Chix, Edinburgh

You may be aware of Chix from their year-long residency amid the shiny floors of the St James, as part of the Bonnie + Wild food hall. And if you’re thinking ‘is there a more on-the-nose example of a rapidly gentrifying area than the old fried chicken takeaway closing to be immediately replaced by a fried chicken place that used to be at the St James?’, you wouldn’t be alone. The good news is Chix’s new place is pleasingly homespun and fancy-free, and the food they’ve brought with them to Dalry Road is very, very good.

The space itself has an air of lo-fi cool, with graffiti art on the walls, bright furniture against grey floors, and a window seat that’s in progress as we arrive. The guy behind the counter talks us through the menu, gives our order to the kitchen, then he’s off to the other end of the room with his measuring tape and a big chunk of wood – this is not a super-flash, highfalutin’ place.

That menu is, as you might expect, chicken-heavy. The spicy chicken sandwich (£8.25) is a huge, juicy piece of thigh meat in a crunchy carapace, topped with a spicy mayo and handfuls of pickles and cabbage. It easily passes the blob test (any sandwich like this should always run the risk of dripping all over your T-shirt) and packs a pleasing chilli punch. The chicken tenders (£6.25) are enormous, brilliantly juicy and crunchy, and loaded with savoury notes of white pepper and garlic. They’re fantastic, leaving a certain faux-military lad with a legally-distinct list of herbs and spices trailing in their wake.

Away from the chicken, there are some genuinely lovely surprises. Who’d have thought you’d send us to a fried chicken place and we’d come away raving about the coleslaw? The raw slaw (£2) is a super-fresh mix of cabbage, carrot and radish, excellently dressed and able to cut through all that poultry goodness from the last paragraph. The Asian slaw (£2) is an absolute banger; red cabbage, coriander, loads of a sesame dressing that we can’t quite put our finger on, superb. The waffle fries (£3.95) are a ludicrously crunchy throwback to our days of trying every formation of potato in the supermarket – these are soft and fluffy where they need to be, salty and chunky everywhere else.

Load up on dips (£1.25-£2) like we do, and you’ll soon find yourself swinging around the table like a cross between a Mediaeval lord and a hungry octopus. Take a piece of chicken, stick it in the confit garlic dip; pick up a waffle fry, dip that in the red hot sauce which is fairly spicy, then in the green hot sauce which is *very* spicy. Go back to your chicken, get the blue cheese dip on one side and the ranch on the other to try and work out the difference between them. You’ll be piling things on top of each other and creating one-of-a-kind works of meaty genius before you know it.

Chix are one of many new faces at this end of Dalry Road, and the apparently ever-rising and horribly out-of-place Haymarket development means they won’t be the last. Yet what Chix has to offer – a high-quality take on a fast food classic that won’t break the bank but is made with care and precision – means they should fit right in. Once that window seat’s in, it could be just the place to keep tabs on the changing face of the neighbourhood, or to make some daring new advances in the field of dipping.

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25 Dalry Rd, Edinburgh, EH11 2BQ, Open daily, midday until late