Review: Kuku in Huntington, Roslyn

A Korean fried chicken spot that feels like dining in a wine country farmhouse — now that's something that could only happen in Huntington. Owners James Chen and chef Chris Pak certainly had high ambitions for their first Long Island Kuku, a minimalist chic restaurant they developed in Queens in 2021. Now with four spots across Queens and Long Island, including a smaller one in Roslyn, the concept seems to be taking off. 

But it's still a bit of a unicorn. The Huntington Kuku is in the former home of Ting, an impressive stand-alone building on Route 25A had been a revolving door of Asian fusion restaurants. When they opened last year, Chen and Pak transformed the flashy retro space, brightening it up with white-brick walls and an atriumlike white ceiling. They expanded the menu to include a sushi bar and large variety of Korean homestyle dishes, such as boiling tofu stews, noodle soups and stone bowl bibimbaps. So it feels almost like you're in an American fine dining restaurant, but the menu is mostly casual Korean classics. 

Although they have it here, this isn't the place for Korean barbecue. (Instead go to another Top 50 spot Korean Grill in Northport, which lets you grill on charcoal.) At Kuku, order the Korean fried chicken wings in spicy garlic sauce, which is pungent yet thinly coated so the wings retain their crisp.

And even if it's cold outside, the kudzu noodles are worth an order. The dish is a riff on the iconic cold noodle slushy called naengmyeon, but this features something different from your typical buckwheat noodles. The kudzu noodles are made from an invasive vine that has a root that renders elastic, slurpy noodles with a good chew to them. A server comes by with scissors and cuts them off, letting the noodles fall into the refreshing icy broth, which is topped with cucumber and a hard-boiled egg. This is truly unique, even for New York.