Momofuku Fried Chicken Meal Visited 9/23/10 - 3 Forks

Momofuku Noodle Bar 171 First Avenue, New York NY 10003
                                                                                           

I had been to Momofuku Noodle Bar years ago before David Chang blew up in New York City.  And my impression then was "eh".  Sadly, after so much hype and excitement over eating at one of his famous "for the table" meals, I still think it's a bit eh.  I'm not quite sure what all the hub-ub is about.  Each of his restaurants has a large group meal: in Saam it's the pork butt, in Ma Peche it's the beef 7 ways and here it's the fried chicken meal.  It's 2 1/4 chicken cooked southern style or asian/korean style and then it comes with pancakes and a bowl full of butter lettuce, carrots, radishes and basil.  And it's $100 total for up to 8 people, so obviously the more people you have the less each person has to pay. The only way to get this meal is through an intense online lottery system where you battle for only 2 time slots.

My friends at work were looking for a nice upscale meal since all their VPs were out of the office and I thought that this was a great idea and wanted to get in on it. I was surprised at how many people were in the restaurant just having a leisurely lunch.  Apparently I am working for the wrong company or just need to marry rich and be a lady who lunches.  I thought I had read on the website that the meal comes out 15 mins after your reservation, but for us when we sat down they said it would be another 25 minutes.  So we ordered 3 orders of pork buns while we waited.  Now I will say that the buns were Amazing. They had giant and perfectly cooked pieces of pork belly with slices of cucumber and hoisin sauce.  It's definitely one of the better pork buns I've had in the city but for $10 for 2, it seems a bit excessive.

Finally, the fried chicken came out.  I started with the southern style first, mostly because the asian style ones were mostly wings and I never found wings to be satisfying enough. While the inside of the chicken was pretty moist, I found the skin to be dry and not very crispy.  It almost seemed like there was too much batter on it...the skin wasn't thin and crunchy.  Instead it was very thick and just bulky.  Flavor wise, it has a hint of Old Bay, which I usually love, but it just seems to dry the skin out.  They also give you four different dipping sauces:  Spicy garlic, oyster, chili, and ginger scallion. I'm not quite sure why they felt the need to treat this chicken meal a la Peking Duck because it just didn't work.  The chicken didn't hold up well because the pieces aren't sliced as big as it is with duck or other pancake/meat combination.  I then moved on to the Asian style chicken and I actually liked the sauce on this one better.  But it was still also too thickly coasted and it was mostly on skinny wings which is frustrating because there isn't a lot of meat to it.  Unfortunately, since we only had 5 people we had about 5-6 pieces of chicken left.  So I think 6 people would be the perfect number for the meal and it would help to spread out the costs as well.

All in all, I was a bit disappointed with the meal given all the hype.  But the pork buns is what carried this review above 2 forks because they really were that good and I do like the communal/group meal idea. The total bill was $170 without tip....which frankly seems too high for fried chicken.  I think you're much better off going to BonChon or some other korean fried chicken place for much less.