When this fine-dining chef turned to fried chicken, the results were so good customers were “grabbing at each other and yelling” for a table. Find out where, and when, you can expect more.
When best-selling cookbook author and RecipeTin Eats founder Nagi Maehashi declared, “hand on heart”, that Joy Korean Fried Chicken made the crispiest, juiciest fried chicken she’d ever eaten in Australia, the Chippendale takeaway shop became an instant sensation.
“By 11am that morning, people started to queue outside, and by noon, I couldn’t see the end of the line,” says chef-owner Kay Hwang, who operates the kitchen alone. “We served more than 150 people, ran out of chicken and couldn’t open for dinner. I was slaughtered.”
But on Tuesday, the chicken shop announced it will close when its lease ends in mid-May. Its popularity, which continued to grow over the past 11 months, had become too much for one chef, two front-of-house staff members, and six tables to handle.
It’s a good problem to have, Hwang admits. Or at least it was, until Hwang had to start working up to 16 hours a day and turning customers away. “It’s just greedy to let people wait longer than 40 minutes,” he says, adding that people even started fighting over tables. “They were grabbing each other and yelling at each other until someone else stood up and said, ‘Hey, I just finished, take mine’.”
“It’s just greedy to let people wait longer than 40 minutes.”
Joy Korean Fried Chicken owner, Kay Hwang
Even then, Hwang was unwilling to compromise on quality. As a veteran fine-dining chef, Hwang was committed to applying the same meticulous care to each morsel of fried chicken as he once did to dishes at Good Food Guide hatted restaurants Quay, Aria and Bennelong.
“The crunchy, craggy crust puts it in a field of its own,” Maehashi wrote in May.
“It’s the perfect texture and thickness and has enough staying power to remain crunchy the next day. The flesh is ridiculously juicy, and the signature sweet-and-spicy sauce has the ideal level of spice tingle.”
Each piece is brined for three days, thinly coated in batter (dilution adjusted each day for the weather), and fried three times at different temperatures. Sauces like “sweet and spicy” and “turmeric and coconut” are house-made, with experimental monthly specials.
“I feel a lot of pressure on a Friday night when there are 30 or 40 people waiting, and I have to work fast but, at the same time, give my customers the best,” Hwang says. “If I make something that isn’t good enough, I will do it again.”
It was time to expand. Though Joy Korean Fried Chicken will close its Chippendale store within the next seven weeks (the exact date of closure is yet to be determined), Kwang hopes to find investors and raise enough capital to reopen in a new location before Christmas.
He envisions an all-day diner in Sydney’s inner west (“probably Marrickville, Enmore or Newtown”), with space for around 50 dine-in customers, more kitchen staff, and a separate section for takeaway. He wants to keep it small enough that he can still connect with his customers (greeting everyone is a must at Joy KFC) but big enough for them to be able to relax with a cold beer and a bowl of fried chicken. The menu, he says, will probably remain the same, except for adding a few vegetarian options.
“I don’t want to open anything fancy; I want people to be able to come in with shorts and things on,” he says.
“I still just want to be known as a chicken shop.”
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Bianca Hrovat – Bianca is Good Food’s Sydney eating out and restaurant editor.
