Cult Sydney chicken joint El Jannah is opening an 'express' location in Newtown, the latest salvo in the city's chook wars

There is no culinary subject prone to more debate in Sydney than the relative merits of the city's various local takeaway chicken chains. But most would agree that the crown goes to El Jannah, the Western Sydney chook mecca, which has seen many a journey from eastern pilgrims traversing the T1 line to Granville.

For those who make said journey on a regular basis, a far closer oasis will be opening its doors soon. An El Jannah 'express' takeaway shop will be joining the chain's 6 other outlets – this one in Newtown, in the Sydney's inner west.

Rumours that El Jannah was setting up shop cropped up on Reddit over the past 24 hours, as signage appeared on King St.

Speaking to Business Insider Australia, El Jannah's business development manager Tony Nahas confirmed the location will be opening its doors in "3 to 6 weeks," and it will be the chain's first takeaway-style shop with limited seating and no table service.

The Newtown shop joins full-service El Jannah locations in Granville, Punchbowl, Blacktown, Penrith, Campbelltown and – most recently – Kogarah, all of which serve exceptionally good) Lebanese-style charcoal chicken.

Nahas told Business Insider that he is constantly fielding requests from people who live closer to the eastern suburbs of Sydney to bring the chain towards the city centre, and Newtown is the closest they've gotten.

Most crucially, it'll be available on Uber Eats.

Nahas says the chain aims to open 1-2 stores a year for the foreseeable future, and it certainly seems like the demand is there to furnish new locations.

Doing so will surely throw Sydney's delicate chook ecosystem, a cold war fought on numerous fronts, into disarray.

Numerous compelling efforts have been made in the past to map Sydney's political topography using the various sub-regional chicken locations. The first and most famous, posted to Twitter in 2016, argued that one could objectively establish the boundary line for Western Sydney using 'the Red Rooster line', which cleaves the metropolis in half based on the locations of the venerable chicken chain.

Always debate about the exact definition of Western Sydney: I present the Red Rooster Line (S. Hill an obv. outlier) pic.twitter.com/J1DsvpB02h

— Big Jez (@THE_REAL_BIGJEZ) February 7, 2016

Competing efforts have cropped up on Reddit and the social media world. One suggests that you can also delineate Sydney's affluent north by Chargrill Charlies locations.

Honi Soit, the student newspaper of the University of Sydney, helpfully brought together these disparate layers of data into a map which looks like the partition plan for a conflict zone.

The Honi Soit article includes a genius interactive map of Sydney's takeaway chains, and how they map to the economic classes who occupy Sydney's various regions.

There are of course a series of other smaller chicken takeaway players operating in the demilitarised chook zone of the city centre. Most notably, Frango in Petersham – which has two other locations in the west and east – has been dishing out legendary Portuguese-style chicken since 1992.

One thing is certain: the entry of El Jannah to Newtown is a brand new front in Sydney's chicken wars.