The Irish Chicken Fillet Roll

There’s an Irish market called Winston’s near my house, two towns over but really just a couple miles down the road, and it’s one of my favorite places to grab a snack or a sandwich. I buy white and black puddings there, Irish bacon, meat pies, and my favorite Tayto brand Pickled Onion potato crisps. It’s also a reliable stop for UK products as well–it’s where I buy the HP sauce and the Colman’s English mustard that I (almost) always have on hand, Marmite and Branston pickle and even the jelly babies that I shouldn’t be eating but I’m crazy about anyway. The market has a deli, and they serve sandwiches that have, in my experience, been universally good. They don’t, in general, seem to be particularly Irish though.

They sell a fine Reuben, but whichever of the two competing origin stories you believe for this sandwich–it was invented at Reuben’s Deli in Manhattan, or in Omaha at the Blackstone Hotel to feed some late-night poker players–the Reuben was invented in the early 20th Century in America, by Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. They do a corned beef toastie with cheddar and grilled onions on rye, which may sound Irish on the surface, but corned beef is more Irish-American than Irish, and rye bread is apparently quite rare in Ireland, according to a comment I received recently on a TikTok video calling a sourdough version in Bangor the “best Reuben on the island.” Their “Smoked Butt Philly” uses a cured, smoked pork butt that wouldn’t look out of place in a boiled dinner in Ireland–it’s fantastic but again, “Philly” should give you some clues about the provenance of the sandwich it’s being used in. Probably the most Irish sandwich on their menu consists of a French roll filled with bangers, HP sauce, and grilled onions and then heated in a panini press.

Chicago is one of the most Irish cities in America, but the Irish heritage people around here celebrate–that “South Side Irish” contingent that now, apart from concentrations in neighborhoods like Bridgeport and Mount Greenwood, is largely suburban–has nothing to do with the Ireland of today. Few self-professed Irish-Americans in the Chicagoland of 2023 will have any trace of an Irish brogue, and in most cases neither did their parents or grandparents. The Irish population in Chicago boomed in the mid-19th Century, and according to a St. Patrick’s Day 1907 article in the Chicago Tribune, by that time 20% of the city was Irish. Today there are around 200,000 Irish Americans living in Chicago currently, or about 7.5% of the city’s current population. But the hazy and indistinct nostalgia that the Irish in Chicago, or Boston, or New York feel today isn’t even for the green, pastoral Ireland that their forebears left–it is for an America of the past, and the specific American traditions that developed within the Irish-American community.

Which is why you don’t see a sandwich like the Chicken Fillet Roll on the menu at Winston’s. The Chicken Fillet Roll–and fillet is pronounced to rhyme with billet in the Irish fashion, not ballet after the French–has only become a cultural phenomenon in the past 20 years or so. It’s sold at gas stations and convenience stores, chip shops and food trucks, and is currently the most popular sandwich in Ireland, and arguably the most Irish sandwich there is as a result. My colleagues at the great sandwiches-and-cultural-critique newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich–which I urge you to read if you haven’t, as Talia and her editor David are both far better writers than I am–came to no more definite conclusion about its origin when they wrote about it a year ago than I have been able to this month, deferring to a post on Reddit that claims its genesis to be circa 2002.

No South Side Irish superfan sitting in his frunchroom will therefore have ancestral memories of such a sandwich. It’s not on the menu at The Carraig down the street from me or at The Atlantic in my old neighborhood on the north side, or at Fado or Chief O’Neill’s or at any of the standard Irish pubs in Chicago. Bangers & Mash, Shepherd’s Pie, Fish & Chips, Steak & Guinness Pie, these are the stereotypical Irish dishes on offer there. There was a Chicken Fillet Roll on the menu of River North’s The Kerryman in 2020, which was described as “kettle fried chicken breast, housemade Irish coleslaw, white cheddar cheese, shredded leaf lettuce, french baguette.” It is still on the menu on this Kerryman website, but not this Kerryman website which appears to be more recently updated. I have not visited the bar myself to determine its current status but frankly, it doesn’t look worth the trip.

It doesn’t look bad, per se, it just doesn’t look worth dealing with River North traffic, parking, etc. Not when the sandwich itself seems so easy to make. I’ve looked at half a hundred recipes in the past couple of weeks and no two of them are identical but they don’t have to be. The Irish Chicken Fillet Roll consists of a breaded chicken breast filet–I have seen a few call for grilled chicken but they mostly appear to be breaded and fried–sliced and served in a long roll such as a demibaguette with lettuce and shredded cheese. There might be tomatoes. There might be mayonnaise or another sauce. There might be, as with the Kerryman version, coleslaw, though that seems thankfully rare. But it is a simple sandwich despite the many potential variants.

You could buy frozen chicken strips, pan-fry them, cut them in half, and make a Chicken Fillet Roll with 2 or 3 of them, and it would turn out fine.

The Irish Mirror, however, polled the people of Ireland back in 2020 and in the process, defined the most common options for the Irish Chicken Fillet Roll. Their choose-your-own-adventure version of the sandwich looks like this:

• Bread
  • White roll
  • Brown roll
• Spread
  • Butter
  • Mayonnaise
  • Neither
• Chicken
  • Regular
  • Spicy
• Toppings
  • None
  • Lettuce
  • Tomato
  • Red Onion
  • “Egg mayo” that appears to be a simple egg salad
  • Coleslaw
• Extras
  • None
  • Bacon
  • Wedges (these appear to be seasoned potato wedges, that are apparently distinct from chips)
  • Beans
• Cheese (Shredded cheddar appears to be the only option)
  • Yes
  • No
• Sauce
  • None
  • Taco
  • Garlic mayo
  • Ketchup
  • BBQ
• Cut in half? (Presentation is, after all, key)
  • Yes
  • No

I have bolded each category above, and italicized the most-selected option within each category. Those options –allowing for only a single selection per category–create 3840 different potential combinations. That doesn’t make sense though. Why wouldn’t someone be able to select both lettuce and tomato for their chicken roll? Or both bacon and wedges? (the heck with beans though–I ry not to judge but come on). By sensibly making each choice into a binary (e.g. it’s possible to have both butter and mayo on a roll, but not both a white roll and a brown roll. You can choose both taco sauce and ketchup–though why would you?–but not both cheese and no cheese.) the total possible combinations balloons to 262,144.

That means there are a whole lot of versions of this sandwich that I won’t be trying. But I can at least try a few. First I made both regular and spicy–by Irish standards–versions of chicken breast fillets. The version on the left was breaded with salt, pepper, onion powder, and garlic powder. The version on the right was seasoned with all of the above plus some paprika and cayenne pepper.

The distinct color difference in the uncooked fillets became less distinct as they browned in a shallow pan of oil.

However, rest assured that I kept track of which was which. As for the bread, I chose to use a softer “French roll” type of sub sandwich bread, as opposed to a harder baguette-style bread, simply because I think they work better for sandwiches. I put it in the oven for 4-5 minutes to give the surface a bit of crustiness and it turned out just right I think.

I gathered shredded lettuce, sliced tomato, skipped the red onions ’cause I didn’t want it and neither did my family. I had mayonnaise, garlic aioli, and a homemade version of Irish “taco sauce” (or my own approximation thereof, consisting of mayonnaise with ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, Taco Bell mild sauce, and a few shakes of Arrachera seasoning mixed in) all on hand–ketchup and barbecue sauce were available as well but not advertised by me, not really. I’ll admit that I didn’t push coleslaw or egg salad either, and I didn’t have any appropriate brown rolls for the purpose. But it was nearly a fully functional DIY chicken fillet roll station.

The version above that I made with chicken strips used the taco sauce with lettuce, tomato, and cheese on buttered bread, and while it was sloppy–I used too much chicken, and the tomato was overripe, and I could have done a better job arranging and folding it in general–it was delicious.

For this version, I started with a buttered roll and shredded lettuce.

Then tomato slices–seasoned of course, and some of the standard breaded chicken fillet.

I chose garlic mayo for this sandwich

And of course I added some finely shredded Irish cheddar to it as well.

It will surely come as no shock to you that this was a good sandwich.

There is nothing particularly surprising about it. The chicken was crisp on the edges, still warm and moist within, simply seasoned but tasty enough to stand out, despite being cut into smaller strips. In fact it struck me that this presentation resulted in only about 1/2 to 2/3 of a chicken breast being used for each sandwich, which makes for a much different chicken-to-bread ratio than that of the American “Chicken Sandwich Wars” contestants that were dominating sandwich discourse a few years ago. Also, while the chicken was still warm when it was added to the sandwich, it was not piping hot enough to melt the cheese, which I appreciated. In my piece about chicken sandwiches many years ago I mentioned that I just don’t get added cheese to a chicken sandwich but here, with a flavorful mature cheddar in gossamer shreds rather than a single waxy slice of American cheese, I appreciate it more, and in fact it seemed to help play up the presence of butter on the bread in a good way. The garlic mayo also was nice, with a milder, sweeter cooked garlic flavor rather than the intense raw garlic flavor of toum or an old-school aioli. It all came together to something entirely pleasant to eat, nothing to write home about perhaps but if every sandwich inspired you to write a letter, eventually your wrist would get too tired to lift the next sandwich.

So of course I made another. This time I chose only the most popular option from the Mirror’s poll above–a buttered white roll, spicy chicken, lettuce and cheese but no sauce or extras.

And of course, I cut it in half.

It’s a good sandwich, Ireland. I can see why you like it so much. I’m not sure where your ideas about “taco sauce” came from–though I’ve also had a good sandwich in Iceland that used something called taco sauce–but I’m not mad about it, it’s essentially another pink sauce like salsa golf or fry sauce, Thousand Island or Russian dressing, comeback sauce, mayochup or that seasoned mayo/ketchup blend that inexplicably causes people to buy the God-awful chicken strips from Raising Cane’s and rave about them. The version of this sandwich that I made using taco sauce was probably my favorite of the three I ate, though my spicy chicken came close without any sauce at all. Mindy and Ian both added mayo, garlic mayo, and taco sauce to their sandwiches and were over the moon about them. I think they had the right idea.