Red Pepper Strathfield — Restaurant in Sydney

Strathfield Sports Club is in the grips of a major renovation. In its new form, their ever-popular Red Pepper Bistro takes pride of place on the ground floor with a brand new commercial kitchen, just after the busy sign-in desk. The now mostly neutral-toned dining room is set right beside their pair of well-lit, 5-a-side soccer fields. With the dining room sitting about a metre below the field height, it’s footwork central, with the ball flying into goal nets right at head height. Against bowls of Kook Soon Dang ($13/bottle) draft makgeolli we take in the sport and the energetic dining room.

Having to dance around the building works created by this Nicholas Architects redesign doesn’t seem to have dampened the enthusiasm for this Korean bistro, with large groups of youthful athletic types, families with small kids, and dating couples making up the bulk of the crowd. The rowdier groups are throwing back beer and soju against giant platters of Korean fried chicken from the Incredible Chicken menu. We join the fray using the smaller serve setting that better caters to those dining in pairs.

While we ordered hot and spicy gangjung bone-in chicken, I suspect what we actually received was the cinnamon and soy-based Incredible Gangjung ($18) as our twice-fried chook arrived drenched in a sticky sweet soy sauce accompanied by just a few fragrant, fresh green chilli slices. As a result, our Cream Cheese Fiery ($19), also ordered bone-in, was hotter, stickier and tastier, especially with its clever two-buck, chewy tteok-bokki (rice cake) add on. When your mouth got overloaded with heat, this version comes with a salty, tangy cream cheese dipping sauce that has a flavour profile that reminds me of French onion soup powder, to help put out the flames. Both of these fried chicken renditions are quite sweet, so the salty dipping sauce also helps to balance the flavour of our second kind of chook.

By also ordering a dish from the wider Red Pepper menu, we get banchan, the little Korean side dishes so essential when you're eating spicy food. We opted for the Spicy Pork Rib Hot Pot ($45/small), which feels pricy, but upon reflection would easily feed four people and seem quite economical that way. The spicy, peppery broth simmers away beside us, dragging down the mountain of shaved shallots and glassy noodles into the bubbling mass below. It's made up of pork ribs on the bone, potato, tteok-bokki, shimeji and enoki mushrooms. We’re soon tucking into the soupy combination against small bowls of rice, marveling at how easily the tender chunks of pork meat fall from the shiny rib bones.

Hot, spicy, and MSG-laden fried chicken really works up a thirst, so we hit up more makgeolli and order dessert. The Mango Shave Ice ($18.50) seems very pricy until we see that, like the fried chicken, the bowl is predicated upon sharing. It’s a wacky mix of cream cheese, canned mango and super frothy mango shaved ice, topped with a lovely ice-crystal free scoop of vanilla ice cream and scattered with crumbled freeze-dried raspberries. There’s way too much for even two thirsty, capsaicin-affected folk. Oh, and that chilli burn, which crept up slowly through the meal, lingered persistently all the way home, so I advise you to know...

I like fried chicken as much as the next man. Infact I like it so much that I walked for about 10 mins in the middle of a heatwave to get to this place while walking past countless other fried chicken places. I was led to assume that Red Pepper is the OG. Turns out it's absolutely hopeless. I ordered the two storey chicken platter after much forwards and backwards with the person behind the counter. It seemed like we both were discovering the menu for the first time. Ah covid happened, people change jobs. Maybe her first day, no biggie.

We had the snow cheese, the sweet and spicy and the really exotic one (I forget the name). It was the standard order for 2 storey fried chicken.

The food also took over 40 mins to come, by that time the Mrs had already fried my brain and was sharpening her knife to dig in. This 40 min delay was informed to me AFTER I placed my order and paid for it- kinda shady but no biggie, if the fried chicken good- I'll wait. The food was subpar, nothing special about the chicken. The sauces and the snow cheese dressing were so dry and it tasted like they fried all the chicken in a big batch, sprinkled a bit of dressings and sauces as per the order and just let it slide out of the kitchen. If this was a manufacturing firm, their QA is severely amiss. I guess the only good thing about the place is that you get to see a bunfh of youngins playing futsal in front of you while you gorge on food. If football is not your thing, please save yourself the trip and try chicken V or the countless other fried chicken spots nearer to the station and main Street. It's really...

My partner and I have been loyal customers of Red Pepper in Strathfield for years and have never had a bad experience — until last Thursday.

We went in for dinner and ordered a soup and bossam to share. Before our food arrived, we politely informed two staff members that we would be moving to a different table. Despite this, the manager, James, brought our food to the wrong table. To make matters worse, even after the people at the wrong table tried to redirect him, and my partner personally went to fetch him, James came over and slammed our side dishes onto our table in an aggressive, unacceptable manner. It was shocking and completely ruined the start of our meal.

As we ate, we quickly ran out of garlic and chilli — essentials for enjoying bossam properly. When we asked James for more, he reluctantly brought a very small amount. Since we still had a fair bit of food left, we asked again, only for James to curtly respond, “The kitchen is closed,” despite it being only 8:50 PM and food still clearly being served to other tables.

This experience was incredibly disappointing, not only because of the rudeness and hostility shown by the manager, but also because of the lack of basic service we had always appreciated here. We left feeling unwelcome and frustrated.

Red Pepper used to be one of our go-to places, but after this, it’s hard to see...