There is never enough chicken when it comes to Matt Abergel. The chef behind Yardbird, Hong Kong’s celebrated chicken yakitori restaurant, opened Always Joy in March 2025. Despite the modern izakaya sharing none of the dishes of its older sibling, a chicken item still remains popular: the stuffed chicken wing.

“We prep 40 of them a day,” Abergel says inside the kitchen. Standing next to two fryers, Dan Koh, the tempura station cook, is beginning the day’s prep with the chicken wings. He makes a small cut along the top of the wingette, gently creating space between the meat and bone.

The signature three yellow chicken is used – a breed of bird that Abergel has repeatedly advocated for over the years, and the same one Yardbird uses just next door.

A version of a stuffed wing has always been on the menu, dating back to Abergel’s now-closed izakaya, Ronin. Changing the stuffing every few months, the team has rotated flavours from pizza stuffing and shrimp and scallop, to more daring flavour combinations such as mango sticky rice.

“It was really good,” Abergel says, recalling the Thai dessert-inspired wing. The sauce was inspired by amba, an Iraqi-style fermented mango sauce; the filling combined sticky rice and mango with a spicy mango glaze.

The current chicken wing on the menu, however, is much tamer. Using minced drumstick meat as stuffing, mixed with shio koji, salt and pepper, Abergel pays homage to Nagoya-style wings, a style of deep-fried chicken wings coated in a peppery, sweet soy sauce originating from the eponymous region of Japan.

“This drumstick meat has a really good separation of lean meat, fat and also connective tissue and collagen, so it has a nice bounce to it,” the chef says, explaining that it is the same meat used for Yardbird’s meatball skewer.