Eating wings with Korean teenagers

After a long night of poker (bed happened around dawn), I needed some good comfort food the next day for a late breakfast (actually, more like a late lunch!) V had just the ticket: Kyochon Chicken, a Korea-based chain that is all over Korea with outposts in Shanghai (one), LA (four in Koreatown) and NYC (three in Koreatown). Their specialty is, clearly, fried chicken wings.

The first batch to reach us was original recipe fried chicken wings. These were great to start, with nice batter and good flesh. The chickens they use are very small, so the meat retains a lot of flavor (though there is more work required to free it from the wing). And, their frying process includes two rounds of frying and takes 25 minutes from end to end.

The second batch was spicy fried chicken wings. And, as is becoming apparent throughout China, when they say spicy they mean it. One of these and my lips started to go numb. I had to both eat an original wing and drink some beer to get the pain to subside. But it was worth it and I kept going back - these were much better than the original.

The third batch, which came after the first two were complete, was the honey and rice fried chicken wings. These were much sweeter and came with a lighter batter that appeared to have rice krispies in it. They were delectable and further numbed the pain from the spicy wings.

We ended up not being sated and so ordered another round of original and spicy to take our meal to the end.

Once done, the wing bones would find their way into silver buckets on the table. These buckets kept filling up and getting refreshed with new ones. Eventually, the four of us at the table polished off 130 wings. Which, in hindsight, sounds a little disgusting and perhaps a bit indulgent. But they were just so good and we were so hungry!

A final postscript to this meal was the ambiance. Wing joints in the States tend to be divey and to focus on sports. This chain has a target audience of teenage Korean girls, and it seems to be hitting its mark. Besides our table, that's all there was! They were enticed by the Korean boy band pictures, the well-lit chain environment, and also by the delicious chicken.