CheeMc in Elephant and Castle

There’s a bus that takes us directly from Croydon all the way to Elephant and Castle – it’s a ridiculously scenic route as the route rolls up and down a number of hills. This route has also introduced me to a number of neighbourhoods and, of course, new restaurants in those hoods. One that caught my eye on Walworth Road in between Camberwell and Elephant and Castle was the slightly absurdly named CheeMc. It turns out that Chi-Mc is the Korean compound word for Korean fried chicken and beer, an extremely popular combination there and in China, thanks to the export of Korean pop dramas. Well, that then explained their logo – a drunk looking cartoon chicken and a stein of frothing beer.

The restaurant is relatively new, opening late last year, and googling for any information brings you to forums in Korean. It sounds like Korean students love the place and there wasn’t anything for me to do but visit for a meal. I arranged to meet my friend at CheeMc one weeknight. I’m not sure what I expected but the restaurant was sparsely decorated, with a kitchen in the back and a glass case full of soju and beer in the front. Their menu is full of Korean dishes in addition to all that fried chicken.

The fried chicken list had prices for half or whole chickens and also a deal for two halves with different flavours. We went for this last half and half deal and after a recommendation from the waitress (and also her telling us what flavours weren’t available) we went with sweet chilli and sweet garlic.

Expect a bit of a wait as that chicken is fried fresh when you order it. What came out first was a sizzling hotplate topped with the fried chicken and lashings of a sweet garlic paste. And I really mean lashings. The half chicken had been cut into manageable sized pieces and fried with a batter. It was a bit different to the batterless kind I tried at Bonchon in Boston but still was welcome.

Most tables were ordering the sweet chilli fried chicken. These were those glossy coated pieces, all sweet and spicy.

Of the two, we preferred the garlic chicken (despite it causing poor Blai to suffer at night – garlic was seeping out of my pores!). The garlic was strongly flavoured and a bit sweet as well and went very well with the savoury chicken. The chilli chicken was a bit too sweet for our tastes but we saw later on that night a slight variant of this flavour that would solve that problem. This was a platter of the sweet chilli chicken covered in a pile of fresh spring onion slivers.

In addition to our fried chicken feast, we split a kimchi jjigae with rice. This was the usual bubbling stone bowl of red broth with sliced pork and kimchi. What wasn’t usual was the default level of heat in the broth – spicy!

Overall, yeah, it’s worth a trip if you’re in the area. Between the two of us, the food and a takeaway box for the leftovers (they charged 50p for that) totaled £30.

CheeMc
310 Walworth Road
London SE17 2NA