Home » Latest » Trending Now » RECORD BREAKING BIRD!!! Roasting an Ostrich WHOLE!!! (NEVER BEFORE ATTEMPTED!!!!)

RECORD BREAKING BIRD!!! Roasting an Ostrich WHOLE!!! (NEVER BEFORE ATTEMPTED!!!!)

6

InfoSearched 59 0 Trending Now

8.6

SaveSavedRemoved 2

An entire ostrich, spit-roasted whole, in the middle of Saigon — a feat almost nobody in the food world has actually pulled off.

Sonny Side, host of the Best Ever Food Review Show, has built a career on eating things most people wouldn’t touch and cooking things most kitchens wouldn’t dare attempt. His September 2019 upload, “RECORD BREAKING BIRD!!! Roasting an Ostrich WHOLE!!! (NEVER BEFORE ATTEMPTED!!!!),” pushes that reputation further than usual. The video documents an outdoor barbecue built specifically to roast a full, intact ostrich on a custom spit — not in South Africa, where the bird is farmed commercially and might seem the obvious setting, but in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Sonny didn’t do it alone. He brought in Pitmaster Mark to handle the rotisserie engineering and heat management, plus culinary collaborator Chef Marie to build out a menu that matched the scale of the centerpiece. The result is less a single dish than a full oversized cookout, built around one bird that most restaurants wouldn’t know how to portion, let alone spit-roast whole.

• The team roasted an entire, intact ostrich on a custom outdoor spit rotisserie over open coals — a bird almost never cooked whole because of its size and its lean, unevenly distributed red meat.
• Sides built for the oversized theme included giant buffalo wings made from ostrich wings and giant deviled eggs made from actual ostrich eggs.
• Chef Marie developed an au jus gravy specifically to offset the leanness and gaminess of ostrich meat, which lacks the fat marbling of beef or pork.

Ostrich Defies Conventional Roasting Methods

Pit cooks who spit-roast pigs or lambs whole are working with animals that have consistent fat coverage, which helps self-baste the meat as it turns over the coals. Ostrich doesn’t offer that luxury. It’s essentially all lean red muscle, closer in texture and iron content to beef than to poultry, and it dries out fast if the heat isn’t managed with real precision. That’s the specific problem Pitmaster Mark had to solve building a rig that could hold a bird of that size and turn it evenly without scorching the exterior before the interior caught up.

It’s also just a size problem. An ostrich carcass dwarfs a whole pig on a spit, and rigging a rotisserie strong enough to rotate that mass for hours over open coals in Saigon’s heat isn’t something either man had a template for. The video treats that engineering — not just the eating — as the real story.

Building a Menu Around One Enormous Bird

Rather than just parking the ostrich on the spit and waiting, the crew built a full spread that played off the bird’s scale. Ostrich wings were turned into oversized buffalo wings, and the eggs — famously enormous compared to a chicken egg — became giant deviled eggs, a visual gag as much as a dish. Chef Marie’s contribution was less about theatrics and more about technique: an au jus gravy engineered specifically to complement lean, gamey meat that has none of the fat content a typical roast relies on for flavor.

Whole ostrich, roasted intact on an open-coal spit — a bird rarely cooked this way anywhere, attempted here for the first time on camera in Saigon.

The pairing matters because ostrich meat, left on its own, can read as tough and one-note. The gravy was the fix, and it’s the kind of detail that separates a stunt cookout from an actual barbecue operation — the same instinct that shows up when pitmasters and chefs elsewhere obsess over sauce-to-meat ratios, whether that’s a Texas brisket or, on a different scale entirely, the kind of precision knife work and sauce-building you’ll see in other kitchens built around technical skill.

The Setup, the Coals, and the Wait

The video’s back half follows the actual roast: getting the bird secured on the custom spit, managing distance from the coals so the outside doesn’t char while the core stays underdone, and rotating it steadily over what amounts to a multi-hour cook. That kind of patience is familiar to anyone who’s watched a serious pitmaster work — it’s the same discipline that separates backyard grilling from something like a chef racing against the clock, except here the clock runs for hours, not minutes, and there’s no redo if the bird comes off dry.

When it finally comes off the spit, the payoff is the taste test with the BEFRS crew — the moment the video has been building toward, judging whether the lean meat held moisture, whether the au jus did its job, and whether an animal this size can actually be roasted whole without turning into an expensive mistake.

Sonny Side has made a habit of chasing the biggest, strangest version of a dish wherever he lands next, and this ostrich roast in Saigon is squarely in that lane — the kind of stunt that only works if the crew behind the camera, in this case Pitmaster Mark and Chef Marie, can actually back up the spectacle with a bird that’s edible at the end of it.