Arirang Cupdak Review

Cupdak at Arirang Belmont

Price
Look
Smell
Crunch
Taste

 

On Thursday this week, we headed to Reading Cinemas Belmont to see the new Logan film, so were in need of a snappy dinner beforehand. The fried chicken options are relatively sparse here, but Belmont Forum does have Arirang (Korean BBQ) in their food court which has a new food item – Cupdak!

Arirang’s website tells me that Cupdak is Korean street food that consists of a big cup of fried chicken sauce and potato gems. It costs $9.90 and is actually a reasonable size for the price – I chose the sweet chilli sauce and it also comes with a squirt of honey garlic mayonnaise on top.

It looks delicious and has a lovely sweet smell of honey and chilli.

Unfortunately my enjoyment stopped there, even though the Cupdak took a while to be prepared, the majority of the chicken was only lukewarm and the potato gems were all cold.

Inexplicably the chicken was also very dry and overcooked and the gems had been cooked so much they were hollow inside – existing somehow only as hard crusts of potato.

That said, the sweet chilli sauce and honey garlic mayonnaise was very tasty and I think that if the chicken was better this would have been a much tastier meal.

I won’t be trying this particular menu item again, but I definitely want to visit an actual Arirang restaurant as opposed to a food court outlet, and try something else.