14 types of fried chicken. That’s what Chez Kimchi in Civic offers and more. On one spontaneous Friday night shopping trip into the city, J and I stopped in for dinner at Chez Kimchi. After hearing good reviews from various people, it was time to try it out. The menu has plenty of Korean dishes on offer. So many tasty sounding dishes that I almost forgot the separate fried chicken menu. Some of the fried chicken is coated in gangjung – a Korean rice cookie made of puffed rice, honey, peanuts and sesame seeds, and then you have your regular fried chicken in different sauces and seasonings. How do you pick?! Luckily you can purchase a half serve or a whole serve. After placing our order, five banchan dishes were provided a short while later.
We started off with the Korean steamed dumplings with prawns and vegetables ($6.80). Unfortunately, these only had a small portion of filling inside. The verdict? Too much dumpling and not enough filling.
J picked the maewun-japchae ($15.80) – stir fried sweet potato glass noodles with vegetables in a spicy soy sauce. I would have preferred the non-spicy version as this seemed to just get hotter and hotter the more I ate. Nevertheless, we were both really happy with the dish. There were lots of noodles and enough veggies to make this a simple yet yummy and filling dish.
It took about 20 minutes after digging into the japchae before the fried chicken arrived. We chose a half serve of sweet and spicy chicken ($18) which came thickly coated in a rich spicy sauce. I really enjoyed the gangjung which did make it super crunchy. The chicken itself was succulent and still steaming hot. The half serve came with 8 pieces of chicken (wings, drumsticks and breast). This is not a first date kind of meal. It’s messy. Your hands and your face will be covered in sauce. You have been warned.
J didn’t like the sweet and spicy sauce that much, and also thought the skin was too crunchy. I enjoyed it but then again I do love my sweets. So we’ll need to try another more savoury fried chicken next time. We didn’t finish all the chicken so I was thankful we ordered the half serve. We asked for a take away container to take the remaining chicken home. At 7.30pm on a Friday night, there was about a 10 minute wait for a table for 2. Service is polite with water and menus brought out to us after we sat down. However as we were seated out in the side corridor, it was difficult getting any attention to order our meal. The fried chicken took longer than expected to arrive but all in all, we had a lovely dinner and I would definitely go back to try more.
Foodgasm 7.5/10
Value for money 8/10
Service 6/10
FPJ score 21.5/30
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