ARISU Korean Restaurant

My friends and I went to ARISU after buying a deal on Groupon for it — $ 99 for a fried chicken set, which has eight pieces, and two cans of beer. ARISU is located on Pan Hoi Street. To get there, walk along Tong Chong Street through Tai Koo Place and then make a right at the end. You have to walk past the garbage collection point, so it reeks pretty badly.
To be honest, my first impression of it wasn’t great. The street the restaurant was on looked littered and dirty, and the restaurant itself was much smaller than I had imagined it to be. It definitely couldn’t sit more than fifty people at one time. Even so, the place looked cramped and actually reminded me of a cha chan teng.
We were given two large plates of coleslaw before the fried chicken. It came with dishes of some sauce that was spicy, and I’m actually not sure if the sauce was meant for the coleslaw or for the fried chicken that as to come here. It felt a little weird to have coleslaw with spicy sauce, and there was already some thousand island dressing in the coleslaw itself. I’m not a huge fan of coleslaw so I just had a bit, but from what little I had of it, it tasted pretty fresh.
The fried chicken took its time to come and took about fifteen to twenty minutes to arrive. The chicken came out nice and hot — a must for a good fried chicken. The meat was really tender, but its skin was quite fattening. It must have been a pretty small chicken too because there wasn’t much meat on the bones. I liked that the chicken wasn’t seasoned to be too salty though.
I guess one thing that bothered me about this place was hygiene — I asked for a fork and knife because I didn’t want to use my hands, and the handle of the knife felt a little oily. On the topic of cutlery, the chopsticks are the Korean metal ones and they’re much flatter compared to regular chopsticks. My friends and I found them really hard to use!
Overall, I don’t think I would recommend coming to ARISU. While the fried chicken was good, the portion was small and the restaurant just seemed like it was in dire need of a good clean.