. He said his supplier gets the chickens from a live poultry market in Sunset Park (he’s not sure which) that offers a choice between caged or cage-free chickens (this poses problems, says Low, since the chickens he gets aren’t uniformly sized). We called four or five poultry markets in the Sunset Park area and none of them sold free-range chickens, but a Times article indicates such markets do exist. (Anyone know which one it might be?) And that’s about as much as we can tell you about the free-range chickens at Chickadee Chick. In case you’re curious, early reviews from Park Slopers describe the chicken as “stringy, I’ve had better chickens from super markets”; “maybe a little tough”; and “just ok.”

How Free Are Chickadee Chick’s Free-range Chickens?