It’s Saturday night. Dinner time. It’s going to be the first entry in our blog. We settled for an old standard, a favorite comfort food joint on dear ol’ Telegraph Ave. Just to test the waters for collaborative blogging. Nice and familiar food. Can’t go wrong.
But tonight’s different. I have to start off this blog with my humble two-cents on something so homely and yet magnificent – the Korean-style Fried Chicken.
Before the deluge of oily goodness, we got a trio of small dishes: white daikon kimchi; jalapeno and celery in a spicy ponzu vinaigrette; and the Koreanized slaw – plain shredded cabbage with addictive Thousand Island dressing. All three plates were swiftly inhaled into our greedy stomachs. No surprise there. The dark, rattan blinds and the loud, irreverently 90s K-pop shaded us and every other table of diners in a cloak of unpretentious, all-out binge-fest, be it for skewers or soju. We were safe.
Per usual we ordered two different preparations of Korean Fried Chicken – the Gan Jang and the Original Fried. The Gan Jang is our go-to dish, hands down. Its light-colored batter pairs beautifully with the honey-infused shoyu marinade, in which the freshly-fried pieces of thigh and leg were tossed right before serving. Topped with sparse pieces of chopped parsley and almost-caramelized slices of garlic, something magical happens between your first bite and your next chew: you get instantly hooked onto the next piece, and crave for more of that sauce which they wisely used with restraint – the crispiness must only be teased with it, like how a hard-edged rocker may sometimes wear baby-pink cardigan sweaters. The Original Fried was akin to a pleasurable visit from an old friend: a darker, more flour-based batter was used, and to be dipped in small nibs of honey mustard.
Korean-style fried chicken evokes strange, unreal memories. Biting into something flavorful and yet crispy at the same time reminds one of Calbee chips or croquettes, but not quite right; the juicy tenderness of chicken meat that follows right after brings it to a surreal level, as if re-tasting the best braised meat you’ve ever had. It is at once an eating experience and an act of deliverance from life’s banality, a two-layered addiction that is, for the most part, well worth its costs.
This was a very good place to start our blog, after all.
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I don’t really remember how we happened upon OB – or even if we did so together – but can you believe our luck?
I mean…come on. It’s Korean Fried Chicken right next to Kentucky Fried Chicken in the boonies between Oakland and Berkeley. The owners must have been too cheap to take out the gargantuan pole that used to house some kind of nostalgic diner sign, and too cheap to open up shop on Telegraph’s mini-Koreatown, further down south, and too cheap to keep the damn place regularly! I can’t tell you the number of times the two of us have tried to drop by on a Sunday, or Tuesday, or Friday at 6 p.m. or 1 a.m. or 11 p.m. and have been met with either a closed restaurant or waiters who tell us that the place is “closed.” It MAY be that we just catch it outside of its business hours, but we’re very skeptical.
Best of all, it’s called ORIENTAL Chicken Town. Seriously? That’s almost as good as the time we went to a Korean BBQ joint where the resto sign was a pork with bullet holes in it (watch for that review!).
Anyway, we had our usual tonight – uhh….chicken…and more chicken. Now I might as well come out and say it: I have an unnatural obsession with fried chicken of all sorts, from bar food buffalo wings to soul smothered chicken to backyard BBQ. But Korean twice-fried, super thin-skinned, wait-an-unbelievable-45-minutes-for-it-to-prepare chicken tops them all.
That being said, this place doesn’t offer the real stuff, in my opinion. Not really, anyway. It’s not 99 Chicken in Santa Clara. It’s not Kyo Chon and its ilk in Los Angeles. It’s somewhere in between normal, boring fried chicken and awesome, amazing Korean fried chicken. It comes out in 15 minutes max; the skin is not twice-fried and not nearly thin or crispy enough (hippo may beg to differ, though…); and the pieces are comparatively gigantic.
But, you gotta love it. The ol’ go-to chicken joint. Every couple should have one, and if you’re stuck in Oakland, OB is the way to go. Thick spicy sauce, honey mustard, soy sauce that tastes like honey, garlic, jalapenos, celery soaked in jalapeno juice, bits of pickled “daikon,” thousand island-soaked shredded cabbage. Find all that at your ol’ Colonel!
Plus, if you think this is just more Korean bar food, think again. The chicken here is actually tender and the sauce doesn’t taste like someone gathered eight cans of random crap bought at Koreana and threw it together. I recommend sticking with the soy sauce and garlic chicken…
The soy sauce and garlic chicken (Gan Jang) at OB Oriental Chicken Town.
The skin is better than the others I’ve tasted, and the sauce is oddly sweet without being too overbearing (at least, until the last fourth of your mountain of fried meat, which is inevitable). Unlike at other Korean joints further south, the 8 billion ounce jugs of beer or soju, though available, is secondary.
Something about gorging oneself with fried food with a loved one is so…intimate. To know when your partner is feeling exactly that feeling of absolute disgust – the feeling that one wouldn’t want to touch another bit of oily, fried crap…except for this one last bite…or two… – that’s special.
But don’t worry, the stuff is fried in “100% pure virgin olive oil”!
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