FOOD

Ruling the Roost

Designer fried chicken at the Korean version of the Peach Pit.


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Published: Feb 19, 2008

There's a cracklike quality about the fried chicken at Café Soho. To hold one of those little drumsticks in your hands, to bite through the sticky-sauced, paper-thin skin, to chew the soft milk-white meat inside, is to know euphoria in poultry form.

The chicken, which comes to Soho courtesy of a Korean chain called Bon Chon, is a great example of what happens when, like a wayward exchange student, a quintessentially American food goes overseas and gets seduced by local customs only to return home a relative stranger. This version of fried chicken, a staple in Korean fast food joints and bars, is crisper, more streamlined, more nuanced in flavor and far easier to eat in great quantity. Popeye's franchises, beware.

Certainly, Soho has other qualities to commend. With its brightly colored lights, young wait staff and crowds of teenagers with asymmetrical haircuts drinking milk shakes, it's like a Korean version of the Peach Pit. The menu features some Japanese-inspired fare, cutlets and udon, plus heartier Korean dishes like duk boki, fat rice cakes in a spicy pepper sauce. This version nests the chewy tubes with fan-shaped scallion dumplings and a layer of melted cheese that languishes on the bottom of the dish like a face-down, liquid-y pizza. For dessert, there are bubble shakes and patbingsu, a chin-high bonanza of sweet red beans, shaved ices, fresh fruit, bits of jellied candy, ice cream and a drizzling of coconut milk.

But oh, the chicken. It comes 20 Buffalo-size drumsticks and wings to a foil-lined basket. (Unless you order the whole chicken, which includes all the parts.) It's fried twice with a minimal flour coating, producing a sharp, smooth crust. Most of the grease is cut out during the process, and the skin seals in moist, plump, chicken-y goodness.

Ordering your chicken half-and-half gets you both the house seasoning and the spicy varieties. The precise recipe is as closely guarded a secret as the Colonel's, but the spicy sauce is pink, studded with sesame seeds and blaring red pepper. The house seasoning, built on a sweetish soy base, is milder but still emphatically flavorful. Bon Chon emphasizes in its promotional materials that its chicken is sauced so perfectly you don't need to wipe your hands, but that's a bit of an exaggeration (at least at this outlet). Finger licking is inevitable.

On the side, you get cubes of pickled moo (daikon radish), a cool, clean antidote to the hot spiciness of the chicken. Wash it all down with soju or beer, which can be bought by the bottle or by the pitcher in a combo that includes the chicken. Of course, these enablers only ready your palate for more, more, more.

(e_ludwig@citypaper.net)

Café Soho

468 W. Cheltenham Ave., 215-224-6800

Hours: Open daily, noon-9 p.m.

Fried chicken, $20 per 20 pieces