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!

88 Topokki

Toppokki, toppoki, tteokbokki, ddeokbokki, and however else you decide to spell it, is utterly delicious. Little strips of rice cakes that have a very satisfying chew, you can have them in their signature gochujang spicy sauce with fish balls and other goodies or as an accompaniment to your favourite hotpot! H., tells me its an iconic part of your childhood growing up in South Korea, the perfect quick meal or after school snack alongside Korean fried chicken of course! I will use the word tteokbokki for the rest of this page as it is my preferred spelling and what Wikipedia uses, if its good enough for wiki, its good enough for me.

So when we found out there was a shop called 88 Toppokki, we were extremely excited and had to go. Except we kept forgetting it was closed on Tuesdays. Oops. Its located in the Pinelands Shopping centre so its easy to get parking. Its located in the centre of the shop near the fruit shop.

Thats us!

Random 88 photos

Here are some terrible photos of the menu, otherwise check out Zomato for clearer ones.

The first time I went here was when I was looking for some fried chicken after work. I bought myself half a honey soy chicken for takeaway and chose the tteokbokki as my side. I like that you can choose between several different sides such as the grilled tteokbokki on a stick, rice, chips, regular stir fried tteokbokki or prawn and veggies. I love variety!

This fried chicken was very crispy and moist but I found the sauce a touch sweet so it's not my absolute favourite fried chicken to have. That being said, its definitely not bad though, and lots of people agree with me! They do a deal of 10 drumsticks for $10 and its always sold out when I try and get it.

Yassss

The stir fried tteokbokki is the regular tteokbokki you would order at any Korean restaurant, barring the fact that this is much more obviously a home style slash side dish version. How can you tell? The sheer number of bulk veggies present! Carrot, cabbage, green onion and zucchini a plenty, the fish cakes aren't as prominent but this is still an enjoyable dish. Just think of this as balancing out that chicken you just got! The sauce is a wonderful fluorescent orange from the spicy gochujang paste but despite that its not unbearably spicy like Madtongsan's tteokbokki, you can happily still eat this without stopping.

Yassss

I went back here a second time with H., and A*! H., and I had the same days off and were tossing up between here and Rogue Spice Canteen. H., insisted that we should eat the special hotpot while I was arguing that we couldn't possibly finish a hotpot off between us. Then I saw A* was online on Facebook and I knew she would come with us because she freaking loves tteokbokki. She loves it so much that once when we went to a Korean restaurant, she made us leave because it didn't sell tteokbokki, that was the time we went to FunnyFunny for dinner.

Anyway, we got the triple fried chicken plate, it came with honey soy chicken, plain fried chicken and a sweet and spicy sauce fried chicken. there was also a lightly dressed garden salad that we mostly ignored. A* loves plain fried chicken. I have a deep love of honey soy fried chicken and guess what H., loves? That's right, spicy fried chicken. We were the perfect team hahaha!

<333

We also got these banchan to go with our fried chicken from left to right its caramelised sweet potato, kimchi and soy marinated fish cakes! I love the sweet potato and the fish cakes the most, I could eat an entire bowl of these without getting sick. I often find myself having to move them away from me so I can't actually get to them before my main meal arrives.

Yesssss

H., was prodding us towards getting the special hotpot and I was being annoying by saying there was no guarantee that A* would agree to getting it. A* is an easy going girl though and she did agree. We got this in the regular size with three additional toppings which cost an extra $8-10 from memory. The ones we picked were an extra serve of deep fried seaweed rolls, quail eggs and tteokbokki since it didn't automatically come with them in there. There are a lot of other ingredients included in the hotpot such as spam, bulgogi beef, pork belly, enoki mushrooms, sweet potato noodles, calamari, deep fried gyoza, whole eggs, cabbage, mussels, prawns, onions, garlic, deep fried seaweed rolls and ramen noodles. We were told by our waitress to eat the deep fried gyoza and seaweed rolls first otherwise they would get too soggy. The soup had a wonderful savoury flavour that wasn't too spicy the best part was fishing out all the different ingredients to eat, you never knew what you were going to get!

H., loves deep fried seaweed rolls and she said this was the first place in Brisbane that she found made them. They're a battered roll of sushi seaweed that is wrapped around a bundle of soft vermicelli noodles, sounds kind of bland but the batter is really tasty! It tastes exactly like the batter on the plain fried chicken.

I really enjoy eating Korean hotpot much more than our Vietnamese version, lau, or Chinese style hotpot just due to the sheer number of ingredients present. Also for the fact that its already layered in for me, where as I would have to grab everything I want and dunk it in. Korean hotpot is already perfectly portioned to boil down to thick saucy goodness! It goes without saying that this place does the best hotpot I've found in Brisbane so far!

So so good!

88 Topokki
Atmosphere: 7, a cosy little place to hide from the world, as we did when it was absolutely bucketing down the day we went. 
Service: 7, pretty good actually. The shop is quite small so the waitresses are always lurking nearby, ready to help or top up your banchan dishes!
Food: 9, I love their hotpots and their fried chicken isn't bad either! I love that you can add whatever you want to the hotpot as well <3

Melbourne Trip!

I went to a conference in Melbourne with Z., L., and H.,! We stayed in the same room with an ensuite between us that we left open so we could talk all night. The first night there we stayed up until 2am chatting and had to drink a lot of coffee to make up for it. The first night that we got there, we decided to get something to eat and wandered up and down the streets of Melbourne to find somewhere to eat.

We decided to pick G2 Korean BBQ because it was one of the few places open. We got this free soju cocktail because we had to move tables to accommodate a large table. It was a peach soju drink and was quite sweet and tasty!

Free dranks

I picked the cheese ddeokbokki, as you know one of my absolute favourite Korean dishes. This was the best rendition of it I've ever had, the dish cost about $20 but was absolutely huge. There were layers and layers of stretchy mozzarella cheese that remained stretchy until the end. There were perfectly delicious rice cakes and fish cakes throughout the dish.

Bargain!

We got the soldier stew with sausage and spam! It had lots of pork belly chunks, zucchini, onion, soft togy, mushroom, enoki mushrooms, carrot, cabbage, spam, sausage pieces and bits of kimchi. It was a mildly spicy soup with lots of interesting bits to fish out and eat. All of us girls had a hearty discussion about our love for Spam, Z., is from the Phillipines, H., is from South Korea and L., is from Taiwan, all our countries had huge military presences from the US at one stage or another. Spam was a big deal and status symbol in our countries, plus tasty to boot. I don't get most peoples reluctance to eat it, its a dodgy weird comfort food for me.

Spam hotpot, got it.

We got the Korean fried chicken, it was delicious! Crunchy pieces of fried chicken with a sweet and spicy sauce, covered in green onion and toasted sesame seeds. We didn't finish this and ended up bringing home about half of it for leftovers. I ate it the next day as my breakfast.

Too much food!

On our way back to the hotel, we decided we needed tea to soothe our full bellies. We saw this Asian grocery store called Tokyo Hometown, it had pretty much EVERYTHING you could think of. It was about the size of a regular Coles/Woolworths and I've never seen so much variety in Asian food. There was an entire aisle dedicated to green tea flavoured sweets. Every day we stopped by this shop for snacks, if you're in Melbourne and are Asian, stop by this place and marvel.

Amazingggggg

H., got this buckwheat tea for us to drink and while the taste is nothing particular, the smell is amazing, kind of a toasty bread/rice grain kind of smell. It reminds me of genmaicha without the green tea aspect. It brews up a bright yellow tea, like fluorescent yellow.

Delicious!

The next night we caught up with our ex-work colleagues who moved down to Melbourne, C., and Kateo! Gill., was also with us as she had traveled down separately for the conference. We wandered around the CBD for a bit before I decided that we should head into Chinatown and into this place called Shanghai Street for dinner. It looked really packed and had a queue out the door, we got seated straight away because we had a group of seven.

I went a bit nuts ordering food but H., reined me in as usual. The first dish we got was this seafood combination fried rice full of carrots, peas, plump prawns, seafood sticks and lovely individual grains of rice. It disappeared in a few minutes once everyone had scooped up a bowl, in hindsight I should have been allowed to order a second plate H.,!

Oh fried rice <3

This was our only concession to vegetables, garlic stir fried kai lan! It got passed around a lot but everyone enjoyed its slight bitterness and crunch. 

Kai lan for fav Asian veggie

This was the pork xiao long bao, L., and I both thought this was a good rendition of the dish with a large serving size, juicy pork mince filling, ample soup inside and gorgeous pleating. It was a lot of fun teaching Kateo, C., and Gill how to eat these as they were surprised by the soup inside.

Yummy

This was the chicken dumpling with hot chili oil and peanut sauce, this was Kateo's choice from memory and it was an absolute cracker. It was scorching hot but addictive in its spiciness, we ended up scooping up all the sauce to use on our fried rice. Chili oil, peanut butter dumplings is an amazing combination and I cannot recommend it highly enough, if you ever see it on a menu, get it!

Delicious

We got fried dumplings. They were very pale but uniformly super crunchy, we had a sneaking suspicion that they were dumped in a deep fryer to get that crunch. I wish the colour was better but what can you do!

Crunchy dumplings are delicious

We got these sweet chilli prawns but we were super surprised when they came out as KING prawns in a serve of four. They were huge, about the size of your palm, there was no clear way that we could split it between the seven of us. So we split prawns into two but shared the sauce, THAT SAUCE, it was perfect on rice! We should've saved the rice for that sauce! Sweet, spicy, garlicky, thick and clinging to our spoons, we scraped the plate clean and Z., confessed that if we weren't in a restaurant she would've licked the plate clean. 

Looks like vomit though

This is the half roasted duck, we thought it would be a Peking style/roasted duck, so we were surprised when it was this brine soaked, crispy dry duck. It was intensely salty and crunchy, like eat all the bones crunchy. It wasn't a hit at our table but I did eat most of it myself, mostly because I absolutely adore duck. 

Dubious purchase

This is what the sign looks like! I find social media link ins for restaurants in Melbourne are a lot better than in Brisbane for some reason. 

Dumplingsss

We wanted to sit around and talk shit while having drinks or dessert and I had seen the perfect place on my travels! To N2 Gelato Bar! I think it was as much the flavours as the theatre of having freshly made nitrogen gelato that enticed us there. Also Terumo syringes of syrup for only $1! Hahaha, a taste of work! 

This is L.,'s apple cider gelato with strawberry syringe! We probably should have all gotten much smaller sizes because none of us finished our portions. 

Looks great!

This was the super popular Ferro Rocher sundae, hazelnut gelato, Nutella, hazelnut pieces, chocolate shot, vanilla wafers and one of those wafer sticks! I think nearly everyone got one of these.

So muchhh

I was different and got the salted caramel gelato with a shot of coffee. It was so sweet, delicious but I couldn't finish it!

Maybe to share???

FunnyFunny

Mr. A., A*., Manda and Dandelion, Mr. A.,'s boyfriend all decided to go out to dinner again and catch up! Manda and I caught up first and as a result we changed the dinner location about three or four times before we finally decided we wanted to have Korean fried chicken and ddeokbokki! Manda recommended FunnyFunny as it was her local Korean joint!

This place!

They always have random specials on all the time, and there's a drinks special for those inclined and keen to drink massive amounts!

They also have a daily special!

Noice

Here is a photo of their downstairs area!

Bar!

Most of the walls have spaces you can write on!

We got a large spread of banchan to share between us starting from the upper left and working clockwise. The red sauce is some kind of spicy dipping sauce that we used for a lot of the dumplings, pickled radish, a bean sprout salad, some type of carrot salad, kimchi and then a soy sauce for dipping.

Eat all the banchan!

We got half and half of the sweet and spicy Korean fried chicken as well as the crunchy plain Korean fried chicken. The spicy chicken was mildly spicy by my standards but the rest of the group thought it was quite spicy, but not enough that they couldn't stop eating it. It was that addictive spiciness where you just kept going and sweating as you go, unless you're me where you just continue eating. We thought that the crunchy plain chicken was a bit of a miss, we should have grabbed a different flavour to even things out.

I love you fried chicken

Dandelion decided to go with the pork belly and mustard sauce, he thought it was like crispy pork belly. I thought he was aware that Korean pork belly was known as bossam, simmered in spices, normally served cold in slices with a dipping sauce and a massive plate of vegetables for wrapping. He was therefore very surprised when this came out. We reluctantly ate this as we were so hungry. It was good for cold sliced pork belly, I'm pretty used to it since we use this style of pork belly for goi cuon in Vietnamese food. I guess just be aware if you're ordering this. The mustard sauce had a wonderful super strong mustard punch, think of hot English mustard or really the first time you had mustard and either loved it or hated it, that astringent nose clearing tang!

Pork bellyyyy

We got some steamed mandu to share between us, these were a soft pork mince dumpling that we dipped in all the sauces we were given. They contained a small amount of meat and weren't anything to write home about.

Hmmmm

We got the ddeokbokki as per A*.,'s request, we both love this dish like crazy. It was Manda and Dandelion's first try of this dish and they both really enjoyed it, they complained about the spiciness but kept going back for more! This one was very much a home style ddeokbokki! Like the one your mum would make you, with added veggies in so its healthy! It had all the usual fish cakes, rice cakes, onions, garlic, some tomato sauce and green onions but then it added cabbage and carrots for bulking!

Home style ddeokbokki

A*., was also obsessed with getting a hotpot of some style to share between the five of us. After a lot of discussion we went with the pork bone and kimchi one which we figured wouldn't be too hot for Manda and Dandelion to eat! It had a wonderful assortment of ingredients, potatoes, rice cakes, perilla leaves, enoki mushrooms and other hidden treasures in the pot! We also got a side of vermicelli noodles added in as well to help soak up the noodles. The pork bones here are the same ones you'd use in banh canh in Vietnamese food, aka bones with not a lot of meat on them. I say get used to putting your hands in the bowl and using your teeth to scrap off every little last morsel of meat off the bones. The soup was quite mild and had a wonderful porky and sour flavour.

So much seasoning pepper!

Dandelion was still hungry and we got some pan fried mandu to share between us. They were deep fried I think as they were quite pale but they were quite crispy despite it.

No golden brown appearance ):

FunnyFunny
Atmosphere: 8, I loved the atmosphere of the place, it seemed like the perfect place to get absolutely smashed with your friends and draw on the walls.
Service: 5, so average. I can't even.
Food: 6, solid. The food wasn't bad but I've had better Korean food in the CBD.