chicken wars

Yesterday I ran into KyoChon near Herald Square for a quick dinner before catching Lady Gaga’s Monster Ball tour.

(The tour, in case you were wondering, was 100% weird and full of hideously amazing costumes – I was expecting no less.)

The food, on the other hand, was a bit more tame.

I ordered a 5-piece meal of spicy-sweet fried chicken wings with a bi bimbap rice ball.  There was a free sauce station with pre-packaged tubs of ketchup, garlic mayo, kyochon sauce, and honey mustard neatly stacked just waiting to be picked up.

For $10+ I got a few small pieces of chicken and one sticky rice ball with a spicy red pepper center.  The wings were not bad – but the sure don’t live up to Bon Chon’s crunchy, crispy gravity-defying outer shell

In case you forgot…

The KyoChon pieces were too small to really get a good bite of crispy skin/meat.

The menu was a bit more playful than Bon Chon (they served fried chicken strips breaded with a rice crispie-like crust and other varieties of the rice ball) and I love free sauce stations, but I think KyoChon is going to have some serious competition when the newest Bon Chon, located literally two storefronts away, opens for business.

May the best chicken win!

mad for (bon chon) chicken

In New York, fried chicken is the new cupcake.  Rather, fried chicken has become the new pork belly.

If you don’t see where I’m going with this, fried chicken is simply the new food fad on the streets of the big apple.

I’ve long been a fan of fried chicken, and I don’t discriminate.  KFC, Popeyes, Momofuku, Locande Verde, The Brooklyn Bowl…I’ll eat it anywhere!

But being the Asian that I am, there is nothing better than a piece of sweet, spicy, savory, garlicky fried chicken.

And nobody does it better than Mad For Chicken (aka Bon Chon).

The options are simple. You get soy-garlic or spicy-hot.  Either a medium size or a large (choice of legs/wings mix or just one).

The result is fried chicken heaven.  I’ve decided the secret is the signature crispy outer layer of skin covered in glistening spice and flavor.

You can see that the skin is entirely separated from the chicken.  It’s crispy, crunchy and soo good!

Served with some irreplaceable daikon radish, this is my kind of fried chicken!