Rather, the wings at Hot n Sweet fall somewhere in between. They’re also not the wings you’ll find at KyoChon, which taste a bit like they’ve been coated in breakfast rice cereal. Nami’s wings are not the thick-coated, ultra crisp, completely sauce-smothered wings you’ll find at OB Bear, a Koreatown site of pilgrimage for those who love wings. Then they spent five years experimenting and perfecting the wings they now serve at the restaurant. She and her husband developed the restaurant’s wing recipe after eating fried chicken in Korea, Singapore, Japan, Argentina, Brazil and, of all places, Canada (every place they traveled, they’d be sure to try the fried chicken). Most of Nami’s experience in the kitchen came from decades of cooking for her family in South Korea and in the U.S. There’s Hite on tap, as well as soju on the TVs there are Bigbang and Girls’ Generation music videos and - most important - there’s KFC: Korean fried chicken. They’ve outfitted the restaurant with everything you’d crave from an outing in Koreatown, minus the drunk karaoke. “In Korea, people eat wings like a snack, and most people eat them with beer,” says Aldo. Nami, born in South Korea, and Aldo, who is Japanese but was born in Argentina (he once worked as a cook and sushi chef at a restaurant in Anchorage), decided to open the type of restaurant you’d find somewhere in between Wilshire Boulevard and Sixth Street in Los Angeles. “One day, we’d like to expand and bring the experience all along the 210 Freeway.” “We wanted to bring the K-town experience to this part of town,” Aldo says. Kara’s “Mamma Mia” K-pop music video plays on a TV behind him. He is sitting next to his wife at a table in his restaurant. “There are really no Korean fried chicken places here like in Koreatown,” says Aldo. The restaurant is on a sleepy stretch of Huntington Drive that includes a driving school, a health care supply store and a funeral home. The married couple opened Hot n Sweet Chicken in 2013. You might not think to go to Arcadia, Calif., the small suburb just east of Pasadena, Calif., in the San Gabriel Valley known for the 82-year-old racetrack Santa Anita Park and the Westfield Santa Anita mall.Īldo and Nami Nakaganeku are trying to change that. When you’re craving this experience in L.A., you head to the general vicinity of Koreatown. By the third round of beer, you should be ready to sing “Bang Bang Bang” by Bigbang at post-dinner karaoke. You spend your evenings cooling the burn of lip-scalding wings with frosty mugs of Hite, while bobbing your head to blaring K-pop in crowded dining rooms. LOS ANGELES - If you’re a fan of KFC wings - the kind lashed with Korean hot sauce rather than the Southern-style from a certain fast food chain - you may think of them as just a form of basic sustenance.
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