Restaurant Review: Bon Chon Chicken

Bon Chon Chicken - dinner on April 2, 2014, 4 stars on yelp

If my coworker is the Queen of Cheap Eats, I am the Empress of Takeout. If you've been tracking my posts lately, you'll notice I haven't made a "real food" recipe in awhile. And my restaurant reviews have been as steady as ever. So I'll sum up the obvious and say I haven't been cooking. When I'm not meeting friends for lunch or dinner, I've been stopping at various places on my way home and getting takeout. I don't do fast food so it's never McDonald's but luckily for me, there are a lot of small restaurants that offer takeout orders.

I stumbled upon Bon Chon Chicken, mostly because I was searching for a place my cousin Christine recommended called The Pasta Market and I turned into the wrong strip mall. Rather than trying to find the right place, I decided I might as well scope out Bon Chon since I was already in the parking lot. The easiest way to describe it is it's like Korean KFC. You can buy various size meals with different amounts of chicken pieces: drumsticks, wings and "white meat" which turned out to be breast pieces breaded and fried. Their breading isn't as heavy as KFC and you can choose between regular garlic and spicy garlic. Side orders include fries, sweet potato fries, rice, kimchi rice and biscuits. See? Korean KFC.

Bul Go Gi Rice plate

They also offer more traditional Korean entrees like Bul Go Gi. I only intended to buy dinner for that night but I was tired and didn't want to go trolling for lunch or dinner the next day so I upped my order to a medium chicken white meat with sweet potato fries and an order of the Bul Go Gi rice plate. It came to almost $30 which I thought at first was a bit expensive. Bon Chon offers dine-in options as well as takeout orders. I ordered at the counter then sat down to wait for my order. In the 5-10 minutes I waited, a fairly steady stream of people came in. There was never really a line but as soon as one person left, another one came in, most of whom seemed to be picking up orders they'd called in. The dining area wasn't quite full while I was there but they seemed to do a pretty good takeout business.

Medium Chicken order - White Meat only

I thought the white meat chicken and the sweet potato fries were pretty good. I couldn't finish it all and ended up eating half the sweet potato fries and 3 pieces of chicken. And none of the Bul Go Gi so I reserved that for the next day. The Bul Go Gi was good too although I wasn't thrilled that it came with a salad that they had already put dressing on (I hate dressing) and the beef pieces were mixed in with onions, greens and other roughage I don't like. I ended up separating out the meat and the rice and it was enough for 2 servings. My $30 Bon Chon order actually saw me through 5 meals so it didn't out to be that expensive after all. And I have a new source for sweet potato fries - bonus.

Sweet Potato Fries