Dig into Korean fried chicken, sushi sandos, beer towers at Freret Street’s new Chi Chi’s

The story behind Korean fried chicken is salty, spicy, earthy and just a little sweet, the profile of the gochujang, the fermented red chili paste that’s key to these extra-crispy, double fried wings.

The story behind the city’s new purveyor of them is a homecoming for a couple raised in the local restaurant business who are making their own start with some of the cravings they developed working far afield.

The result is Chi Chi’s Chicken & Beer (4147 Freret St.), part of the ever-changing Uptown restaurant row. Two blocks way, the street also saw the debut of the second location of smash burger master Bub’s Burgers this week with its tiny new Bub’s Grab & Go (5031 Freret St.).

Chi Chi’s opens today (Sept. 7) in the address that was previously Windowsill Pies, a gem of a pie shop that sadly closed last spring. It’s a small, 30-seat restaurant bringing something different to the local scene.

Family roots, new flavors

This new restaurant is the first project from Adolfo Garcia and Sophia Petrou. Petrou’s family runs Russell’s Marina Grill, the West End institution. Garcia’s name will be familiar to local restaurant aficionados. His father, also named Adolfo Garcia, has run a string of restaurants, going back to the 1990s and was an influential early adopter of Freret Street’s commercial comeback a dozen years ago.

The younger Adolf Garcia, who goes by Fito (the Spanish diminutive of Adolfo), is also a chef. He’s been building his career at high-aiming restaurants from Panama, where his family is from, to Paris and most recently New York.

Post-shift jaunts around New York’s Korean restaurant scene is how he learned to love Korea chicken and a bigger idea around it: chimaek.

The Korean term chimaek combines the words chicken and beer. But in practice it’s not about the pairing so much as the experience and good times that go with it.

“It’s an experience, you come together around it, that’s what stuck with me,” Garcia said. “It’s like crawfish boils here, it’s more than about the food.”

Chicken, beer, sushi sandos

At Chi Chi’s, wings (six, 12 or 20 pieces) are coated either with gochujang sauce or garlic soy, and there’s chicken sandwiches, with a Korean version and a Southern version, marinated with buttermilk.

The bar takes care of the beer part of chimaek with a short selection on cans and draft (Asahi or SkaterAid), and another fixture of the chimaek tradition: beer towers. These are three-liter servings served in a tower with an iced center and a tap to share around the table.

Chi Chi’s menu also has another of Garcia’s cravings. Onigirazu are essentially Japanese onigiri rice balls fashioned into sushi sandwiches, the sour rice serves as the “bread,” encased in nori. It’s like a combination of sushi and sandos, the simple, precise Japanese sandwiches. You can get these with spicy tuna cucumber, salmon jalapeno, a seasonal vegetarian version and Korean fried chicken.

“A lot of this is new to New Orleans, but will be familiar to some people from home, some from other cities, its exiting to bring this here,” said Petrou.

Korean sno-balls, sojo drinks

The short menu also has steak, a 10 oz rib eye either charcoal grilled or fried gyukatsu style. For desserts, the feathery-light texture of kakigori shaved ice brings to mind the best New Orleans sno-balls, with flavors like matcha, strawberries and cream, coconut and melon.

Beyond beer, the bar has wine, a selection of soju (the Korean liquor) and soju-based cocktails.

Chi Chi’s feels like the kind of place where you could drop in for a quick sandwich or sink in for drinks with friends and a shared feast. It’s also a place with a lot of personality built in.

“My latest obsession is what makes dining special, the emphasis on all the little things that seem unnecessary but are integral to the experience,” he said.

The small restaurant is filled with these elements, from the type of plastic bottles to serve water at the tables to adorable, motorized dispensers for soju, a workaround for the Korean cultural tradition of never pouring one’s own glass of this distilled spirit. With this device solo soju drinkers have a mechanized friend pouring for them.

Chi Chi’s has table service, and it offers takeout (order ahead via chichisnola.com).

Chi Chi’s Chicken & Beer

4147 Freret St., 504-381-4953

Wed. 5-9 p.m., Thu. 5-11 p.m., Fri., Sat. noon-11 p.m., Sun. 11 a.m.-5 p.m.