Kyochon

• Cuisine(s): Korean
  Hours: Daily 10:30am-3am
  Price: $$
• Payment Types: All Major Credit Cards
  Features: Takeout, Delivery
  Serving: Dinner, Lunch
• Alcohol: None
  Reservations: Accepted, Recommended on Weekends
  Parking: Lot Available, Valet

Description

A gleaming, sterile, mostly takeout joint in a Koreatown mall, Kyochon is an early local outpost of a thousand-restaurant chain that prepares chicken with an intense precision more commonly associated with brain surgery or microchips. What do you eat at Kyochon? Fried chicken - a whole tiny chicken chopped into tiny pieces - steeped in a garlicky marinade that supposedly contains 23 ingredients, double-fried to a glassy, thin-skinned crunch, meat rendered of most of its fat, that is similar to what you might find in a good Cantonese restaurant, only juicier. While you wait for your chicken, you are given a bowl of crunchy, sweet-and-sour pickled radish cubes, the classic Korean accompaniment, which is slightly less penitential than it may sound, and as much Coke and Sprite as you can drink. There has been Korean-style chicken in Los Angeles before, but Kyochon may be the most chicken-intensive restaurant on the planet, especially when the sticky Korean pop pauses just long enough to allow the playing of a Kyochon radio commercial, whose clucks and scratchings can be understood in any language.