http://www.yelp.com/biz/cocobang-san-francisco

Tired of cooking and craving to try something different in our neighborhood, we decided to try Cocobang, a Korean restaurant a few blocks away.

Upon entering the restaurant, your eyes are first drawn to this huge white projector screen above the kitchen that is playing music videos. It’s quite dim inside too with a reddish tinge to their lighting. The place is pretty small but seems like it’d be fun for a group of friends to hang out and drink soju cocktails. Service was a bit slow as we had to wait about 10 minutes to get our menus then had to call the server over to take our order. Understandable though since there only seemed to be one server and two cooks in the kitchen and the place was getting packed.

We tried their seafood pancake which has tons of squid and was surprisingly spicy. I think they put the Korean red pepper mixed with the batter. There was no sauce but that was okay actually.

Next we had the rice cakes with ramen. The rice “pinkies” were great, just the right amount of chewiness. I wish there were more veggies in the mix, it was mostly sauce and lots of fish cake.

We think they totally forgot about our chicken since it took another 15 to 20 minutes to come out after we finished the first two dishes. We decided on half fried chicken (no sauce) and half order of the fried chicken with the sweet tangy sauce. It was served with a huge mound of cabbage salad with a dressing of what tasted like Japanese mayo and a bit of red pepper powder. The chicken pieces were huge and meaty with some wings mixed in. The batter for the fried chicken was a bit sweet and the fried batter by itself would have made a great snack! The sweet and tangy sauce was good but I’d almost say it ruined the great tasting crispy skin. Surprisingly we all really loved the salad.

I’d say we’d definitely go back, the rice cakes dish was the best I’ve ever had since KoKo House closed in Berkeley.

Cocobang
550 Taylor Street