yaokui: Momofuku Fried Chicken Dinner

Address: 171 First Ave, New York

http://www.momofuku.com

Phone: none

David Chang is always making headlines with his food/restaurant ideas. His latest talk of the town dinner concept is the fried chicken dinner at momofuku noodle bar. Just like at Momofuku Ko, you need to make online reservation in order to have the fried chicken dinner and the reservation is only available for 4-8 people at specific lunch/dinner time.

The process of getting a reservation at momofuku Ko was too much for me, so you can't pay me enough to go through the same reservation process for fried chicken dinner. But since our friend Nick is obsessed with fried chicken (he actually forewarned us NOT to go eat momofuku fried chicken dinner without him), we let him take care of the reservation. He managed to score a table for 8 people at 12am last week so good job Nick!

chicken man nick

The $100 fried chicken dinner comes with two whole fried chickens, one southern style and one korean style. The southern style chicken is fried with a buttermilk and old bay batter while the korean style chicken is triple fried and served with a light spicy glaze. The fried chicken meal also came with mu shu pancakes, long spicy peppers, baby carrots, red ball radishes, shiso leaves, bibb lettuce, four sauces and an assortment of herbs. The four sauces are ginger and scallion, jalapeno in soy sauce, hoisin sauce and bibim sauce.

The mu shu pancakes are used as wraps, to be eaten with slices of fried chicken or fried chicken skin, Peking duck style. Some of us liked the southern style better, while the rest preferred the korean style. I personally liked the korean style fried chicken better, with jalapeno and soy sauce and ginger and scallion sauces.

I wished I can just go into momofuku and order fried chicken anytime I want. But I guess that's not what David Chang can offer. He actually told GQ blogger Alan Richman to “Why don’t you open up your own fucking restaurant? How about that?” after Alan Richman suggested that he should retire his online reservations system and make fried chicken available to everyone. Whether Alan Richman deserved that type of response after badgering David Chang and comparing his chicken dinner to KFC, I'm not sure. But David should know better that there will be people who will read that and find out about David's temper. Momo fried chicken is delicious, but a little bit of humility to pare down his bigger than life personality would be a nice gesture to the people who truly appreciate what he has done to the NYC food scene, and specifically the asian fusion movement. People should be talking about his food, not his antics.