Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

It all started on Monday afternoon as I was perusing my usual blogs, Web sites etc when I went on the Momofuku site on the chance that there was an open Fried Chicken Dinner reservation. Expecting to see pages and pages of little black X's like I usually do, I didn't give it much thought, just went clicking away. But to my surprise, there it was - the green check mark! It was for a 6pm Fried Chicken Dinner on Wednesday, December 16 (Yesterday). I clicked on it right away, called my sister, put in my credit card information and we were SET!

For those of you who are new readers to my blog, or have no idea what I'm talking about let me explain. Everyday, Momofuku Noodle Bar has 3 reservations for their infamous Fried Chicken Dinner. 5pm, 6pm, and 10pm (plus 2 later ones on the weekend). You can only make a reservation online and you can only have 4-8 people at each seating. I've been checking regularly for the past couple of months and have never seen availability.

Me, my sister and 4 other friends arrived last night promptly at 6:00 pm fearing that they might take away our fried chicken. We were seated at our own table and were told that our 2 and a half fried chickens were being cooked as we spoke and would be out in 15 minutes. Our waiter warned us that we were about to receive a HUGE amount of food, but we ordered 2 orders of the pork buns anyway because who can refuse them?

First came the pork buns, that were devoured immediately, and then came the "bounty" and 4 dipping sauces. The bounty is a huge bowl containing bibb lettuce, mint leaves, parsley, turnips and some carrots to eat with our fried chicken and mu shu pancakes. I don't remember exactly what each of the 4 sauces were, but one was with garlic and jalapeno, a regular plum sauce, a spicy paste concoction and a shallot/pesto tasting sauce. All were yummy except I didn't really like the spicy hot sauce type one.

And then the main event came to our table. All the tables around us turned to stare as a mountain high plate of 2 different fried chickens came to our table. One half was of your normal southern style chicken and the other half was Korean style with a hint of spice. You've never seen 6 petite girls dig in so fast. I started with the Korean style plain, with no pancake. It was amazing. The outside was so fried but the inside was so moist - I don't know how they do it. After finishing off a little wing of the Korean, I went on to a huge piece of the southern style. I added a pancake and a piece of bibb lettuce, the jalapeno sauce and plum sauce and wrapped it up. Awesome! Triple fried pieces of chicken with a warm and flavorful middle combined with the pancake and sauces.

This is mostly a picture of the Korean style chicken, but you can see the Southern style in the back!

Conversation was light throughout dinner but we mostly talked about was "this is so good!" "I'm so full, why can't I stop eating?" After 2 little pieces of the Korean, a big piece of the southern a half of pork bun later, I couldn't force myself to eat another bite, even though I really wanted to.


There was still enough chicken to feed an army so we doggy bagged it up and took it home.


Readers, you should add https://reservations.momofuku.com/login.aspx?unit=4 to your daily Web site stalking and hopefully you will be able to experience the dinner that I had last night.


Lunch Time!