b.b.q. chicken / clairemont – san diego, ca

I’ve passed by B.B.Q. Chicken (which stands for “Best of the Best Quality” by the way since there’s not barbequed chicken on this menu!) on Convoy a few times before, always wondering a little bit about it. It wasn’t until I saw Jinxi’s post on it that I even realized they served fried chicken. Say what now? Not only that, but they use olive oil for frying which is also weird since olive oil has such a low smoking point. It sounded interesting enough until I also saw on their website they had “fried spaghetti” which intrigued me so much that I wanted to go and convinced my co-workers that this had to be our next spot for our weekly lunch.

side-menu

Imagine my sadness when we finally made our way in and I noticed on the menu that the “fried spaghetti” was covered over with a sticker for “sweet potato puffs”. Damn it! I wanted to know what fried spaghetti was! The red noodles sticking out like it was in a vase made me ever so curious and now I guess I’ll not get to try it… oh well. We still had Korean fried chicken to tackle!

house-salad

[house salad – shredded cabbage + veggies with thousand island dressing]

This is the house salad that comes with an order of chicken. It’s mostly shredded cabbage with a few other veggies all covered in thousand island dressing. I had ordered a garden salad and our waiter told us he’d be bringing us this and if I still wanted the salad… I said yes since I had a feeling I wouldn’t like this.

Cabbage + my least favorite dressing ever? I think I’ll pass.


garden-salad

[garden salad with house red wine vinaigrette – $4.99]

The garden salad was much more to my liking with leafy greens, tomatoes, red onions, cucumbers and more with a nice red wine vinaigrette. Above is just a little plateful, the salad was on the smaller side but a nice start and easily shared between myself and my 3 co-workers. I needed some green stuff in my system before we attacked the fried foods! I didn’t want my tummy to hate me later.

waffle-fries

[waffle fries – $3.50]

We got a basket of waffle fries to start, which came out first. I asked for a side of ranch to go with the waffle fries and we had to remind our server to bring it out to us several times before he remembered. He got sidetracked a few times…

The waffle fries were pretty typical of any waffle fries you’d get anywhere around town. They were cooked just right though to a crispy golden brown.

olive-oil-fried-chicken

[olive luxury chicken – 10 pieces $17.95]

We ordered 10 pieces of the olive oil fried chicken which is sweetly dubbed “Olive Luxury Chicken” here. It’s apparently made with over 30 ingredients and fried in 100% olive oil.

The chicken was served super hot – almost too hot to eat! The outer skin was super crunchy and extra crisp which I really liked. The chicken itself was quite juicy (I had a thigh and a wing) though the wing had a few “dry” parts, but not really surprising. It didn’t really taste like it had 30 ingredients to me as I didn’t really particularly detect any certain spices or flavors. What was also nice was that it didn’t taste really greasy, even though we were eating fried chicken. Overall I really liked it!

wings-of-teri-waltz

[wings of teri waltz – 20 pieces – $18.00]

David and Matt decided on ordering some wings. They underestimated the size of the wings though and got an order of 20! Though, the photo in the menu did made the wings look kind of small…

We got the most popular flavor which was a special teriyaki sauce with garlic flavoring and a light breading of rice crumbs. I personally did not think they tasted much like teriyaki at all. It really just tasted like soy sauce to me and not much else so I didn’t really care for the flavor all that much. But I did like the outer texture of the wings – the rice crumbs gave it a nice, thin, but crisp shell around the wings.

conserve-the-napkings

[conserve.]

This is our empty napkin holder. I don’t know if they realized they were serving fried chicken and wings covered in sauce. People need napkins, yo.

Overall I did like the super duper crispy Korean fried chicken… I don’t know if it’s really worth the price tag but I might come back to try a few other of their chicken items. If I get a serious craving for some damn crunchy chicken then I know where to go to get my fix at least!

B.B.Q. Chicken
4768 Convoy St San Diego, CA 92111
(858) 571-3333

BBQ Chicken on Urbanspoon


6 thoughts on “b.b.q. chicken / clairemont – san diego, ca

  1. Haha S and I also over-ordered the first time we visited, too! I agree that the pictures are deceptively small. Also I didn’t event realize that the picture next to the sweet potato puffs was supposed to be fried spaghetti – I wondered why sweet potato puffs looked like that! Haha!

    1. Haha! Funny they didn’t bother to scratch out the photo… I saw it on their website, that’s the only reason why I knew what it was supposed to be!

  2. This place is closed as of April 2013… there’s a chinese restaurant on its place now. Such shame since I loved their teri wings and the closest BBQ chicken is up in the Irvine/LA area. There’s a another Korean chicken place inside the new Zion market called ‘Gala Chicken’ which is alright but not on the same level as BBQ.

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