She Thought She'd Meet the Love of Her Life in a Chicken Shop. Twelve Years Later, She's Closing the Shop.

When Amelia Dimoldenberg was 17, she had an idea that sounds less like a career plan and more like a joke: maybe she'd meet the love of her life on a date in a chicken shop. She turned it into an interview series instead, and spent the next twelve years sitting across from some of the most famous people in the world in fluorescent-lit fried chicken restaurants, deadpanning her way through questions nobody else would ask.

On September 3, she announced it's ending.

Chicken Shop Date launched in 2014, when Dimoldenberg was interviewing figures from Britain's underground rap scene in exactly the kind of restaurant its title promises. It stayed a niche, cult favorite for years — the kind of thing you'd have to already know about to find.

That changed in 2021, when a Jack Harlow episode went properly viral. Dimoldenberg's flat, unimpressed style — treating global celebrities exactly the way she'd treat anyone else awkwardly across a table — turned out to be exactly what the internet wanted. The show's audience, and her own profile, jumped almost overnight.

From there, the guest list kept getting stranger and more impressive at the same time: Andrew Garfield, Sabrina Carpenter, the Jonas Brothers, Matty Healy — and, memorably, Elmo. Dimoldenberg started showing up as a fixture at major awards shows themselves, working the format into red-carpet interviews at the Golden Globes in 2023 and the Oscars this year.

The series has passed a billion views across its run — a number that's almost funny given how small and specific the original premise was.

Dimoldenberg, 32, says a handful of final episodes are coming before the show closes for good — "a last line-up of eclectic guests," as she put it, before she moves on. That next chapter is already taking shape: she's set to star in and produce a romantic comedy for Amazon MGM Studios' Orion Pictures, about a journalist whose life gets upended when a celebrity interview turns into an unexpected romance. She's also developing a young-adult drama for the BBC that she's described as her own version of Skins.

No date has been set for the actual final episode. For now, the shop's still open — just not for much longer.