bb.q Chicken Downtown Gainesville (FLORIDA) — Restaurant in Gainesville

BB.Q Chicken, also known as Best of the Best Quality Chicken, is the largest Korean chicken franchise from South Korea. Fried chicken was introduced to Koreans by U.S. African American soldiers during the Korean War, and over the past half-century, it has become extremely popular in Korea, leading to the creation of numerous unique flavors. Koreans often enjoy their fried chicken with beer after late work hours, giving rise to the term "Chi-Mac" (Chicken + Maekju, the Korean word for beer). Nowadays, there are about 87,000 fried chicken restaurants in South Korea alone, which is more than all the McDonald's in the world, despite McDonald's being the world's largest restaurant chain.

BB.Q's Golden Original chicken is renowned for its exceptional quality and extra crispy texture, achieved by frying the chicken twice. In addition to Golden Original, I recommend all their flavors, including honey garlic, soy garlic, galbi, spicy galbi, hot mala, gangjeong, and Gangnam style. All of them are unique and are absolutely delicious. Additionally, cheesling chicken is quite distinctive, featuring a Cheetos-like shell coated with sweet cheese powder. Their hot spicy and secret spicy flavors are Korean-spicy, distinct yet comparable in heat to the "Hot!" level, the third spiciest at Hattie B's Hot Chicken from Nashville, TN. One Korean chicken variation that BB.Q does not offer is Padak, which features chicken with green onions. However, this dish is available at Seoul Pocha. Additionally, BB.Q offers delicious Tteokbokki (Korean spicy rice cakes), a popular Korean street food. For a rich, creamy, moderate spicy taste, try the Rose Tteokbokki, and for those interested in spicy options, the Mala Tteokbokki is a must-try, reminiscent of street food stalls in Seoul.

Please keep in mind that when BBQ Chicken stores open, there are always very long lines for several weeks after opening. I would suggest ordering over the phone or online and expecting at least a 1.5-hour wait time. This was the case for both BB.Q stores in Orlando and Tampa. It took about 6 months for these stores to reach full speed, and currently, it still takes about 30 minutes in the Orlando and Tampa stores, mainly because they make...

My family and I have been waiting for this place to open and we were super excited to finally try it. We love Korean fried chicken and I make it at home a few times a year. I am giving this place a little grace as I know it just opened and they are working out the kinks, so I will review this in sections.

Food: I was not super impressed. For the hefty price tag of $15 for 8 wings I was expecting excellence. Korean fried chicken is supposed to be super crunchy, but all of it was soggy with no crunch. We ordered the Spicy Galbi, Honey Garlic, and Gangnam Style. The flavor of the Galbi was just ok and the wings would have been a little better if they were not drenched beyond belief in sauce. Soooo much sauce. The Honey Garlic was good, but I barely tasted any garlic and the sauce ratio for this one was good. The Gangnam Style was the best flavor and I would order again, it had a nicely balanced heat that was savory and spicy. I was also bummed that we could not mix and match flavors, most places will let you order wings and pay a slight up-charge to have two flavors for the same order. Oh, and it comes with pickled radish, which I absolutely love, but the rest of the fam hated. It would be nice if there were other options as a small side to be included instead of having to pay $8 for french fries.

Service: The service was interesting. They were attentive, but still floundering a bit as the place is brand new. We were told it would be a 30 minute wait for the food once we ordered even though there were only a few occupied tables. So the weird thing is that they kept checking on us. Like every 5 minutes a different person would ask is if we needed something. Too much of a good thing!

Atmosphere: It’s a fast food joint, so no points off for looking like one. They had kpop playing as well as kpop music videos on the tv. It really threw me off though as the music that is playing does not match the music videos they had on. No points off for that, I just found it a little odd.

I am willing to give it another try once they have been...

I went in tonight on 4/6/24 with friends to celebrate a birthday. We arrived at 7pm, we were seated and not tended to for another 20 minutes, finally someone arrived and took our drink orders and brought it back within 5 minutes. It is now 7:25pm, our waiter takes our orders. We sat and watched different parties come in, everyone get their food before us, and we thought maybe because we had a bigger order that is why the wait was so long. Now, it is 7:50pm, our drinks are empty, there was no waiter coming to our table, no refill on drinks, no update on the food, still have this place the benefit of the doubt. It is now 8:15pm, we finally wave our waiter down because he had not checked on us since we ordered and asked him “how much longer on the food?” He goes to the back and then comes back with a very bogus story on how our order was mysteriously “deleted” out of the computer ordering device that they use. We were so disappointed and eventually left the building without being serviced. From arriving at 7pm and leaving the establishment at 8:30pm. We were so excited and looked forward to trying this place and was left unattended to. We were the only colored people in the entire building, and it appears to be a racial thing seeing that we were treated extremely poorly due to the color of our skin. I would not recommend this place to anyone, and if I could leave a -100 review I would. Highly disappointed. Highly frustrated. If you’re a colored person, DO...