Coqodaq is a six-month-old, 8,000-square-foot restaurant on East 22nd Street that may remind you, at various points in the evening, of an airplane hangar, a church, a roller disco, a Las Vegas casino and a Quonset hut. At times it seems like the first in a new species of restaurant, and at others it seems like the end of civilization. It may be the most interesting place to open in Manhattan since the start of pandemic, in part because it can be so many things at once without being especially good.
Oh, it’s fine. You can have a good time there, particularly if you like eating Korean fried chicken out of a bucket. There are other things on the menu, but the chicken in a bucket comes with a cup of chicken-ginseng consommé, plus cubes of pickled daikon and other banchan plates, plus cold capellini sprinkled with perilla seeds, plus a slaw of slivered scallions, and at the end there’s soft-serve fro-yo with blueberry sauce, à la Pinkberry. All this costs $38, a pretty decent deal.
The menu calls the whole shebang the Bucket List, in red type that’s larger than anything else on the page except the restaurant’s name. At the end of the word “list” is a little trademark symbol. The name also has a subtitle: “Our Chef’s Signature Fried Chicken Feast.” There is a drawing of the bucket that is even bigger than the words Bucket List. The bucket seems to float in front of a sunburst of light, like Jesus ascending to heaven in a Renaissance painting. Before taking your order, one of the servers will tell you that the Bucket List is “a great way to experience our food,” or something along those lines.
In case I hadn’t figured out that Coqodaq is serious about pushing the Bucket List, I would have figured it out when I asked whether I could get one of the other buckets on the menu — the fried-vegetable bucket or the fish-and-chips bucket — while everybody else at the table was getting the regular Bucket List, and I was told, “Only if you have a food allergy or dietary restriction.”
That seems like a hard rule to enforce, so I took my chances and asked for the fish-and-chips bucket. Nobody asked for a note from my allergist.
The fish turned out to be monkfish in golden chunks that I ate happily in about three bites apiece. The chips were French fries that are freshly cut and fried twice. Coqodaq’s fish and chips might be my favorite thing on the menu.
The restaurant is owned by Simon Kim, who also runs Cote Korean Steakhouse, a quick walk west on 22nd Street. Cote is a cross between a Korean barbecue restaurant and an American steakhouse. It isn’t the city’s best example of either genre, but it’s extremely successful at luring customers who might not go to a straight-up steakhouse or a pure Korean barbecue spot. Positioning it as a steakhouse probably helps it sell a lot more red wine than you typically see at the restaurants on Northern Boulevard or 32nd Street.
What Cote did to galbi and anchangsal, Coqodaq does to the irresistibly crisp South Korean way of frying chicken. As in Seoul, Los Angeles, New York and hundreds of other cities that have embraced Korean fried chicken, Coqodaq serves the pieces plain or varnished, painted with a glossy soy sauce or a reddish gochujang glaze.
Another thing Coqodaq really wants you to get, besides the Bucket List, is Champagne. It claims to stock more Champagnes than any restaurant in the United States, around 400 bottles at last count. A note on the drinks list calls Champagne and chicken “A Match Made in Heaven.” To underscore the point, there is a drawing of a pyramid of Champagne coupes floating in the clouds, with more of that Jesus light behind it.
Champagne is a great match for fried chicken. So is beer, the standard pairing in South Korea. So, for that matter, are iced tea and lemonade. But Mr. Kim seems to understand that spending money on Champagne fits the city’s weird, giddy, and-the-band-played-on mood. One of several Winston Churchill lines about Champagne was, “In victory I deserve it; in defeat I need it.” New Yorkers aren’t sure which one applies to them — they’re still celebrating the end of the pandemic and now they’re freaking out about the election.
Coqodaq isn’t the first restaurant in the city with a fried-chicken-and-Champagne theme. Birds and Bubbles, which ran on the Lower East Side from 2014 to 2017, built the concept right into its name. I don’t remember feeling that I was being upsold there the way I often did at Coqodaq, maybe because Birds & Bubbles was smaller and more intimate.
With about 150 seats indoors, Coqodaq is anything but intimate. High tables are lined up by the front windows for walk-ins, and a double-barreled arrangement of banquettes and booths for people with reservations recedes into the distance, spanned by a series of glass arches that glow with a coppery light. The design, by Rockwell Group, is obviously alluding to the rib vaults of Gothic cathedrals, but it also made me think of the golden arches of McDonald’s.
The chicken buckets and the honey-mustard dipping sauce that comes with them had already put me in a fast-food frame of mind. So did the Golden Nuggets (also written with a trademark symbol), which the kitchen makes from scratch by sticking bits and pieces of chicken together and molding them by hand, so every nugget looks the same. They’re much better than McNuggets without being delicious, exactly. Not that you’re supposed to eat them on their own. Coqodaq sells them loaded with spoonfuls of ocean trout roe ($16 for a nugget) or sturgeon caviar ($28).
The Golden Nugget, like the restaurant, displays a calculating shrewdness in the name of fun. The dish exploits our sentimental nostalgia for the chain restaurants of childhood along with our suspicion that the future will be worse than the present, so we’d better live it up while we can, and compresses them into a single, bite-size piece of Instagram bait.
The end-times indulgence might be more entertaining if the food weren’t obvious and pandering. Seung Kyu Kim, Coqodaq’s chef and a partner, is clearly skilled. His kitchen does an impressive job of keeping up with a large and voluble crowd that files in almost as soon as the doors open at 5 p.m. and doesn’t start to thin out until 11 or so.
But he pushes the salt and sugar in his cooking to the limits and sometimes beyond. The chicken consommé was almost briny one night, as the chicken guksu was on another. Korean kitchens often deliberately undersalt chicken poached with ginseng, and one of the pleasures of eating it is the contrast between the bland meat and the salt crystals you add at the table. This is the kind of nuance that Coqodaq strips out in its pursuit of crossover success. In the chilled capellini, you taste sugar more than you taste the perilla seeds, and the tteokbokki are slick with a one-dimensional gochujang sauce that’s far more sweet than spicy.
Maybe the overuse of salt and sugar is supposed to be some kind of statement about fast food and the ways cuisines from other countries are assimilated in the United States, but it flattens Korean dishes and makes them one-dimensional. The paradox is that if the food were a little more subtle, it might taste a lot better with Champagne.
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