Entree Kibbles: Pizza Maru - Korean Fried Chicken & Interesting Pizzas (No Pork, No Lard, Alcohol Free) @ Northpoint City Mall [Yishun, Singapore] #northpoint

Do fried chicken and pizza go well together? It did seem like an interesting combination and i never regretted my visit to Pizza Maru upon receiving a strong recommendation from my younger sister to check it out!

Tucked away at the far end of the new wing on basement one of Northpoint, this eatery is one of many in the designated food arena of the shopping centre. Competition is predictably intense and the good thing is that you don't usually need to wait long to get a table.

Use this QR code option to order! I prefer to do so the good old way by calling for the waitress as i am a sucker for recommendations and being undecided over what to order can be so frustrating!

For example, with eight choices for the fried chicken, i was honestly stuck! Thankfully, there were four of us to share and i thought this "two is better than one" option would allow us to try more than just one flavour. Problem was; which two to choose?

Roasted Barley - free flow roasted barley tea for just S$1.90. Did you realize that Japanese restaurants would go for green tea whereas barley tea is usually the norm for Korean restaurants? My preferred tea is actually barley tea.

Korean Fried Chicken (Two Is Better Than One) - six pieces of spicy garlic dak gangjeong and half a dozen of sweet honey butter coat. To be frank, i think we over-ordered as there were just too much food (including the yet to appear pizza) and my parents are not big eaters.

An issue with Korean fried chicken is that their base is simply put just deep fried chicken and the flavour came in at the last stage via a top-up; e.g. stir fried with a sauce, like my garlic dak gangjeong or coated with powder, like my honey butter coat. This differs from other fried chicken like KFC which has herbs and spices in the wet batter before frying.

I do like this Korean version as the cooked batter turned out to be crispy and flavourful; the garlic dak gangjeong was sweet, garlicky with a manageable spicy level whereas the honey butter coat had a nice, buttery aroma! Too much batter was a bad thing though it got cloying after a while.

Although the meat underneath the batter was juicy and chunky, i got a bit turned off with the slightly pinkish meat within as it gave the impression that the chicken was under-cooked.

Real BBQ Chicago - featuring the black rice dough, this pizza has "double mozzarella cheese, string cheese, cream cheese mousse, chicken chunk, roasted onion, mushroom, tomato, potato, honey, almond flake, icing sugar, BBQ sauce."!

Always satisfying to see the strings of cheese that never seemed to break as you pull a slice away from the pan! To be honest, this tasted like the BBQ chicken from Pizza Hut but at an elevated happiness level.

Incredibly cheesy with even more cheese oozing from the centre of the bulging ring-edge; the slices of almond provided a unique, nutty aftertaste and i super loved the sweet black rice dough! I was so full yet i couldn't resist taking the last slice of the delicious Real BBQ Chicago pizza!

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