Snow onion chicken from Choong Man Chicken. Photo: Monica Eng/Axios
👋 Hey, it's Monica. With so many spots now serving inventive Korean fried chicken, I find it hard to keep up. I also have a major aversion to long lines in a city with so much good food.
But now that Choong Man Chicken has three suburban locations (Lincolnwood, Aurora, and Glenview), I decided to finally try one of their most intriguing signature dishes.
The dish: Snow onion chicken, which pairs marinated, twice-dredged, fried, and then charcoal roasted chicken with a mountain of raw onions and a mayo-like sauce ($15.99).
Insta-rating: This isn't the prettiest dish in the world, though a gif of the mayo-drizzle could earn you some major likes on a post.
Taste rating: Snow onion chicken delivers a storm of flavor with no raw onion smelliness. Daikon-like shaved onions offer a cool vegetal contrast to the creamy mayo sauce over the impossibly juicy, crunchy fried chicken.
Bottom line: Some of Choong Man's other chicken dishes may make for brighter pictures, but this flavor combo rises to the top of the snowy onion mountain for me.