Any day s good for Chicken Day

Tucked away in the Briggs Plaza on Foothill Boulevard is the recently opened Chicken Day restaurant. The menu is posted over the counter — well, at least, we assumed it was the menu, since the text was all in Korean.

Fortunately for us, the restaurant happily provided a one-page menu with English translation, allowing us to order using something other than the “point and grin” method that we’ve perfected on our international travels.

The young lady behind the counter also took the time to patiently and clearly explain the menu options.

As one might expect from a place called “Chicken Day,” the menu was pretty Chicken-centric.

Three types of chicken were offered — fried chicken, spicy sauce chicken and teriyaki chicken.

A whole order consists of 12 pieces ($13.90 to 14.90), while a half order is six pieces ($6.95 to 7.45). Each of these choices can be ordered as wings or legs. Additionally, the fried and spicy chicken meals come in boneless options.

To complement the chicken, the restaurant also offers Korean rice rolls.

These tasty little cylinders, made from seaweed and rice, are wrapped around vegetables ($2.50), beef, tuna or cheese ($2.75).

The menu also includes an “everything roll” ($3) that has all of the above items, but apparently defies translation because it isn’t included in English on the menu. Be sure to ask about it.

Interestingly, all of the Kim bab rolls, even the vegetable roll, include little slivers of Spam, the oft-underrated meat product. They’ll take the Spam out if you ask, but why would you want to do such a thing? Steamed rice is also available ($1).

The restaurant’s interior is simple, with three booths and a handful of tables.

It also has a television showing Korean programming, which was strangely mesmerizing.

I could have easily sat in the restaurant and whiled away the evening trying to decipher Korean TV, but we were taking our order to the park to enjoy an outdoor musical production by the Crescenta Valley Arts Council.

A good way to judge take-out food is by how good it smells while the boxes are rolling around in the back seat of the car. It took quite a bit of willpower to keep myself from reaching back there and trying to grab a handful of chicken while motoring up Rosemont Avenue.

Once we settled ourselves into our lawn chairs, we noticed that we weren’t the only ones who brought Chicken Day to the park.

We started out with the fried chicken, which was hot, crispy and delightful.

Next, we sampled the spicy chicken, which was moist and only mildly spicy.

The teriyaki chicken was slathered in a teriyaki sauce that was similar to sweet and sour, and left our fingers red and sticky — in a good way. We also discovered a container of mildly pickled cucumbers at the bottom of the bag, which complemented the chicken nicely.

The Korean rice rolls were quite nice (hurrah for Spam!). The vegetable rolls were light and crunchy, and the everything roll had, well, a little bit of everything and was really tasty.

The leftovers were also good the next morning for breakfast.

A small container of sweet and spicy teriyaki sauce was great on the rice.

So, the next time you feel like a box o’ chicken, and are hoping for something a little more exotic than the Colonel and his secret recipe, you may want to pay a visit to the good folks at Chicken Day.