Restaurant Review: Is Coqodaq a Fancy Fried-Chicken Joint or the End of the World?

With drumsticks in buckets and hundreds of Champagnes, Coqodaq leans into the city’s weird, giddy, and-the-band-played-on mood.

Coqodaq is a six-month-old, 8,000-square-foot restaurant on East 22nd Street that may remind you, at various points in the evening, of an airplane hangar, a church, a roller disco, a Las Vegas casino and a Quonset hut. At times it seems like the first in a new species of restaurant, and at others it seems like the end of civilization. It may be the most interesting place to open in Manhattan since the start of pandemic, in part because it can be so many things at once without being especially good.

Oh, it’s fine. You can have a good time there, particularly if you like eating Korean fried chicken out of a bucket. There are other things on the menu, but the chicken in a bucket comes with a cup of chicken-ginseng consommé, plus cubes of pickled daikon and other banchan plates, plus cold capellini sprinkled with perilla seeds, plus a slaw of slivered scallions, and at the end there’s soft-serve fro-yo with blueberry sauce, à la Pinkberry. All this costs $38, a pretty decent deal.

The menu calls the whole shebang the Bucket List, in red type that’s larger than anything else on the page except the restaurant’s name. At the end of the word “list” is a little trademark symbol. The name also has a subtitle: “Our Chef’s Signature Fried Chicken Feast.” There is a drawing of the bucket that is even bigger than the words Bucket List. The bucket seems to float in front of a sunburst of light, like Jesus ascending to heaven in a Renaissance painting. Before taking your order, one of the servers will tell you that the Bucket List is “a great way to experience our food,” or something along those lines.

In case I hadn’t figured out that Coqodaq is serious about pushing the Bucket List, I would have figured it out when I asked whether I could get one of the other buckets on the menu — the fried-vegetable bucket or the fish-and-chips bucket — while everybody else at the table was getting the regular Bucket List, and I was told, “Only if you have a food allergy or dietary restriction.”

That seems like a hard rule to enforce, so I took my chances and asked for the fish-and-chips bucket. Nobody asked for a note from my allergist.