ZABU - KOREAN FRIED CHICKEN

Koreans love their Starcraft, the pop singer Rain and their  fried chicken.  While fried chicken is a very satisfying snack when you are playing your real time strategy computer game, it does make your keyboard greasy and you could lose some valuable time that you could have used to build more Protoss units.

I couldn't find too much on the interweb about the origin of fried chicken in Korea, maybe it was the Korean war or maybe it was the love for Americana?  Regardless, fried chicken is a very popular and prominent thing in Korea and it has been for a while.  I had some great Korean Fried Chicken in K-Town LA, which was double fried and just wet my appetite for more.



Zabu is located at the bottom of Robson, close to where all the Japanese ramen and izakayas are.   The chicken was incredible.  Soo moist with a nice light batter.  I am still craving it.  Zabu offers the chicken wings in three forms, unglazed, soy glaze or hot.    I didn't order the hot this time but from my previous experience with Korean Fried Chicken the hot is ridiculous and it burnt my taste buds for the rest of the night.   The unglazed is decent but the soy glaze is off the hook.  A nice sweet taste that didn't taste like soya sauce but more like a light honey garlic flavour, either way still great.  They  seemed to be less greasy compared to our KFC and Church's counterpart.   These wings are soo good that I no longer crave Phnom Penh, I long for Zabu.

The rest of the meal was good.  The Japchae was tasty and the infinite panch'an always keeps the table happy.   The service wasn't exactly on point but it was a busy night.

Can someone please school me on Korean Fried Chicken and how it became so big in Korea?   

Maybe Robocop brought fried chicken to Korea.

Zabu
1635 Robson Street
Vancouver, BC

Matt