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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.
Like egg rolls and gyoza, fried chicken is one of those dishes that your mother probably makes better than everyone else, because no one else's version is quite as crispy, or quite as juicy, or made w... More »
In our last handy food flowchart, we tried to point you in the right direction for those times when you just need a bowl of ph? to comfort your soul. Today, our flowchart helps you navigate the city ... More »
Dear Mr. Gold: You seem to be writing about a lot of Korean restaurants recently. The new KFC is Korean Fried Chicken. I've tried BonChon and Kyochon. While both are good, I have to give the edge to Kyochon, although BonChon gets points for easy... More »
We love big hunks of tender, southern-style fried chicken, brined overnight in buttermilk, seasoned, dredged, and then fried in a cast iron skillet full of Crisco. But more and more, Los Angeles seems... More »
I pan-fried 75 pieces of chicken the other day, legs and thighs from sustainably raised chickens that I had brined in salted buttermilk, dusted with flour and fresh herbs, and sizzled in the unholy brew of lard, butter and country-ham drippings... More »
I often find myself drawn to the peppery fried chicken at Bertha's, a soul-food café not far from Watts, and the crackly skinned fried chicken with fermented tofu at Mission 261 may be the best dish in that formidable Cantonese restaurant. The Buffalo-style fried wings at Ye Rustic Inn and the Japanese-style fried wings at FuRaiBo are exemplary. But it has become evident in the last year that Korean fried chicken really is an evolutionary leap forward — marinated in a cabinet full of spices, saturated with garlic, double-fried to a shattering, thin-skinned snap dramatic enough to wake a sleeping baby in an adjoining room. It is not accidental that fried-chicken parlors have been opening in Koreatown almost as ferociously as frozen-yogurt stands. Kyochon, the first of the Korean chicken joints, definitely has some problems. The chicken is cooked to order, so even a simple to-go box can take an eternity to prepare, and the only real appetizer is marinated cubes of daikon, a conceit that is amusing for about five minutes. Somebody really needs to learn how to set the carbonation controls on the soda machine. Beer would be nice. But then the chicken comes out, hacked into random pieces, all garlic and juice, heat and crunch, and finishing every last femur and scrap of rib meat becomes the most important thing in the world. Bonchon, Chicken Day and the oddly named BBQ all serve good Korean fried chicken, but it's the Kyochon birds that you dream about the next day.—Jonathan Gold
I often find myself drawn to the peppery fried chicken at Bertha's, a soul-food café not far from Watts, and the crackly skinned fried chicken with fermented tofu at Mission 261 may be the best dish in that formidable Cantonese restaurant. The Buffalo-style fried wings at Ye Rustic Inn and the Japanese-style fried wings at FuRaiBo are exemplary. But it has become evident in the last year that Korean fried chicken really is an evolutionary leap forward -- marinated in a cabinet... More »
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