Turntable Mad for Chicken

On the first Saturday of the World Cup, we only had a small window of time to fit in a World Cup lunch. We thought it best to go someplace nearby and decided Korea would be the easiest country to check off the list. We're big fans of Korean fried chicken and have tried a number of places (even if we've only ever written about one Bonchon visit). Not wanting to go back to Bonchon yet again (as tasty as it is), we decided to try a place we'd heard good things about - Turntable Mad for Chicken - and catch part of the Uruguay-Costa Rica game.

We arrived before the game started and were very happy to see a big projection screen set up by the window, which would afford us a great view of the game. We also got to listen to a group of Korean girls try and figure out who was playing. It started with them looking at the Uruguayan squad and saying that they were certainly Eastern European but not Russian. They then looked at the Costa Rican team and said that they looked Turkish. We were off to a wonderful start.

The flags were brought out next, and the Eastern European Not Russian Uruguay became Greece. So now we were looking at Greece playing Turkey, but at least Greece was in this World Cup. Somehow they found the country abbreviations, and they realized that it was indeed Uruguay, but they thought they were playing Croatia. Finally one of them looked up the actual game and they settled on Uruguay vs Costa Rica. Yay! Sometimes we forget that not everyone is as obsessed with soccer and the World Cup as we are.

We were there for the chicken, so that's what we got. We also got a side of daikon radish ($4), since we didn't know the chicken came with it and we really like eating daikon with Korean fried chicken. It came first like an appetizer, so it gave us something to snack on as we waited for our chicken to be fried up.

M prefers boneless breast pieces of chicken instead of dealing with bones, so she got a small order of that (6 pieces for $9.95), half in soy garlic flavor and half in hot & spicy flavor.

The spicy pieces tasted like they had been drenched in a gochujang or chili pepper based sauce, but they were a bearable level of heat (if you like spicy). We've definitely had spicier fried chicken at other places but M likes a medium level of heat where you can still taste the flavor of the spice and it's not just hot. The soy garlic was really good too. Both were crispy fried, but still easy to bite and not dry.

A likes wings a lot. He got the medium (12 pieces for $17.95), also half soy garlic and half spicy.

A often gets just the soy garlic since he likes the flavor, but it had been a while since he got the spicy from any other Korean fried chicken joint so he opted for the half and half. The spicy had actual flavor aside from the heat which is always nice. The heat itself isn't the type of OMG burn like those stupid ultra hot wings you can get from other wing joints, but it was a good long, slow burn that just kept going. The soy garlic wings were good, but they were very similar to most other soy garlic wings he had gotten at other places. The really nice thing about these wings, though, was that the skin was really nicely crisped but not overly bready.

As the first half of the game ended and we were preparing to leave, we saw another table get this beer thing.

Apparently it's called a beer tower (and costs almost $50!). At first A was trying to figure out how they were using the dry ice to cool the beer since the bubbling would ruin the beer itself. It didn't take long for him to realize that it was cooled water bubbling around the center cylinder of beer. There were apparently neon lights somewhere in there as well. It looked really interesting.

We enjoyed our fried chicken lunch at Turntable Mad for Chicken and would definitely go back!