COQODAQ

Simon Kim, who Koreanized the steakhouse at Cote down the street, entered New York's Korean fried chicken argument with a room built around one $52 bucket.3 8 The bucket is where the value sits, and COQODAQ holds a Bib Gourmand in the 2025 MICHELIN selection for it.2

Why go

The cooking is Executive Chef Seung Kyu Kim's. He breads the original in rice flour, which is why it is gluten-free, and the second round comes glazed with soy-garlic or gochujang.3 8 In between come chicken consomme, banchan, cold perilla seed noodles and a soft-serve frozen yogurt, so the bucket is a sequence and not a platter.1

Victoria James runs the champagne list, and it is long enough that Matthew Schneier counted a hundred bottles under a hundred dollars on it.3 The house reason for pouring it against fried chicken is that the acid and the bubbles cut the fat between bites.8

Order this / avoid

Order: the bucket, and the soy-garlic glaze on the second round. Neha Talreja and Will Hartman both picked it over the gochujang for The Infatuation.4 5
Order: the cold perilla seed noodles. They come inside the bucket, and Schneier's advice if you are eating a la carte is to order them as a side anyway.3
Order: the mac and cheese if you want a side. Talreja rates it the best of the four and calls the coleslaw and the fries meh.4
Avoid: the Golden Nugget, one nugget under a spoon of caviar. It ran $28 with Golden Daurenki and $16 with trout roe in 2024.4
Avoid: eating past the bucket. Robert Sietsema ordered the tartare trio at $68 and a tin's worth of the rest and left having paid $260 with tax and tip.6

What locals & experts say

Matthew Schneier, New York Magazine's restaurant critic, on the fight this room walked into (4 April 2024): 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 gone-but-not-forgotten charms of Baden Baden?3
Robert Sietsema, who has covered cheap and outer-borough eating here for decades, ate the expensive way for Eater NY on 5 June 2024 and regretted it: I couldn't help but feel that instead of treating myself, I'd taken the bait meant for rubes.6
Will Hartman put it on The Infatuation's fried chicken guide on 9 August 2024, beside Charles Pan-Fried Chicken and Bobwhite Counter: Ignore the nugget, and order the ... Bucket List.5
Neha Talreja, reviewing it at 8.2 for The Infatuation on 18 April 2024, on what a table of four actually spends: around $70 per person (if you get drinks and extra sides).4
Simon Kim, telling Time Out New York what he set out to build (29 November 2024): a modern and family-friendly cathedral for fried chicken.7
The MICHELIN inspector, on where the value stops: Stick to the bucket for solid value, though optional splurges like caviar-topped bites can push the bill higher.1

Good to know

Booking: tables are released two weeks ahead and they go.4
Service: lunch and dinner, seven days.8
At the door: you walk in through a hand-washing station and pick your own soap, which for finger food is a better idea than it sounds.3
The operator: Simon Kim's group also runs Cote and Undercote, and the James Beard Foundation has put him on its Outstanding Restaurateur semifinalist ballot two years running. That is his award and not this room's.9 10

Jeff's take (his words)

Note: "New high end Korean fried chicken"

Verdict

should-visit — The long bar takes walk-ins and its stools have backs, so a full book is not a lost night here. Get there before the line builds in the late afternoon.

COQODAQ.