Aussie trio's fried chicken business, Coqfighter, takes flight in London

When London's first COVID-19 lockdown began in March 2020, Deacon Rose wasn't sure his business would survive. Coqfighter, the Korean fried chicken concept he launched in 2014 with fellow Australians Troy Sawyer and Tristan Clough, had grown slowly but surely in its six years of existence – but with no government assistance announced at that stage and a period of lockdown looming, things looked grim.

"We didn't have a lot of cash in the bank, [and] we're not a big enough company to go into hibernation," says Rose, 38. "It became about how we were going to keep the business afloat. It was really uncertain."

Two years later, Coqfighter has taken flight. The company now operates eight sites in London (up from three pre-pandemic), with three more to follow this year, according to Rose.

For the past two years, the trio have been riding a boom in home delivery, operating out of pubs, dark kitchens and hole-in-the-wall shop units, and satisfying Londoners' hunger for their delicious, high-quality chicken sandwiches, such as the Original Burger, made with chicken thigh, pink pickled onion, lettuce, sambal mayo and Korean hot sauce.

"We were doing 1500 orders a week during the first lockdown from one of our sites, a tiny shop in Brockley [in south London]. It was absolute madness," says Rose. "The last two years has completely reshaped our business; it's changed our future trajectory. It's a weird phrase to use, but we had a really positive pandemic."

Coqfighter is inspired by the trio's days living in St Kilda a decade ago. At that time, they used to fuel up for nights out at Gami Chicken and Beer in Melbourne's Chinatown, and were perplexed to arrive in London and find lots of fried chicken, but none like Gami's.

"In London, you've got tonnes of fried chicken at that entry level but nothing at an elevated standard," says Sawyer, 31.

Delivery may have transformed their business, but the Perth-raised trio (Rose and Clough, 32, are brothers) are now focused on bricks-and-mortar outlets for their business, which they've dubbed "fried chicken for grown-ups". They recently opened in London's King's Cross, with a restaurant in foodie East Dulwich to follow.

The battle now is to get people to eat in: "We have to make it more fun than eating a burger in your pants on the sofa," says Rose. After the transformation of the past two years, though, that should be easy.