Momo Chicken and Beer

This is the post I've been avoiding, because this place is popular enough already without me having to promote it. It's the hands down, best fried chicken joint in all of Brisbane. I go here religiously. like once a fortnight. It's honestly one of the very few places in Brisbane that is open late night, like normal countries late night, midnight erryday. I've dragged all my coworkers and family members here. Its basically my restaurant version of Maccas.

It's located in the shopping centre part of Runcorn Plaza, right on the corner. Parking is pretty decent most days but try and avoid parking underneath the big trees at sunset, your car will get covered in bird shit.

Here is their menu.

 This is literally the first thing I've ever ordered and my last dish on earth. Half a honey soy fried chicken with a serve of home made crunchy potato chips. Oh. My. God. Their fried chicken is to die for, such an amazing earth shattering crunch, that manages to stay even until the second day of eating! They have such tender, juicy chicken as well covered in a luscious, sticky, sweet and salty sauce, I honestly lick my finger and drag it through what's leftover in the box. Get the chicken on the bone, that's where the flavour is!

The potato chips are also amazing here. They're super thin, made on site and taste like fried chicken themselves since I think they're fried in the same cooking oil.

It comes with a box of amazing radish pickles. Misshapen, roughly cut cubes that are obviously cut and pickled on site.

Yassss

Yessss lunch and after school special

Here is their spicy, cheesy and chicken dish. It comes with a huge amount of green onions, spicy chicken, onion, garlic and obviously a lot of cheese. The sauce is a mixture of gochujang and friends. It is mouth burning spicy but the cheese helps, this is a dish that definitely needs a bunch of rice to go with.

Sizzling

This is their plain fried chicken, its no different from the honey soy aside from the fact that it comes with a very tangy, honey mustard sauce.

Glorious fried chicken

Here is their awful kimchi pancake. It is soggy and uncut, when asked about this, they said that they don't cut it for you because its not served that way in South Korea. They seemed very surprised when we asked for scissors as a result.

Passss

I forgot to take photos but also, ALWAYS get their soy fried noodle. Its an udon noodle in a slippery, dark soy sauce with a lot of vegetables, carrot and cabbage, that somehow makes up for the lack of meat you get eating an entire bird of chicken. If you get the soy fried noodles, it also comes with their fancy side dishes, pasta salad, kimchi and pickled seaweed!

Momo Chicken and Beer
Atmosphere: 3, super pub like. Noisy and full of drinking.
Service: 3, inefficient, abrupt and vague. Two girls for the entire store, they often leave tables dirty for a long period of time before cleaning them up and are slow to answer buzzers if you're not Korean.
Food: 10, absolutely freaking excellent. The best fried chicken in town! I bring people here all the time and if you see an Asian girl in a nurses uniform, its probably me. Or one of my friends here I guess?

Nene Chicken

I was very excitedly stalking Nene Chicken's opening in Queens St Mall for many months. All my friends know I love fried chicken especially Korean Fried chicken and I was especially excited as Nene Chicken is South Korea's version of our KFC! I didn't manage to go on their opening day because the rain was so bad but I managed to go later in the week with VGirl, her boyfriend, JGirl, Dr S., and myself.

Parking is terrible, it's the CBD! Hope for weekend parking at the Myer Centre, park further afield and leg it in or catch public transport! It's located near the Starbucks/MacDonald's end of Queens St Mall.

Here is their menu! Don't bother with their website as it has no prices and doesn't actually have the same range of products as their Zomato menu.

We got the bulchi chips to share! It's a mix of deep fried potato chips covered in bulgogi mince, kimchi, then topped with sour cream, tomato and finely shredded green onion. It's pretty messy but also delicious to eat, think of it as a Korean take on chilli fries!

We got the largest box of chicken! Jumbo 16 pieces which allows you to get two types of sauces for an extra $2. We ended up getting the bulgogi and swicy flavours. The bulgogi flavour tastes just like straight up honey and garlic soy, which is essentially what bulgogi is, I like the flavours here and I will always continue to pick honey and garlic soy if asked .

The swicy flavour is their sweet/spicy flavour, tasting a lot like a sweet tomato and honey number, its very sticky and continued to thicken up as we ate it. I think we were pretty evenly divided on which flavour we preferred. I still prefer Momo's chicken though, its just as crispy but has isn't as drenched in sauce. There was a massive pool of sauce at the bottom which I though was a bit much and made eating quite messy.

All their fried chicken comes with a tiny serve of pickled radish and coleslaw, the radish too finely diced to be easy to pick up or share. Ditto the coleslaw, its very finely shredded and was very soggy by the time we got it. That being said, I do appreciate any form of vegetation when I'm eating Korean fried chicken, it alleviates the oiliness! Especially the crunchy pickles.

Actually a huge box

Nene Chicken:
Atmosphere: 5, its a takeaway shop.
Service: 5, brisk and efficient. They package everything neatly for you and also give you plastic gloves to stop your fingers getting dirty!
Food: 8, a good introduction to Korean Fried Chicken but I still love Momo's more!

Lord of the Wings

I'm trying to post my massive archive of 2015 posts, so bare with me as I get them out of the way now that we've hit 2016 and part of my New Years Resolution is to get back on track with my blog! 

VGirl, JGirl and I decided to go out for dinner one day, so long ago I forgot why we went! Anyway, we wanted to eat some type of American food and we also needed to do some quick shopping so off we went to Lord of the Wings in Westfield Carindale Shopping centre.

Uhh, parking is easy of course. Park in the shopping centre, the GoHealth Club/new food court end and then walk in. Here is a link to where their menu can be downloaded.

The decor is very similar to a bar set up with high tables and stools, there are also lots of little booths if you prefer a more restauranty feel.

We sat in a booth, VGirl prefers this

JGirl and I decided to split everything, because we're generous girls and JGirl is student poor. The first thing we got was a serve of eight bone in wings, cause bones are where flavour lives, in classic BBQ. Tiny little wings just about as big as that dipping sauce of blue cheese sauce, they were cooked perfectly tender. The sauce was nothing spectacular. I've heard a lot about these "life changing" wings and I don't get the hype to be honest. I wish that places with lots of sauce choices let you try sauces before you settled on an order, or is that just me? How can I commit to one out of sixteen choices when I haven't tried most of them? Ice cream places let me try their stuff before I buy ):

Oh how the mighty have fallen?

VGirl got the garden salad, it's pretty sad because that's one of the few things she can eat beside every single appetiser. She says she enjoys salad but I don't see the point of going out to eat salad? This was a simple garden salad of lettuce, tomato, grated carrot, purple onion, raw button mushroom, cherry tomatoes and a drizzle of ranch dressing. She wolfed or should I say cowed hahaha it down in about a minute. The girl eats fast.

Inhaled.

JGirl and I split this pulled pork and coleslaw burger as our meaty main, figuring that with everything else we needed to squash it down a little bit more. Don't ever split a pulled pork burger by the way, not if you want to leave the place with your clothing intact. You think eating a pulled pork burger is messy? Try ripping a brioche bun, a notoriously soft bread, then the lusciously wet pork and the fiddly bits of coleslaw spilling everywhere. Solid pulled pork burger, I must say.

On another note, I think it's funny that the pulled pork and slaw burger on the menu has a picture of fries in the background. Then there is a disclaimer in each photo that the burgers don't come with sides. Like, "please excuse our food porn, we were doing it for the 'grams." I get it man, you do you.

I could be a hand model

We got sticks and rings to share between the three of us, deep fried mozzarella sticks, onion rings and a side of both Thousand Island dipping sauce and the same classic barbecue sauce that's on our wings. The onion rings were pretty greasy but still better than the atrocity I had at 8 Bit Burger earlier this year. The mozzarella sticks were disappointing, I pulled apart the sticks, gleefully awaiting the spectacle of endlessly stretchhhhhhhhing cheese and got nothing. Even fresh, mouth burning out of the fryer hot and they still didn't do their thing.

I recognise that BBQ sauce!

I got the traditional poutine, because VGirl loves potato chips more than she loves me and I love poutine, it's in my top 10 foods. Don't ask me to rank the loves of my life though, its just a loose list that changes whenever I'm eating a food that's on the list. Anyway, I wasn't a huge fan of this poutine, mostly cause they had clearly shoved the whole thing in a skillet and shoved it in the oven to heat up the cheese so the chips lost their crunch. FOR SHAME.

POUTINE?

Lord of the Wings
Atmosphere: 5, vaguely bar like enterprise. I dunno why there are so many groups here.
Service: 5, permabusy teens, enough said.
Food: 5, passable but I wouldn't go back here again. There's cheaper, larger portioned American food joints in Brisbane, don't bother with here.

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.

RJIE: Boundary Street Markets

I got invited to try wings from the Wing Stand a long time ago hahaha! I had been aware of them for quite a while but never got to go because they are only open at the Boundary Street Friday night markets and I always seem to work that shift. So as a result I was pretty excited when they contacted me because I do love chicken wings. It took a few weeks to organise it but I eventually was able to see them before my night shifts and try a few places.

 

So basically you choose how many wings you want, six or ten in a pack, choose your sauce and then choose your dressing! They have a buffalo, BBQ, lemon pepper and a rotating special flavour, the day I went it was peach bourbon! I picked the six wing pack and got to try a few different flavours, I got to try almost all the flavours that day despite only getting a six pack of wings!

Nice!

I can't remember which is which but I got the buffalo, BBQ and peach bourbon which was the special when I went. My favourite was the BBQ which had a not overly sweet and smoky flavour, I didn't mind the buffalo wings even though I normally find them annoying sour and mildly spicy, these had a good heat to them. The peach bourbon was quite sweet but it worked well with the spiciness of the sauce. I found the wings to be quite crispy from the frying which I liked and coated in a generous amount of sauce. The blue cheese sauce was strong and creamy.

Mmm wings

I love the Hierba Santa iced teas you can get here as well. They come in a 1L bucket for $7 and the flavours are gorgeous, they are quite sweet but you can always try before you buy! This was the Aztec Rose flavour, a sweet rose flavoured tea.

Chug chug chug!

I got some calamari since I was still feeling peckish from these guys!

Woo!

I got quite a large cone of freshly caught and fried calamari with a lemon slice and a handy stick for poking. They were large rings with a golden brown crunchy breadcrumb layer and super tender flesh underneath. I was very impressed! They also have a selection of different sauces to apply if wanted, I remembered there's an aioli, mayonnaise, sweet chili, tartare, herbed mayonnaise among other things.

So good +_+

I've been a regular at the markets since then, frequently dropping by whenever I'm in the area since they run Fridays, Saturday day and Sunday day. I keep having Saturday off, so I tend to go for a massage at Skeletal Harmonics before wandering down here for a feed afterwards. This is Tom and John's Wings!

New wings?

I got the hot garlic wings supposedly but I have a suspicion these are their buffalo wings instead. I didn't mind, they were super crunchy and had a thick hot sauce coating, hot enough that you were sweating bullets but not enough that you stopped eating!

Man I love wings

I also got a drink at this little place here. Its a pretty trendy/hipster organic food truck called Planted, think lots of kale, handmade nut milks, organic stuff everywhere, superfood everything, that kinda stuff!

Their menu

Very well connected~!

I got a peanut butter milkshake made with soy milk and coconut milk icecream. So rich and creamy, with a strong peanut butter flavour, I barely noticed that it had a soy flavour at all. I would highly recommend this drink and have had it several times since, but only when Hierba Santa isn't around hahaha.

Surprisingly good!

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hierba-Santa-Organic/1411472389097416



https://www.facebook.com/plantedwholefoodsco

Korean Style Sticky Chicken

I finally did it. IT FINALLY WORKS. MY KOREAN STYLE STICKY CHICKEN RECIPE FINALLY MAKES SENSE.

So, months and months and months ago I first made this. I remember vaguely what I put into it, it was one of those quick rush meals that you just whack together last minute. So of course, I didn't write down a recipe or anything because I was making it up as I went along.

It turned out that this chicken was delicious, my Boyfriend ran off with half of the chicken and even my mum approved of it. It was numbingly spicy, but not enough that you stopped eating, made a delicious, sticky, salty sauce that went wonderfully with rice and the smell of it was absolutely divine.

Then my Boyfriend requested it again.

I had no idea what I had initially done. So began the first of a long series of experiments on different ratios, different ingredients and different cooking styles to get what became this recipe. All I knew was that I had brined the chicken, oven baked it, minced up garlic and soy sauce, added some water perhaps, some garlic, some gochujang paste and some honey. Then I started adding weird stuff when I was cooking off the sauce and that's where it got tricky.

Korean Style Sticky Chicken

Ingredients:
1kg of brined chicken wings/drums/whatever
1/2 cup of soy sauce
1/2 cup of warm water
3 cloves of minced garlic
3 tablespoons of gochujang paste
3 tablespoons of honey
Sesame oil
Vegetable oil

Instructions:
1. Brine your chicken beforehand.
2. Preheat your oven to 180C while you mix up the sauce. Line a baking tray with baking paper/aluminium foil and splash on a little oil to prevent the chicken from sticking.
3. Mix up all the leftover ingredients barring the oil. The honey and gochujang paste are very thick, so mix them with the warm water first. Then soy sauce and then the garlic.
4. Cook your chicken for at least 40 minutes, until cooked through. Turning at least once during this time.
5. Heat up a large frying pan/wok on a medium heat, with a little bit of sesame oil and vegetable oil, maybe a teaspoon or so of each.
6. Cook the combined sauce until the sauce begins to boil.
7. Throw in the chicken and baste constantly until the sauce thickens to the desired consistency, I normally leave mine in until they turn universally dark brown and the sauce reduce by 2/3rds.
8. Serve with rice and steamed veggies.

Alternatively, if you'd rather, you can change the recipe to basting every 15-20 minutes and halve the sauce recipe if you don't like much sauce.

Food Phenomnomom!

Its been and gone but here are my pictures from Food Phenomnomnom held on the 1st of June at the Cooparoo Bowls Club. On arriving there, the place was absolutely packed! There wasn't parking to be found for a good ten minutes or more around the venue. We ended up going down the main road nearby and finding a side street to park on.

We did a quick run through of all the food trucks before making our plan of action. So here are the vans that showed up! First is the Neko Neko food Van, a Japanese food van selling sushi, Japanese sweet treats like fish shaped azuki bean pastries, udon dishes and bento boxes.

Closest I could get

This is the Pasta Cruiser, which sells freshly made pasta with a variety of traditional and non traditional pasta sauces.

Same for these guys

Thumbs up hotdog, had a massive line up and served five different types of hot dogs. The kicker for this food van was the huge amount of condiments they served with the hot dogs.

Ehh I'll just take photos of their sign

Juan More Taco is a Tex-Mex taco van, owned by one of my work acquaintances. They sell five different tacos, pork, chicken, beef, veggie and a special of the day.

Cute set up

Roam'in pizza is a wood fired mobile pizza oven that serve a variety of different pizzas as well as wraps.

Click on the photo to enlarge!

When I had arrived the Meatball Spot were telling everyone that they had completely run out of everything barring the wedges and were hastily restocking at the nearby Woolies/Coles. Its a pity cause I really wanted to have some. I didn't see them reselling meatballs until we left around 4pm.

Someone on IG said they were amazing ):

This is King of the Wings, they rocked up as I was getting there and I immediately hopped in line.They had five different wings for sale, the American BBQ with a hint of bourbon, bee sting with honey, sesame and chilli, the Southern Spice, a dry spice rub with a tasty herb mayo accompaniment, the Portuguese Crumb, a super crunchy coating with Portuguese flavours and the Chilliology, a mix of three of Australia's hottest chillis. You could also get steamed garlic butter chicken rice as a side or french fries. They also served potato samosas and veggie spring rolls for the vegetarians.

I saw Manda while I was in line and her let her cut in because she looked super sad when she saw how long all the other lines were.

Oooh~

While I spent an eternity in line for the King of the Wings van, I saw this van pull up from nowhere. Its the Kai Kart! New Zealand style pies, sweet baked goods, drinks and real fruit ice cream. 

Yay~

They sold out of most things really, really fast

I got super bossy and demanded everyone split up. I forgot my wallet at home which was pretty mortifying so I borrowed money off VGirl to stand in the line at King of Wings. HKBoy went to get pizza and also the tacos while VGirl and Mini VGirl derped around the trunks.

Veggie Pizza!

We got a vegetarian pizza for VGirl to mostly eat it had a very thin, slightly crisp base which probably would've been much crisper if we had eaten it as soon as we had gotten it. It had capsicum, spinach, olives, pineapple, mushrooms, onion, cheese and cherry tomatoes. There was a lovely wood smoked flavour to the pizza from the oven that they used.

Pizza~!

We grabbed one of each taco to split between us. From top left and going clockwise, there is the beef, chicken, veggie and then pulled pork tacos.

Oooh~

The sharing was made a bit more difficult by the fact that I was recovering from having a nasty upper respiratory track infection of some sort. So I was unable to share bites with everyone else, we decided to pinch off a bit of the meat off each taco and make our decisions to our sole taco each. It actually turned out quite well because we all had very different favourites.

The taco on the left is the slow braised beef in chipotle and adobo sauce with salsa verjo, pico de gallo and queso fresco. Salsa verjo being a simple red sauce made from onions, tomato, chilli and garlic. Pico de gallo is a basic fresh sauce made from tomato, garlic, coriander, onion and jalapenos. While the queso fresco is a feta like textured cheese that they get specially made from a cheese maker. I liked this one the most.

The chicken was the universal favourite on the right, I think they actually made it a differently to what they had on their website. They were chicken thighs marinated in achiote paste that were super tender and flavoursome. None of us realised that the green stuff on top was a super potent, home made jalapeno sauce that destroyed HKBoy's and Mini VGirl's taste buds. Manda had some too and she agreed it had a nasty burn. Mini VGirl had to run away to find a drink to quench the burn, she scraped off all the sauce and ate the rest of her taco quite sadly.

Not bad

HKBoy picked the pulled pork taco that got topped with some bright pink pickles. The pork was the universal second favourite. It was very tasty from memory.

The one on the right is the vegetarian taco that has spiced, crunchy pepitas, zucchini, roasted capsicum, fresh corn, tomatoes and queso fresco. VGirl wasn't particularly impressed by it and she said that the portions are quite small compared to some of the other Mexican places that she went to. She mostly ate the vegetarian pizza and ended up eating some fresh berry ice cream from the Kiwi van to fill herself up. I quite liked the pepitas that were in the taco. She also didn't at the bright green jalapeno sauce.

Hmm~

The main part of our meal were the wings from King of Wings. We got a 20 pack for $24 with a choice of four flavours. I decided that we would get every flavour but the Chilliology as VGirl said that the other people couldn't handle the spice.

Delicious wings. The smell was incredible.

So from upper left going clockwise, its Bee Sting, American BBQ, Southwest Spice Rub and then the Portuguese Crunch. The Bee Sting was sticky sweet with a mild chilli hint, which was Mini VGirl's favourite.

The American BBQ was Manda's favourite, she ordered her own box with the American BBQ and the Southwest Spice Rub. She remarked that the she was used to have a bit of a saucier wing, and the Southwest Spice Rub was quite dry compared to the American BBQ. That being said, she didn't go for the creamy herb mayonnaise that was on offer. We were both surprised they didn't do a classic buffalo wing.

The Southwest Spice Rub was my favourite, nice and crunchy and it went wonderfully with the herb mayonnaise. I really enjoyed it. I loved all of it though, I could eat any of these wings again and again. If I saw them at a market or something, I would gladly buy another box of the stuff.

The Portuguese Crunch was HK Boy's favourite one, he said he loved its super crunchy coating and the flavours in the batter they used.

Delicious wings

While we were eating, we sat at the back of the lawn bowls court. We saw a lot of little kids running around with nothing to do and completely unsupervised. When this lawn bowls game started below, a lot of kids were running around picking up the heavy balls and ruining the game, they were warned off constantly but it kept happening. As soon as one adult had turned their back, another kid passing by would see the ball and try and pick it up. One kid put himself in time out straight after an elderly man disciplined him about nearly getting knocked over by a heavy lawn bowl.

Serious lawn bowls

We had a chat to the lady organising the event while we were eating, two of the promised food trucks never showed up, a chocolate dipped strawberry van and the frozen yoghurt van. They didn't even bother to call them and inform them of it.