At the Altar of Korean Fried Chicken

Coqodaq's owner calls it a cathedral. It feels more like a club.

- MATTHEW SCHNEIER

THERE COMES A TIME when a New Yorker must pledge allegiance to his or her preferred Korean fried-chicken outpost: Are you a Mad for Chicken man? Pelicana partisan? Or one of the many who still lament the gonebut-not-forgotten charms of Baden Baden?

Simon Kim, who Koreanized the New York steakhouse with Cote (or steakified the KBBQ, depending on your perspective), is hoping a quorum of the wealthy will warm to Coqodaq, his own entrant in the ongoing KFC wars. So far, they have. Since it opened in January, Coqodaq (the French and Korean words for “chicken,” soldered together) has been taunting aspirant diners with nothing more than midnight Resy slots and unfulfilled promises to Notify them. Coqodaq has the low lights, pulsing music, and door-stationed bouncer of a nightclub, and most days, a line for the walk-in seats along the bar and in its front-room lounge starts to form around 4:15 p.m.

In Seoul, fried chicken is a cheapish, cheerful, local encounter. Coqodaq, in keeping with Kim’s fine-dining expertise, is designed to optimize the experience. You enter the restaurant—past a boarded-up front that will house 24 extra outdoor seats—directly into a hand-washing station, a nice touch for finger food, where you may select your own luxury soap. (The correct choice is Loewe’s tomato-leaf cleanser, which retails for $80.) Coqodaq is a “fried chicken cathedral,” Kim has said, even if David Rockwell’s interior, with its illuminated archways, suggests something closer to a fried-chicken tunnel of love.