Gluten-free and coeliac-affected diners will find plenty of options at Wu-Cha

Wu-Cha, launched on January 23, features an Asian-style chicken menu oozing with flavours like sticky garlic and ginger barbecue sauce, chillies, house-made pickles, pickled slaw, pickled cucumbers, pickled cauliflower, pickled grapes and miso butter.

Wu-Cha offers gluten-free options, including the fried chicken, and the bun, and also has vegan choices. It is proving to be a safe choice for those with coeliac disease, too.

"Great, healthy, clean, casual fast food," is how Matt Lovell, the CEO of Wu-Cha, describes the menu. "That’s something we are really passionate about."

While Lovell is keen to acknowledge the contribution of Birch, an architect and his partner, and Callinan, a chef and long-time pal, Wu-Cha is his dream project.

Lovell is a Novocastrian who's come home. A three-time ARIA award winner (music engineer for albums by The Mess Hall, Eskimo Joe, Shihad), he was involved in Silverchair's career from the beginning. 

In recent years he has been working in London, producing film soundtracks with composer Jed Kurzel. His last work was with Ridley Scott on Alien: The Covenant. As a mate of Chris Joannou, he was in the neighbourhood when The Edwards was launched in 2014. 

While he spent nearly 20 years living away from Newcastle, calling London home with frequent refresher trips to Asia where he often caught up with Callinan, it was during a trip back to Newcastle for a wedding that Lovell woke up to the city's revival.

"I hadn't been been back here for years and I was blown away by what was going on in Newcastle," he says. "Finally, it was going ahead. I was seeing the potential of what was going on in Newcastle. When I left, King Street was dead and nothing was going on."

While music is a passion and livelihood, food has always been a special interest for Lovell.

"I always made my own chilli oils and ferments," he says. "I gave it away under the name 'wu-cha. I did hand-made labels and gave it to friends at the Edwards, the chefs."

Nearly a year ago he met Birch for the first time. While she's been a casual academic and design tutor at the University of Newcastle School of Architecture for the past seven years, she is also a creative artist who runs photobooths and and does photobooth artwork. She, too, has bought into the Wu-Cha idea.

"Matt really wanted a strong visual impact," she says. " . . . early Bladerunner - ironically set in 2019." The design result: an invitation to "dystopian fried chicken". "Take these radical flavours and celebrate that visually," as she describes it.

As for Callinan, a prominent fixture on the Newcastle food scene (most recently as Mulga Bill's wood fire cooking), he began casually giving advice to his mate Lovell, then jumped on board when the idea started to gel into something serious.

"There were a lot of ideas put on the table," Callinan says, "and we picked the ones that worked. We set up a logistical way of doing the chicken and getting it to the table, developing recipes for sauces.

"It was driven by Matt, with me executing it using my 30 years of cooking knowledge. We use a lot of modern techniques, which set our product apart in quality and also allows us to expand on this quite easily and achieve that holy grail of culinary things that is consistency."

The Wu-Cha marinated chicken wings have proven to be the early favourite with customers. Wu-Cha waffles (served with crispy fried chicken, miso butter, pickled grapes and sweet sticky sauce) are developing a cult following.

As Lovell calls it: "On Sunday at 11am, young dudes on struggletown Sunday are buying waffles."