FOOD & DRINK
Decibel Korean Fried Chicken offers chicken wings, tenders and drumsticks. P H O T O : FA C E B O O K . C O M / DECIBELCHICKEN
Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner Walnut Hills’ Decibel Korean Fried Chicken is the first to bring the twice-fried style to Cincinnati R E V I E W BY L E Y L A S H O KO O H E
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rom humble beginnings come great things — especially when we’re talking about Decibel Korean Fried Chicken. Brought to Cincinnati by the crew behind Dope! Asian Street Food, Decibel is the city’s first Korean fried chicken joint. The outfit now has a storefront location in Walnut Hills, adjacent to Esoteric Brewing, but Decibel launched in 2021 as an unnamed fried chicken pop-up in the Kroger On the Rhine food court, where the Dope! stall already was seeing great success. Decibel got its start when Dope! owner and founder Kam Siu, who also
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runs Asian food supplier Panda Trading Company, and operating partner Mapi De Veyra, the former executive chef at Quan Hapa, were planning to expand Dope!. Fortunately for chicken lovers, they decided the storefront they were looking at should be used for a different concept. “When we saw the space (in Walnut Hills), we both looked at each other, and said, ‘Fried chicken. Korean,’” Siu says. “And then we put our heads together and really worked on the recipe, the execution side, what the operation looked like, and then we started putting all the pieces together.” Dope! had expanded rapidly since
MARCH 9, 2022 - MARCH 22, 2022
opening at Kroger in 2019, adding a second Kroger location in Anderson and opening a standalone restaurant in Hyde Park last year. Kroger approached Siu and his team in early spring 2021 and asked if they’d be interested in taking over an additional stall in the On the Rhine food hall. “We said sure, let’s take the Korean fried chicken concept and let’s do a pop-up and see what happens,” Siu says. “So while Walnut Hills was being built out, we did the pop-up and it was a huge success. We thought, ‘We have something really good so let’s just keep it going but refine the process.’” For the uninitiated, Korean fried chicken is an airier, crispier iteration of Southern-style fried chicken. Gone are the browned crunchy bits that stud American fried chicken; instead, Korean fried chicken is sheathed in a lightly golden-brown crust. Biting into Korean fried chicken might be best described as shattering that crust, and the crunch is outrageous. The chicken remains juicy, and the simplicity of the batter is a great complement.
“Korean fried chicken is a twice-fried chicken (with) a very nice and thin airy batter, very crispy,” De Veyra says. “Just like your traditional American chicken wings, it’s tossed in sauce. Even tossed in sauce, you still get that crunch.” Korean fried chicken isn’t a new trend. In Korea, it’s often consumed as a street or bar food, and in that way continues the Dope! tradition of incorporating world street foods into its culinary repertoire — as its “Asian Street Food” moniker would suggest. When you arrive at Decibel in Walnut Hills, there’s a takeaway entrance and window in addition to a dine-in window. The dine-in window is located inside Esoteric Brewing, which itself is housed within the larger and recently renovated Paramount Building. Now, you can get the same offerings at this Decibel as you can at the Kroger On the Rhine food hall — various iterations of Korean fried chicken and other fried items. On Sundays, though, something magical happens here — brunch, which began in January. “We have an ube chicken waffle,
