![]() ![]() The execution in Norfolk has also been a bit spotty. Eight wings for $8.95, four drums for $7.95, many combos available. The combo makes for a meal of surprising lightness, with wings that are themselves characterized best by their delicacy: They are the lightest, and deftest, of the Korean fried wings in the area. ![]() For $9 to $12, you get three wings and your choice of low-cost, fresh sushi roll made mostly with variations on veggies and crab. And as a bonus, you can make a balanced meal out of your chicken by ordering it as part of a sushi lunch combo. ![]() (The “original crispy” reads closer to an American Southern style.)Īnd if the flavors are not as intense as at Choong Man, they remain well-balanced and satisfying, with the garlic soy in particular counterweighted by a satisfying tingle of heat. The skin on Chick N Roll’s garlic soy or sweet and spicy wings is the most consistently on point of any of the spots we tried: thin-breaded and devoid of grease, with a textbook, paper-crackly crunch over chicken that remains moist within. But before opening Chick N Roll here, she traveled to Seoul to take classes at a school devoted to fried chicken - yes, Korea is just that serious about its birds - mostly, she says, to figure out what the competition was doing.įor her own chicken, she spent months figuring out the mix of more than 20 flavors she uses in her powdered spice mix and brine - including apple and pineapple - and the precise mixture of cornstarch and wheat flour for her breader. LeRoy hails from the Southern city of Daegu. Even their bad days, which do come, are still pretty good. Their chicken is almost troublingly habit forming - some of the best junk food in the region on a good day. Still, the variety and intensity of the flavors at Choong Man keep them atop this list. The whole experience is a bit like being with someone you love very much, who nonetheless gets a little too drunk sometimes. From visit to visit, even at the same location, crispness can also vary mightily, ranging from a satisfying crunch to light rubberiness. However, she says they are still calibrating temperatures and times in the charcoal oven.īut it’s not only the smoke at Choong Man that’s inconsistent. Last year, Washington Post food writer Tim Carman embarked on a charcoal-smudged vision quest to find out why the tikkudak didn’t arrive uniformly smoky, and discovered that some locations used liquid smoke, or didn’t use charcoal at all.Ĭhoi says that’s not true in Hampton Roads, and that they use only Royal Oak charcoal. This has apparently been true in Northern Virginia as well. Even better, the chain offers an option to make your chicken “tikkudak,” crisping and smoking it in a proprietary charcoal oven. And the curry is a masterwork of lightly sweet, earthy depth. Their signature snow onion, meanwhile, comes slathered in a sweet, mayo-based sauce that seems custom-made for a Southern palate. This goes for an earthy soy garlic brightened with a light bite of chili pepper, and a flavorful red hot pepper chicken so Vesuvian it’s nearly psychotropic - it shares with Nashville’s hot chicken the ability to slip your tongue into a mind-altering and de Sadean realm of heat, where pain and pleasure have lost all distinction. On multiple visits to Hampton and Virginia Beach, I’ve found their chicken to be thickly crisp-breaded, juicy, meaty, smoke-charred and impossibly dense with flavor. Their fried chicken, whether delivered as wings or tenders or an indiscriminately chopped whole bird, has already become something of a personal obsession: I’ve eaten it more times than I care to disclose. ![]() She’s opening two more in Richmond, and scouting spots in Norfolk and Chesapeake. And local Realtor Soo Choi, who teamed with the owners of Choong Man franchises in Northern Virginia, isn’t stopping there. Choong Man (which pops up on delivery apps as CM Chicken), has opened three locations in Hampton Roads in the past six months. ![]()
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