Fox in the Henhouse

Fried chicken is usually the first thing a coeliac at the table has to wave off. Fox in the Henhouse built its counter to erase that problem: the breading is gluten-free across the whole menu, from the butter-brined chicken to the crispy tofu that sits right beside it. The kitchen makes both from scratch and treats them as equals rather than filing tofu under substitutions. What comes out on a brioche bun is a sandwich a whole table can order the same way — a quiet piece of engineering that makes a downtown Huntsville pickup window more useful than its footprint suggests.

The menu's real trick is how many identities it hands one format. The Southern comes with slaw, pickles, pickled red onions and chipotle mayo; the Buffalo swaps in quick-pickled carrots, celery and iceberg under hot sauce and jalapeño ranch; the Korean layers bulgogi, gochujang mayo, radish and pickled cucumber, and is honest enough to flag that its sauces carry gluten and break the gluten-free promise. The Club keeps it plain with bacon, tomato, arugula and basil mayo. The Hangover piles on pickled jalapeño, lemon-garlic slaw, tortilla chips, cheese sauce and chipotle mayo for the mornings that earn it. The sauces carry much of that identity work — a house Secret Sauce threaded through several builds, jalapeño ranch, gochujang and sweet chili giving one fried base a different accent each time. A rotating seasonal build and a build-your-own Customer Customs option round out the board. Same fried chicken or tofu underneath; a different meal on top each time.

Around the sandwiches sits the supporting cast a serious chicken window needs. Fresh-cut fries and duck-fat fries; chicken tenders to range across with a house peanut sauce or sweet chili; gluten-free gravy for poutine; house-made pickles; sliders and combos for smaller appetites; salads for the table that wants one; a kids' chicken combo; and glazed doughnuts, with seasonal doughnut holes, that turn up on weekends. None of it is fussy, and that is the read. Fox in the Henhouse behaves less like a sit-down restaurant than a food-truck kitchen that found a permanent doorway — it still reads as part of the John Street food-truck scene — and orders run through a Square pickup page, the sandwiches built to survive the short walk to wherever the meal actually gets eaten.

That walk is usually a short one. The counter sits on John Street next to Canvas Brewing, part of a downtown cluster that works as Huntsville's street-food corner, and the restaurant points diners toward the Muskoka River waterfront to sit down with the food. Seasonal ingredients and a stated commitment to inclusivity run underneath the whole thing, which is the same instinct that made the breading gluten-free in the first place. The brewery next door is neighbour rather than partner — somewhere to carry a sandwich and fries to a patio, not a beer list to read here. That adjacency is most of the geography that matters: the counter works because it sits exactly where a summer crowd is already walking, between a pint and the river.

Fox in the Henhouse has been at this since 2020, and the years show less in any room than in the menu's confidence — making the whole breading program gluten-free, giving tofu a real sandwich instead of a side, naming a Hangover build and meaning it. For a mixed table in downtown Huntsville — the coeliac, the vegetarian, the kid who only eats tenders, the one who came for the Korean — everyone orders off the same short menu and nobody eats around it. The counter calls it perfecting the art of the sandwich. In practice it is closer to making one sandwich work for a whole street.