BREAKING: Kyochon Closes for Retraining!

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“Here’s a menu… come back on Saturday”

From Lunch’er Alyssa in the ML Inbox: “Just went out to get Kyochon (on 5th btw. 32+33rd) today and was informed that they’re closed for the next two days to retrain all of the employees due to the poor reviews they’ve received. Further proof that all those too-early reviews just ruined it for everyone else.” Clearly, your voices have been heard.

Related:
The Really Early Word on Kyochon
Cast Your Judgements on Kyochon Now That It’s Open For Lunch (That’s Right… You Read That Correctly)

27 Comments

  • maybe they should lower their prices too.

  • wow, i guess 2 years wasn’t long enough training period.

  • User has not uploaded an avatar

    i thought the primary complaints were more about the size of the chicken and the comparative price while the service was good? guess i better find some more reviews

  • User has not uploaded an avatar

    AMEN on mkim1206.. better prices or bigger (and hopefully not over-fried) wings. It’s absurd to pay $5.99 for like 10 bites of food.. even in NYC!!

  • Besides the wing price/quality, improvement in service too if people are waiting forever. Long lines are never welcomed. Unless they start slashing prices in half – oh joy, never-ending lines.

  • User has not uploaded an avatar

    Kyochon sure knows how to get people talking about them. The whole thing has been quite humorous.

  • yeah..attention whore. they say bad publicity is better than no publicity..or something like that, right?

  • People in my office got it delivered when I Was away this week–they thought it was terrible…I am not sure any amount of retraining is going to fix this place. If they cut prices in half, MAYBE….

  • User has not uploaded an avatar

    Go ahead and put in your bid on the fried-egg table now if you’d like to own it, because they’ll be selling off the fixtures within a month.

  • Hopefully it’s just a matter of time before they catch up to their west-coast branches in quality, speed, etc.

  • lmao, I knew I wasn’t the only one pissed that I couldn’t get both kinds of wings for my $9.99.

  • Wow, I guess ONE DAY was too long to go without a kyochon posting here. Does the foodblogging elite realize that MOST readers won’t even bother checking this place out? They slowly serve small portions of mixed-quality food items at large prices, so what is the big fuss about exactly? It’s sad when food bloggers so obviously jump on a bandwagon topic because all their buddies are doing the same. This is seriously worse than last year’s Artichoke Pizza hub-hub.

  • They are actually retraining half the staff to provide rub-and-tugs to waiting customers …to make up for the bad reviews but also and to make the long lines more palatable

    Updated menu will now feature Choked Chicken

  • Stevenp: “Does the foodblogging elite realize that MOST readers won’t even bother checking this place out? They slowly serve small portions of mixed-quality food items at large prices”

    The reason most readers wont go there NOW is we are learning from the ones that went on the first few days that they “slowly serve small portions of mixed-quality food items at large prices”

    Im grateful they took one for the team and saving me money and a waste of time.

  • User has not uploaded an avatar

    I’ll never try it because the prices are kind of stupid… They call half a wing a drumstick… Charge 4.99 for two of those “drumsticks”! That’s absurd. I dont know how big these drumsticks are, but unless they are truly the size of a normal chicken drumstick, then thats a complete ripoff. Hell 5 pieces of the other half for 6 is a rip off too. Those aren’t lunches, or meals. Those are snacks. They need to close the place and re do the pricing on the menu.

  • BTW, i think that dude with his back to the camera is wearing a jock strap.

  • User has not uploaded an avatar

    It’s crazy to think that bloggers caused this. It’s also crazy to think that any amount of re-training they do is going to change the fact that Kyochon is just not that special. It’s not bad, it’s just not great. When they do open back up, however, NYC Food Guy will wait at least a month to review them again, and I will review them again, to give them a credible chance to achieve something resembling greatness.

  • Bit like your blog.

    and you refered to yourself in the 3’rd person.

    Twat.

  • User has not uploaded an avatar

    The NYC food blogging community periodically loses its mind (see also: K! Pizzacone). A little bit of hype creates more hype, creates way more hype and before you know it, the bloggers must report on it every hour (Breaking: Kyochon won’t serve wings until after 6pm@!!! ZoMG, BREAKING: Kyochon is open for DINNER!>!>! BREAKING: Kyochon to open at 11:15am instead of 11am!!!!!)

    I just did a quick count and there have been 9 Kyochon posts on ML in March…. NINE. Over a type of food that we already have plenty of in the city, and frankly wouldn’t be all that exciting even if Kyochon had the best Korean chicken wings on the planet. It’d certainly be worth a mention, but nine mentions?

    What’s sad is that this overhype machine takes focus away from interesting things happening food-wise in the city. Those 9 posts could’ve been used to cover new and interesting spots around midtown.

    ML staff, try to use your heads here. Instead of getting sucked into the hype going on around the blogosphere, let’s stay focused on discussion of new, interesting lunch choices in midtown. Stay in touch with your readers instead of staying in touch with eater, seriouseats, fork in the road, etc, etc etc

    • User has not uploaded an avatar

      @heWho

      Don’t kid yourself those nine posts would be replaced with:

      1) other bloggers posting crap you wouldn’t bother to read otherwise (many of which have nothing to do with midtown OR lunch)

      2) links to forum threads you wouldn’t bother to read otherwise (DOS hint: the few that care are already in the forum)

      3) other exaggerated and embellished “issues” loosely related to midtown or lunch blown way out of proportion (Street Vendor Project I’m looking at you)

      4) pandering to the LCD with innuendo, sexual repartee and adolescent dick swinging.

      ML was struggling for content before Zach moved to Ca. mostly due to the narrow scope and limited universe of subjects. There’s little choice nowadays but to troll the other blogs in closer proximity to midtown and rely on people of considerably less talent, focus and gravitas than our beloved rotund (if only self-proclaimed) one. It was a labor of love that turned into a business and suffers for it, nothing new under the sun. We continue to return hoping some of that magic will return but it’s becoming an increasingly difficult exercise in futility only kept alive by inflated tolerance levels of frustration and misguided optimism.

      Been there, done that, long before the Internet was accessable by those other than universities and government employees I ran a popular BBS. My experience is that the brilliance of community has a finite lifespan (rarely more than a few years). It was much easier to disolve things when the luster faded, it was simply a matter of refunded subscribers dues and donations and pulling the plug. In many ways the increased exposure (by orders of magnitude) and ad revenue insures the longevity, inevitable dilution of content and proliferation of mediocrity.
      Fred has sung.

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