Roadkill: plat de nuit

Tommy Gilhooly tucks in to the culture of cuisine killed on the road

Petr Davydtchenko and Masayoshi Haraguchi outside The Bacon Factory. Image: Yuliya Grazhdan

It started with a Pitbull — pitbull stew, to be precise. Some of it is still left over in the freezer. Then it was badger, fox, donkey, porcupine, and many, many rats. A crow from London, however, remains preserved in a plastic bag – for aesthetic reasons.

Squirrel, yakitori-style, is on the menu this evening. It is the latest addition to this Noah’s Ark of gastronomic perversity. They don’t come with a Red Tractor badge, but the squirrels have been sourced locally: around St James’s Park over the past month. The smell is nutty, as they lie barbequeing on a grill at the front of the gallery – The Bacon Factory in Kennington.

It’s certainly not a usual canapé for a book launch — that being the Death Book by Russian-born artist Petr Davydtchenko. For three years, he lived exclusively on roadkill. He would photograph, then skin, butcher and eat any animal he found, indiscriminately. ‘Pitbull’, Petr tells me now, ‘just tastes like a Pitbull.’ Death Book documents the peculiar recipes developed during that time. Fox-head soup, for example.

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Chef Masayoshi Haraguchi has been transforming these roadkill recipes into haute cuisine — but it’s the first time he’s preparing squirrel. That’s because the menu for their pop-up restaurant in The Bacon Factory, KHAM, is based on whatever Petr has happened to find along the A21 and M26 over the past month: ‘Up until the very last minute, we couldn’t even make the menu, because we didn’t know what animals we would be cooking. It’s a bit like a lottery.’ Venison, mixed-roadkill jelly consommé, and Peking-style pheasant were served at a one-night-only event at the gallery this April. Previously the executive chef of the Michelin-star Dominique Bouchet restaurant in Paris, Masayoshi has found working with roadkill fascinating. ‘Each animal has a different texture, a different taste’, he tells me.

For its sheer method-in-madness — its ecological sensitivity of transmuting highway detritus into delectable cutlets, consommés and broths — this roadkill restaurant, though gone as quickly as it emerged, may be the most interesting gastronomic event of the year. You must sign a waiver before you devour any of the menu; I’m not allowed to keep a copy, but the gist is that this is not a restaurant, but an artistic performance. You are participating in it voluntarily, and you are thus responsible for anything that happens to you, even to the point of death.

It all sounds rather dangerous, but Petr believes roadkill is some of the best meat you can get your hands on: ‘It’s the same quality of meat as if you went hunting. It’s wild, natural.’ Legally, of course, you cannot deliberately ram down animals. Instead, Petr views it as an almost ‘automated hunting’, created at the crossroads of technology and nature – the endless stream of traffic meeting the wild forest. ‘When the animal dies, it doesn’t release stress hormones in the blood because it’s a sudden death. In a way, it’s the most healthy way you can get meat – if you manage to get on the site of the accident quickly, within two hours ideally,’ he says.