What The Chicken Connoisseur did next

Elijah Quashie, aka The Chicken Connoisseur, aka the North Londoner who launched the viral YouTube chicken shop review series The Pengest Munch when he was 22, first learned of his own demise through a stranger’s video.

A true crime-style explainer, complete with ominous synths, had appeared in his YouTube recommendations, promising to tell the story of The Depressing Downfall Of The Chicken Connoisseur. ​“I clicked it, obviously,” he says of the video that was posted on 23^rd November 2023 (to date, it’s had almost half-a-million views). The video recycled unverified online rumours, including one that he’d stiffed his crew on pay. ​“The guy could have just asked me, but he didn’t,” Quashie says, referring to poster Phat Memer. He’s calm, almost bored and bemused, like he’s explaining the most trivial of misunderstandings rather than an alleged ​“exposé” with himself as subject. ​“It wasn’t that deep. Not to the point of affecting my mental health.”

Quashie, who lives his life on a ​“not that deep basis”’, shrugged off the internet essayist who tried to cash in on engagement by treating him like a cold case file. But this, in a way, is what happens when your life was once meme-level famous. You become myth, then cautionary tale, then, eventually, Wikipedia citation fodder. Quashie’s resistant to the idea that he’s experienced any kind of drop off in visibility and popularity, though. ​“It’s only just beginning to fizzle out,” he insists. His tone is chronically unmoved, punctuated by long pauses that suggest both weariness and control.

Quashie is speaking to THE FACE two days before The Pengest Munch – a golden relic of mid-2010s YouTube – turns 10. Aside from a quick post on Instagram, the occasion goes uncelebrated. ​“I just didn’t have a videographer who could do the occasion justice,” he says. The line lands softly, but there’s an undertone of suspicion in his voice, one he papers over with polite intonations. He hasn’t spoken to the press in years, bar a few small podcasts. Quashie asked, straight up, if he’d be paid for this interview. He’s a businessman, after all.

He has agreed to talk because he’s hoping this feature could lead to more opportunities and renewed interest. His decade-deep story is a salutary lesson in the highs and lows of online fame, a corrective to the well-worn tales of DIY content creators who become YOUTUBERS with all the capital-letter glory that goes with it.

We’re on Zoom. His name pops up – ​“THAT GUY” – as he refuses to turn his camera on. ​“Nah, not comfortable,” he says, almost curtly. But going off his latest YouTube videos, in which he keeps going restlessly in search of the pengest munch, he looks about the same as he did a decade ago. And, he insists, there’s still fandom from those days. ​“Whenever people see me out in public, they ask me when the next episode will be out.”

Now, at 32, Quashie still lives at home in Tottenham. Content creation is his full-time job, but not in the way you’d imagine: ​“Most people work 40 hours in a week. I don’t even come close to that in a year.” Getting up at 2pm most days, to fill the time, he ​“chills”, goes to the gym, does some calisthenics, and stays up until around 5am watching UFC. He’ll typically go to church on Sundays, as long as a fight wasn’t keeping him up too late the night before. As always, he prays not for any kind of dream in particular, but to right wrongs. Specifically, he prays for a good, reliable videographer.

Quashie is currently waiting on edits from three different trial videographers while he casually plots new formats (“reviewing gyms” for one). The Pengest Munch still exists, though in an inconsistent state. One recent video looked like it had been filmed on a Blackberry; in comparison, the next resembled a glossy Hollywood production. ​“I test out videographers a fair bit,” he says. ​“I think I’ve had over 20 at this point.”

He lists his criteria: keep the camera in focus, don’t cover the microphone, don’t put voiceovers about wings over shots of chips. They should also be a somewhat decent hang. Judging by Quashie’s recent output, the rapport’s been stiff, and many of them haven’t been aware of the show’s format. (In a recent video, he directs the cameraman to pan down as he introduces the ​“crep check” section, the part of the video where Quashie shows off a pair of trainers from his 400-plus collection). ​“I’m behind on my output by quite a bit,” he admits.

Ten years ago, Quashie was freshly sacked from JD Sports for chronic lateness. Circling his hometown like so many other bright, unemployed grads, he had an idea: review London’s fried chicken shops with the gravitas usually reserved for wine tastings. Dressed in a suit and trainers, he broke down bossman’s meal into constituent elements – burger, wings, chips – and scored each on a five-point scale. He prized a well-crumbed fillet. A fat chip could send him rhapsodic. On 15 September 2015, he uploaded the first episode of The Pengest Munch to YouTube. A longtime friend shot the first videos; another posted them on Reddit with a caption engineered for virality: ​“Kid in a suit and trainers reviews London chicken shops.”

Within days, The Pengest Munch hit Reddit’s homepage, then the national press. By early 2016, it was everywhere. Quashie got swift support from Radio 1, enjoyed a flurry of TV appearances, and even flew out to New York to sample its chicken shops alongside A$AP Mob’s Bari. Within 14 months, he’d secured over 250,000 YouTube subscribers. In 2018, he published a book, The Pengest Munch: In Search of the Nation’s 50 Favourite Chicken Establishments.

Quashie had cracked something open: the chicken shops that had fed mostly Black and brown kids for decades were suddenly international cultural landmarks, featuring prominently in Stormzy’s Big For Your Boots video and Ray BLK’s My Hood. The Pengest Munch was the perfect artefact of the post-Grime Daily internet – handmade, funny, self-aware. Its appeal lay in the rapport: you could hear Elishama Udorok, the series’ original videographer, chuckling at every one of the Connoisseur’s quips, as though the videos carried their own laugh track.

But by late 2016, just as the series peaked, cracks began to show. Quashie and Udorok parted ways. ​“The videographer thing became a problem,” Quashie says. He suspects Udorok left for a UniLad editing job, offering steadier money for less work. ​“I don’t really know why. I never asked,” he says. It’s an oddly casual admission, given they’d built the show together. But Quashie insists: ​“I had to get on with it.”

And so he did, rotating through collaborators who never quite clicked. Quashie appeared to coast, prioritising sponsorship deals over the show itself. YouTube had never been the dream – he hadn’t realised people could build whole careers off it until he saw KSI driving a Lamborghini in a P Money video.

Still, the YouTube fame came, and fast. But it was never particularly satisfying to Quashie. Kids shouted chicken slogans at him on the street and lunchtimes became hazards. Strangers snapped photos. Once, an American tourist grabbed his bicep, refusing to let go while she demanded a selfie. He resisted. ​“If I said yes to one, it’d never stop. And honestly, how anyone could feel comfortable grabbing me like that, I don’t know.” Fans thought he was rude, but just found it all unnatural. ​“People could be rabid and kind of hands-on.”

By 2017, about a year after his peak, Channel 4 came calling, commissioning him for a show – on paper, this was his mainstream coronation. In reality, it was another cautionary tale of traditional media absorbing viral talent and sanding down everything that made them magnetic in the first place. ​“They kept telling me it was my show,” he says flatly, ​“but I had next to no creative control.” The result, The Peng Life, launched in August 2018, a limp imitation of The Pengest Munch which swapped chicken shops for bougie-versus-budget doughnuts. It brought Quashie a whole new TV audience, but it wasn’t him. It ran for four episodes.

After his abortive foray into mainstream broadcasting, Quashie never recovered the popularity of The Pengest Munch. He tried regular uploads again in 2020, but views continued to decline. YouTube reps told him everything was fine. ​“They said all my subscribers were getting the notifications, but I saw diminishing returns,” he says, citing the algorithm – the online creator’s boogeyman – as the reason for the decline.

Meanwhile, chicken didn’t stop. Amelia Dimoldenberg’s popularity soared as Quashie’s faded. She had in fact predated him, launching her mock-romantic YouTube talkshow Chicken Shop Date in 2014, her first filmed ​“date” with grime MC Ghetts, arriving more than a year before The Pengest Munch. ​“She was doing interviews with well-established grime artists who were already legends on the scene,” he says, politely batting away comparisons between their projects. ​“What she’s doing is all about the interview, it has nothing to do with the chicken shop. Hot Ones, though,” he says of the YouTube show on which celebrities answer mild questions while eating progressively spicier wings, ​“is really similar to what she does.”

Still, the fact remains: in the past decade, fried chicken has become the unlikely medium for some of the most memorable internet moments; a fourth-wall shatterer and convenient way to forge personality. For Dimoldenberg, the awkwardness of chewing fried meat next to a celebrity becomes the whole point: the slow intimation of intimacy, a host and a star breaking into nervous patter together. Quashie and Dimoldenberg even once collaborated, on Valentine’s Day 2017, when she was ​“stood up” and joined him for a box of wings. It’s the kind of clip that reminds you how small the internet once felt; just a handful of creators orbiting the same fried chicken shops.

There’s an uncomfortable and glaring contrast in how the story played out since then. While Quashie’s white peers parlayed their formats into empires, his moment seemed to expire as quickly as it arrived. Some of that may come down to infrastructure, or luck. But it’s hard not to notice how the cultural appetite for ​“authenticity” tends to reward its performers unevenly.

Quashie’s story, more specifically, takes the arc of an era of Black British internet culture. His show was born out of the tail end of SB.TV’s DIY glory years, briefly amplified into national consciousness, then left to wither under corporate interference and platform drift. Even his old haunts have changed. Prices have crept upward. Morley’s now sells branded merch. The Taste of Tennessee in Priory Court, the first chicken shop he filmed at, has shut down.

There was, too, a kind of creative inertia – an understandable one, perhaps, since his spats of steady output yielded petty dividends. ​“There are no financial rewards for being a legend,” he says, with plain seriousness. Some commercial opportunities might arise very occasionally, but financial stability? ​“I can’t say so,” he admits.

Quashie still eats chicken ​“once, maybe twice a week”. He still wears suits. ​“It’s the same life, just not documented.” These days, you’re most likely to see him pop up in the comment sections of parkour videos or obscure grime instrumentals on YouTube.

But, breaking news: Quashie’s slowly getting his numbers back. His latest episode of The Pengest Munch – in which he forensically broke down the chicken on offer at Dixy Chicken in Bruce Grove – pulled in almost 50,000 views in four days. He’s smiling throughout the video, and there’s an obvious rapport with the cameraman, who knows the show well enough to ask questions and anticipate Quashie’s habits, even down to ordering his sandwich without mayo. Familiarity produces small pleasures: a couple of classic lines land effortlessly, like ​“man’s been using a thesaurus,” delivered with the same deadpan timing that made the series feel so fun a decade ago.

Still, Quashie talks like someone who’s begun to make his peace with relative obscurity. ​“It’s much nicer like this. People treat me like a human being.”

If he could tell his younger self anything, it would be to plan for when things go wrong. For now, he’s still cracking on, still testing videographers, still dreaming of the next big thing. Asked if he’s happy, he pauses.

​“Happy? I don’t know. Sort of.” Then, as if giving himself an assignment, he adds: ​“I’d like to just get one clean run of dropping content in a year. Even if I could put out a hundred videos in a year, that would be good.” For The Chicken Connoisseur, the wings are the same. The hunger’s just different.