In Australia’s biggest city, fast-food outlets have come to signal demographic divides. That’s all about to change …

Urban planners and columnists have long used the “latte line” or the “Colorbond fence” as simple shorthand to separate Sydney’s best-off residents from everyone else. It’s a diagonal stripe that bifurcates the city, starting near the airport and running north and west. If you live to the north and east of that line, so the story goes, you’re probably doing all right. Find yourself on the south-west side and your economic prospects worsen.

In recent years another metric has emerged, carving up Australia’s biggest city according to its fast-food offerings: it’s called the chicken curtain, or the Red Rooster line.

That line is about to be broken. Last Wednesday photographic evidence erupted on social media, revealing that the cult chicken shop El Jannah is preparing to open in Newtown, in the inner west. The chain now has six Sydney locations – in Granville, Punchbowl, Blacktown, Campbelltown, Penrith and Kogarah – suburbs between 14 and 55km from Sydney’s central business district. The new King Street storefront will be El Jannah’s furthest incursion east, and upsets a convenient method of mapping the city’s class lines.

Johnny Lieu (@Johnny_Lieu) An El Jannah in Newtown. In my lifetime.

The idea that Sydneysiders could be sorted according to chicken shops was born somewhere between Twitter and Reddit, where the term “the Red Rooster line” quickly spread.

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

The University of Sydney magazine Honi Soit explained it in 2017: “The formula is simple: sketch the points of all the Red Roosters in Sydney and you get a surprisingly neat indication of the border of Western Sydney.”

By its assessment, you could map the distribution of Sydney’s wealth via other fast-food outlets. Lebanese-styled El Jannah locations, where chicken is served with pickles, sujuk and a ferocious garlic sauce you can smell from a mile off, constituted the “ethnic West”. The chicken chain Chargrill Charlie’s, whose sides include “green goddess” salad and seared broccoli, is found in moneyed suburbs including Rose Bay and Mosman and thus marked the “affluent North”.

The Red Rooster line had non-dietary implications, such as school results, which differ vastly depending on which side you live on.

Nathan Ruser (@Nrg8000) THREAD to show booth-level swings in two party preferred in major cities. Data is preliminary from AEC, will do more when full data comes out. These maps show SWINGS not overall winner. Doesnt include seats with Indie contests.

Here's Sydney. Clearly follows the Red-Rooster Line pic.twitter.com/cCK35e7nJc

El Jannah opening in the inner west throws the whole thing off. But the chicken purveyor says demand came from well beyond its home turf. “We’ve got a lot of patrons who tell us they came all the way from the eastern side of Sydney,” El Jannah’s business development manager, Tony Nahas, tells Guardian Australia. “So we’ve answered the call.”

The chain opening in Newtown might also be a reminder that the city is not as segregated as it’s made out to be.

“I think, actually, Sydney is a pretty integrated city compared to other places,” James Arvanitakis, a social and cultural analysis professor at Western Sydney University, tells Guardian Australia. “If we were having this conversation a generation ago, you would say Sydney is incredibly class-divided. Areas of greater western Sydney were often known as areas of exclusion. But what we see now is that [it’s] a patchwork of classes.”

He says there are pockets of inequality and privilege on either side of the line. “The Red Rooster line, or the latte line, provides us with some insight but it’s also a very simplified way of looking at it. What it allows people to do is create this really superficial, straw man understanding of what people are like in these different parts of Sydney.”

And while El Jannah’s move might be particularly high-profile, it’s hardly the first time the Harbour City’s neighbourhoods have changed face. “People have been embracing different cultures across Sydney for the last 10 or 20 years,” Arvanitakis says. “If you look at Randwick, it has a number of restaurants that were originally established in Fairfield or Parramatta. I don’t think it’s anything new. Maybe it’s just been happening a little bit below the radar.”

There are still a few weeks until El Jannah cuts the ribbon on its Newtown store. When that happens, Sydney will have to find a new metaphor for its divisions, or a more subtle way of understanding them.



