Bungle Bungle

It's no secret that I love fried chicken and Korean fried chicken in particular. I've had Bungle Bungle on my go to list for a long time but had quite a few problems deciding to go there. I didn't know where it was for one, the second being that the reviews for their service were a bit iffy and then also the fact that panned for having terrible interior as well.

Thankfully VGirl introduced me to Runcorn Plaza and I've been going here ever since.

Bungle Bungle is super easy to find, it's in the corner of the Runcorn Plaza shopping centre and will undoubtedly have large groups of people enjoying lots of Korean food in front of it.

This place!

Here is their menu!

My first visit was straight after we went to Mien and the Sweet Desserts Cafe, I decided to be a pig and get a snack for the drive home. I went with the honey soy chicken wings with chips! I think it depends on the waitress but sometimes I've been charged extra as per the menu for choosing a sauce, sometimes though I get it for free. If you're travelling any distance, open up the foil so that the wings don't get soggy from the condensation. There is a massive serve of chips that I didn't take a photo of but its equally the same size as this box of wings.

These wings were amazing! So juicy and with a gorgeously crunchy, bubbly and quite thin layer of batter on top of tender chicken. The sauce was quite sweet and I would have liked a stronger, saltier soy flavour but I definitely can't complain with how the chicken was cooked. 

Great wings

I came back here again, later in week with A*., and her boyfriend Mr D.,! While we were here, we were asking each other questions from a psychological study made to cause two strangers to fall in love with each other increased intimacy due to their deep, dark answers. They were things like what ability would you like to wake up with, if you could have dinner with anyone in the world - who would it be? There were a few head scratchers like what were you most thankful for, what would you change about your childhood and things like that. I think the questions were very interesting and I was really surprised at some of the answers I heard. If you're interested in the questions, you can find them here.

Anyway, here are our banchan! From top left going clockwise, there was candied sweet potato, what we thought was mayonnaise coated acorn jelly and then some kimchi. Out of the three items, the acorn jelly was the most interesting dish, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what it was because it had such an interesting texture. It was a very crisp/snappy kind of texture with a very neutral taste, like crunchy vermicelli noodles?

Curious

We got a serve of rice each to help soak up the sauce for our later dishes.

The same size and depth as my camera case!

We decided to go with the Korean fried chicken with garlic soy sauce to share between us! Just like the wings, they were so deliciously crunchy and soaked in a still quite sweet sauce. We all agreed that it was an excellent first choice. A*., and Mr D., are both north siders and had driven about 40 minutes to get to Bungle Bungle and they both thought it was well worth the trip down to have this chicken again!

I love Korean fried chicken!

We chose the plain ddeokbokki aka spicy rice cakes with fish cakes as our second main to share. This one came with lots and lots of thin oden fishcakes cut into large triangles as well as the usual compact fish balls that you find in Vietnamese/Malaysian/Chinese cuisine. This one had melting cylinders of rice cake with a perfectly balanced sauce, enjoyably spicy, not too sweet and with a good level of saltiness. The fish cakes used were of good quality and A*., and I were trying to get as many as we could before the other one noticed.

So good!

We decided to get a hotpot as our main, we went with the sandcrab and seafood hotpot. I'm not particularly a fan of seafood with shells as I think its way too much trouble to eat when I'm hungry but A*., and Mr D., were super keen so I went along with it. It was a good decision as it would be something I wouldn't order otherwise. The broth was absolutely delicious! It sang of the sea, with a pronounced saltiness and sweetness from the usage of mussels, octopus, sand crab, tiny prawns, thin slices of rice cakes, giant bean sprouts, enoki mushrooms and soft tofu pieces. It was like digging for treasure and we seemed to find something different every time we dipped our ladle into the soup. I really enjoyed the giant bean sprout heads, they tasted very nutty like peanuts! I mostly just stole all the soup and the beansprouts since I don't really like seafood but I still enjoyed it. I think if you were a seafood lover, you'd be in raptures which A*., and Mr D., were.

That soup was amazing

We got given these free drinks for buying so much food. This one was an orange flavoured drink that tasted pretty gross.

Do not want

This one tasted exactly like Hubba Bubba grape flavoured gum.

Bungle Bungle:
Atmosphere: 4, pretty poor. It looks like a cheap takeaway shop, complete with sliding screen door. Save it for lunch/dinner with friends or family you don't want to impress with anything else besides food.
Service: 5, pretty average. Free drinks were nice though.
Food: 10, some of the best Korean food I've ever eaten. It started my drive to learn Korean dishes and I regularly go here to buy wings and chips to go. The portions are huge, cheap, cheaper still if you're a member of the Griffith/QUT Korean students association, and delicious. Everything I ate from here was delicious.