Does Caviar Fried Chicken Merit the Two-Hour Wait at Coqodaq?
Everything you need to know — good and bad — about Simon Kim's sequel to Cote
Enjoy this (mostly) free review. Paid subscribers can scroll down for notes on Coqodaq’s caviar nuggets, tips for snagging a table, and a guide to Korean fried chicken in NYC.
Busta Rhymes probably didn’t wait two hours for this!
If you enjoy the masochistic ritual of waiting a few hours for a steak dinner — and a few of you really do — I have another another recommendation, a hotspot that commands a multi-hour wait for a bucket of fried chicken.
Actually, that’s oversimplifying things.
This isn’t just any fried chicken spot. This is a Modern Korean restaurant where you’ll wait a few hours for caviar, Champagne, Hermès hand soap, black truffle soy, and tasty squeeze bottle sauces that look like they were lifted from a chain barbecue joint.
This is Coqodaq. Say hello to the latest effort in luxury branding from Simon Kim. It is the city’s most opulent fried chicken restaurant. And the absurd wait is one of the worst ways to spend your time outside of hanging out in gridlock traffic during UN General Assembly week.
Around 4:50 p.m., a line of about 50 or so people might snake outside the entrance. You could try making a reservation instead of queuing up, but you could also try winning Powerball. I have succeeded at neither.
Folks seem to like it here. Busta Rhymes, who performed a 20-minute set at the opening party, gave an impromptu review of the chief product (“What the f*ck did you do to this chicken,” a Nylon reporter heard him say). Mayor Mayor Eric Adams — who likes a very particular breed of clubby restaurants — showed up for the ribbon cutting.
And Vogue has called Coqodaq a “fashion in-crowd favorite.”
A few journalists have even found religion here. “We come to the fried chicken cathedral to worship,” wrote Condé Nast Traveler. Or here’s Wallpaper, with some galaxy brain musings: “Who could have imagined that indulging in fried chicken could transcend the realms of fast food convenience to become a quasi-spiritual experience?”
Christ.
At 5:00 p.m., the doors open, and it’s “off to the races,” a host quips. She’s not wrong.
In less than an hour, the dining room will fill up. This is nice, because the crowd is the true draw, much more so than the food, which feels about right for any hip hangout that our nightlife-loving mayor might drop by.
Patrons appear to be dressed up for a rooftop hotel DJ party. Here’s a mustachioed fellow with oversized sunglasses and a Kangol cap. Oh, check out this well-built bloke strolling around in cargo pants and a crisp tank top! And in the opposite direction, someone walks the length of the room slowly and methodically, with an iPhone. It’s the unmistakable gait of a TikTok being filmed.
Maybe you’ll see me in that online clip, eating a crappy caviar nugget. That snack costs $28. A single bite for the price of a gourmet burger (or let’s be honest, three-quarters of a burger; this is New York, after all).
Let’s give Kim some credit. He predicted that social media types and well-heeled residents would show up and queue up for overpriced fish roe every day of the week.
The first time I dropped by with a friend, it took nearly 2.5 hours before a host texted to say our seats were ready.
Coqodaq gave us just 10 minutes to get back to the temple for services.
How to brand luxury fried chicken like Louis Vuitton
I’ll admit I understand the some of the fuss over La Grande Cathédrale Coqodaq.
Korean fried chicken is one of the world’s great poultry preparations, a dish that defies the laws of ornithology, gastronomy, and particle physics. When done right, after three of four trips to the fryer, the skin and batter fuse and puff up. It’s almost like a chicharrón, only thinner and lighter, with an occasional gochujang glaze. This chicken doesn’t crunch. It shatters.
At a good Korean fry shack, biting into a drumstick is like chomping down on a candy apple made of meat.
But anyone who loves this style of chicken knows there’s no shortage of tasty, affordable, and ambitious options in New York. Kim knows this too. So he’s doing something more unique. He’s giving the city a fancy fried chicken spot.
It’s an understandable move for a restaurateur who told WWD that he considers Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton as an inspiration on the branding front.
Kim is pretty good at branding himself.
Just as Cote rose to fame on its affordable-ish steak prix fixe, with posh add-ons like caviar-topped oysters, the chief draw at Coqodaq is an affordable-ish poultry prix fixe, with spendy supplements like those caviar-topped nuggets. It might be New York’s only fine dining fried chicken spot.
The $38 set menu — a solid deal but not quite a meal by itself — comes with tart banchan, an herby salad, two rounds of fried chicken, and super nutty, super cooling sesame noodles.
Every dinner here ends with tangy frozen yogurt, and begins with an amuse of ginseng-laced poultry consommé. True to form for fine dining chefs, that soup tasted precisely the same over multiple visits.
It tasted like warm Evian laced with bland chicken stock.
Okay, so a fried drumstick walks into a clubstaurant…
Fancy food is only part of the equation here.
Kim wants folks to splurge at Coqodaq for the same frosé-fueled reasons that they flock to Bonnie’s, Cote, Tatiana, or Bad Roman. He wants people to experience something that’s more raucous than a quiet small plates restaurant or a tasting menu palace.
This fried chicken spot, like other party restaurants, is in the business of getting people out of their apartments by selling fun. Whether it succeeds is a different question.
Rows of booths, compliments of the Rockwell Group, recall a Houston’s upgraded to business class. Curved archway lamps give the whole place the feel of sleek, anonymous room in Berlin, Moscow, or Roosevelt Field.
Like dining at the counter? Go elsewhere. At Coqodaq, that area faces away from the dining room and all its Caviar Influencer energy.
Bar patrons get a nice view of expensive liquor bottles.
Is that Blondie playing at high volume? It is. What’s the waiter saying to us? I can’t hear. Though I suppose folks with early resies will enjoy these type of vibes, which include the lights sometimes getting turned down to nightclub levels before 7:00 pm. That’s not an unimportant point, as Coqodaq relegates groups of three of fewer to the first and last seatings.
For a primetime table, you need to bring the party yourself. Sorry!
Don’t trust fried chicken that wears a suit and tie!
Fancy fried chicken isn’t coming out of nowhere.
The city’s Modern Korean restaurants — like scores of other culinary movements — take approachable and traditional dishes and turn them into edgier affairs.
At Mari, the lunchtime staple that is kimbap stars in an innovative omakase.
At Jua, the street food that is hotteok becomes the final course in a tasting menu.
And at Coqodaq, everyday Korean fried chicken — like at Momofuku Noodle — becomes a special occasion around which an entire meal is built. To achieve this, tweaks are made. The restaurant seems to think highly of these tweaks, judging by the 800 word explainer the kitchen attaches to its menu.
That document has some smart talk about animal welfare and environmentally-friendly fry oil. And it also has some GOOP-y words about how the kitchen experiments with batter and spices that possess “antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anticarcinogenic, and cholesterol lowering properties. Crazy, right!?”
So crazy! I never knew fried chicken could be a superfood.
I also never knew it could be so boring.
For the first round, served in a bucket, the kitchen seasons the meat lightly. Maybe this is to show off the natural flavors of the poultry, though the bird doesn’t have much to say. This is neutral stuff.
Coqodaq’s plain fried chicken is the the Belvedere vodka soda of the poultry world.
But a quartet of squeeze bottle sauces improve things a bit. You squirt them inside the bird’s ample nooks and crannies; if this chicken were any more craggy it would qualify as a slice of pita bread. My two favorite sauces: cilantro “jun verde” that adds creamy grassiness, and a parmesan-pepper concoction that imparts a wallop of heat and umami.
Then comes the second round of chicken, served on a literal pedestal. Here, you get a choice of soy-garlic or gochujang, but either option is a fail. The former is uninterestingly sweet. The latter lacks the compelling heat you’ll find elsewhere. And while the crust exhibited that wonderful candy-like crunch on an early visit, it was chewy during a follow-up meal, as if it had started dying in a delivery box.
It’s all very mid.
Nailing the right balance of seasonings is tough at a fancy restaurant. Folks aren’t coming in for wings and beers and a TV with the Knicks playing; they’re making plans weeks in advance for an expensive multi-course meal. The kitchen probably doesn’t want to blow out your taste buds in the style of Bonchon or Buffalo Wild Wings. And that’s all fair enough. But a restaurant can only take “restraint” so far.
At Coqodaq, the chicken isn’t spice-free, but it’s far from spicy. It’s not salt-free, but you won’t really notice the salt. It doesn’t have a particularly chicken-y aroma; it’s middle-of-the-road meat. With one tiny exception, it lacks juicy, squirt-y, gelatinous flesh. It tastes like something that doesn’t want to overwhelm a glass of Champagne — or offend your senior vice president, whose spouse hates chiles.
If certain segments of our high-end restaurant world are increasingly happy to push boundaries and get us out of our comfort zones, Coqodaq seems to be taking a page from the Old Bible of Fine Dining. It’s yet another restaurant that transforms a bold and casual dish into something fancy and pricey by dialing down the flavor volume.
And while it’s fully within Kim’s right to let imaginary notions of balance act as a bland straight jacket, it’s a shame that this mediocre fried chicken den attracts so much fawning adoration. That reality says something about all of us.
This is Ivy League fried chicken, the type of bird that could walk into a hedge fund or law firm and get a six-figure job by keeping its opinions to itself.
This fried chicken really wants that Michelin star.
Behind the Paywall: Your Handy Guides!
Everything you need to know about the caviar nuggets
How to actually get into Coqodaq
A guide to really good Korean fried chicken in NYC
A few words of warning about Pelicana fried chicken
Case study: How to screw up good caviar
I didn’t try Coqodaq’s Champagne, with “expanded yeast cells which help aid digestion,” lol. But since caviar is trending these days, I test drove those Internet Famous nuggets so you don’t have to.