Tastes like magic

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/02/2019 (2615 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new West Broadway hole-in-the-wall has been crowned the best fried chicken restaurant in Winnipeg. 

Magic Bird Fried Chicken operates out of a small kitchen inside The Handsome Daughter (61 Sherbrook St.) and last week it was declared the winner of the city’s 2019 Fried Chicken Fest.

The winning dish, called the “Cone Ranger,” was a waffle cone filled with pimento macaroni and cheese and topped with a piece of fried chicken and crispy chicken skin. 

“We definitely wanted to do something different so we could stand out a little bit,” head chef Mike O’Connell said. “Chicken and waffles is kind of a classic dish so we wanted to turn it into something handheld and not too filling so people can come in a try our regular menu items as well — and mac and cheese is just good.”

Magic Bird has only been open since November, but the deep fried business model has been a long time coming.

“We had been talking about doing a fried chicken place for like the last three years,” said O’Connell, who was also the chef behind The Handsome Daughter’s previous restaurant. 

“It’s something that I eat all the time, it’s just like a really easy food that lots of people can relate to.”

This is Winnipeg’s second Fried Chicken Fest and O’Connell had been looking forward to taking part since the inaugural event in 2018 — even before the plan for Magic Bird was fully hatched. 

“We’d been making plans for it since we heard about it last year — that was the plan all along, to come in and hopefully win, which we managed to do,” he said.

Twenty-one restaurants in Winnipeg, Stony Mountain and Selkirk created dishes for the festival, which ran Jan. 20 to 27, and diners voted for their favourite. Magic Bird came out on top, with Brazen Hall Kitchen and Khao Restaurant taking second and third place, respectively. 

“This food festival is a testament to the chef talent in this city and area, and the creativity this year was off the charts,” festival co-founder Susie Erjavec Parker said in a release. 

The festival was the busiest Magic Bird has been since opening and the busiest January O’Connell has seen in all his years in the food industry. 

“People get really excited and it’s nice to see so many new people that would normally never come out taking part in these things,” he said. 

Fried chicken is the newest addition to a growing trend of food festivals in Winnipeg. O’Connell says that while the events can be great to get new customers in the door, he’s worried the market for festivals will become oversaturated. 

“I hope that it stays just a few weeks throughout the year because we don’t want every week to be a different food week — but it is a very good thing.”

Magic Bird is open Tuesday to Sunday from 5 p.m. to late. Visit magicbirdfriedchicken.com for a full menu.