Kko Kko Nara

There's a massive K-pop craze in Singapore and with that wave comes a Korean food craze. There's so many Korean restaurants along Tanjong Pagar road now... If you remember, a while back, Posh Nosh the resident eater/writer for the local papers reviewed 2 Korean fried chicken restaurants - Woori Nara and Kko Kko Nara. I've tried the chicken at Woori Nara a while back (I'm sure it has a place in my heart, in one of my coronary arteries - hopefully it's not in somewhere that's critical) and decided that I wasn't a great fan of Korean Chicken.

However, after Tsujiri, we needed to find a place for dinner (yes we ate dessert before dinner because it was Tsujiri and I was so excited about it) and we stumbled upon Kko Kko Nara.

Since they have plastered a mega-sized poster of the review article by Tan Hsueh Yun all over their front door, we decided to try it. To recap, the article says that the owner, Ms Lee used to rummage through the dustbins behind famous fried chicken restaurants in Korea, and used the ingredients she found to concoct her own special to come up her own special batter and blend of spices for her chicken. Great determination that lady has! 

 The fried chicken platter - 3 different flavours - original, sweet and garlic. It's really very steep at $25 for 9 winged sized portions. I really liked the sweet sauce - it wasn't that spicy and I liked the sticky, sweet sauce (it has some fruity undertones but I'm not sure what fruit is it). I wasn't a big fan of the original - just tasted like oily chicken with batter. I found some of the chicken parts rather hard and dry - no complaints about the chicken wings but there were some weirdly chopped unidentifiable parts which were very dry and tough.

I can't remember what this was but has kimchi, tofu and glass noodles in it. Another $25 bucks.
And the pot comes on top of a portable stove - but guess what - the stove wasn't even lit!
Service here was horrible +++ from the minute we stepped in - inattentive and there's this really rude woman (quite young) who seems to be in charge of allocating the tables. The place is dingy and cramped, food is only passable, and service is lousy - they took forever to give us the bill (ended up walking to their counter to pay cos they kept ignoring us) and I don't think that 9 pieces of chicken is worth $25 before taxes. I will definitely not go back. Unless you're in the area, and you're crazy over Korean fried chicken, I won't recommend this place to you.

(Btw, pictures are from my iphone 5 - not bad for lousy lighting and tweaking right?)

Kko Kko Nara
51 Tras Street