Momofuku Noodle Bar

A couple of months ago, I started thinking about what I wanted to eat for my birthday.  While the restaurant list was long, I realized that I could eat at most of them at anytime.  Since I’m still on my celebrity chef kick, I decided that Momofuku Noodle Bar would be the spot.  They don’t take reservations for their regular menu, but I’ve never been the regular type. Exactly four weeks before my dinner, I signed on to the website to score a reservation for the infamous Fried Chicken Dinner. The reservations are limited to groups of 4 - 8 and they aren't exactly flexible on the times you can eat.  I reluctantly whittled down the list to namely VBRAT et. al. and reserved space for 8.  So the stage was set…

After whetting our appetites at The Plaza Food Hall, we took a quick breather and geared up then we hauled to the east village for our fabulous dining experience. As I noted, the reservations are hard to come by. There was a small crowd waiting for tables when we walked in. We were seated at the first large table within a few minutes. Although I was craving the shrimp steam buns, we refrained from ordering appetizers. Within 15 minutes, our masterpiece arrived.

Daaaayum! We were so excited you'd think we hadn't eaten all day. There are two styles of chicken.

The first is a spicy southern style that's fried in buttermilk. It was soooo good! Flavorful pieces of chicken that were piping hot. Each time you peeled apart a piece you could see the steam release. The chicken was also very moist which is always a concern with fried chicken.

The other chicken was Korean style also deep fried but with a spicy pepper sauce. It was slightly crispier but maintained the same level of moisture inside. Incredible! The chicken was served with four sauces.

Clockwise from top left: ginger scallion, hoisin, jalapeno soy sauce and mysterious red spicy sauce that is not sriracha. They were all delicious in their own way. The ginger scallion was probably my favorite but mostly because the jalapeno soy was too runny.   The meal is also served with mu shu pancakes.

Or as my lovely crew calls everything – roti. Oddly, we received a bowl of vegetables that didn’t quite fit into the equation.

Weird right? The lettuce was used to make chicken wraps. The carrots were a good break from all that protein.  The basil was an odd flavor thrown in the mix. I didn’t have any radishes but I heard they were good!  We cleaned house at this dinner.

The picture is blurry because we couldn't see straight after eating that much!!  The chicken was totally worth the advance reservation and I couldn’t help but smirk each time I saw people staring at our meal and hoping they could order the same. We had a few left over pieces which were delicious the next morning pre-brunch.  The dinner lasted about 2 hours and was worth every second. I highly recommend the fried chicken dinner.  The sides definitely leave much to be desired but realistically the chicken is all you’ll want to eat anyway! 

Hungry yet?