Chego

My friend and I went to check out this place last night. We were lucky and managed to miss the huge crowd that arrived after us. She ordered the buttered kimchi bowl while I went for the pork belly bowl. We also shared the Ooey Gooey fries and a shaved ice. 

My friend was pretty happy with her bowl, but I was disappointed with the pork belly. I don't mind that it was burnt on the edges (yummy caramelized flavor!), but the meat and fat were tough. Yes, I just wrote that the fat was tough. Isn't that kind of shocking? 

The rice was pretty sad and clumpy. I can't remember the last time I had clumpy rice. 

My favorite part of the bowl turned out to be the veggies--when I cook Chinese broccoli next time, I'm going to slice the stems into thin rounds, and I am biased towards anything involving kongxin cai.

Chego mishmashes tons of different flavors into one bowl. I like this idea of mixing Thai, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, etc., flavors into one bowl but an elegant hand is necessary. I can see that the point of these bowls is to blast spicy, sour, and savory flavors so to say it needs elegance is a bit awkward...I just mean that this still requires some kind of balance otherwise the taste just gets muddy. I can imagine this being even better. 

Anyway, so the concept is great, but looks like they need to work on consistency and execution. I'm not sure I would go here again for that reason.