In Koreatown a doorman sits listening to Russian radio.  When asked for Mono + Mono he replies, "Second floor.  Elevator is broken."  Upstairs, a door is propped with a bucket.  The dining room is furnished like a lounge, with leather benches and low tables and vertical stripes looking out over the pizza place on Fifth Avenue.  The wall behind the bar is brick; everything else is concrete gray, punctuated by reminders that the restaurant accepts CASH ONLY.

The menu is thirteen laminated pages in a binder.  Fried chicken is the signature dish, but there are also sushi and ramen, as well as Mexican corn and Idaho cheese nacho fries.  The most space is devoted to booze: eight shooters like the Liquid Cocaine or Redhead Slut and twelve vodkas including one described as "french sparking win" that is recommended to ladies.  There's cognac, champagne, and something expensive called soju.

Dinner comes in golden rows on a white platter.  Eleven pieces hardly resemble the parts of a real bird.  Four legs are short and round, and seven wings have a fat boomerang bend.  They look more like crispy chicken shapes from a cartoon.  The portion seems comical, but with the first perfect wing you vow to eat every last morsel.  The flavor is "soy and garlic," but the taste is an addictively vague sweet and salty, reminiscent of a Chinese buffet and youthful afternoons of overeating.  Polishing off the third drumstick you set a personal record for cleaning a chicken bone, even the crispy fried cartilage at the end.  Try to slow the pace by sipping beer between bites, but there's no conversation to distract you, and your neighbors' is an insipid salad of Samsung contracts and IBM.  "You grew up in Asia?  I grew up in Alabama."  A glass shatters and the room jumps — someone claps nervously — but you don't even flinch as you reach for the sixth wing.  Only on the ninth piece do you pause to wonder whether this is as good as it was hot, and it's ten before the idea of protein poisoning ever occurs to you.  Finishing brings relief and then guilt, and looking at the remains you get the urge to flee.  But the check is slow, and in the time it takes to pay, another order has arrived at the next table.  The aroma seizes you by the brainstem, and you have to leave before it can repossess you.