Angel Dabang, N1

A banging dabang

After kimchi and K-pop, fried chicken has become one of Korea’s most ubiquitous exports. Angel Dabang, a compact cafe tucked behind Islington’s Upper Street, leans into that popularity and expands on it with a menu where almost everything comes deep-fried — sausages, croquettes, even the sandwiches. As a man on a diet, this poses a problem for me, a problem worsened by the fact that Angel Dabang is a) quite close to my house, and b) frustratingly good.

Angel Dabang takes its name from the Korean term for cafes serving non-alcoholic drinks, though in fact the food here feels like the firm focus. There’s coffee, including an eponymous dabang coffee infused with condensed milk, plus a spread of hot teas and a small selection of heavily sweetened iced ones. I imagine Dabang does a brisk trade in people popping in for a takeaway coffee and a twisted kkwabaegi doughnut, dusted in cinnamon sugar and great value at £1.50.

Good as the doughnuts are, I have much more interest in Dabang’s sprawling savoury menu, all the more impressive given that this must have a fighting chance at being London’s smallest cafe. There’s just enough counter for two people to stand at, and a seat or two behind where you can sit while you wait, so long as you don’t mind getting up close and personal with the lower back of whoever next comes in to order. It might go without saying, but don’t expect to dine in. Instead, if you’re not local I recommend ducking round the corner to nearby Lonsdale Square — you’ve got good odds of spotting at least one other Dabang customer clutching their own cardboard box stuffed with greasy goodies.

And yes, this will get greasy. You can eat something that hasn’t been fried at Angel Dabang, though your options are limited. The only permanent one is tteokbokki, the slippery rice cakes that you’ll find slathered in a sweet, spicy sauce in every street food market in Seoul. I’ll be honest: tteokbokki have never really done much for me. The chewy-slimy texture is great, but the sauce is always just a little too sweet, and if you don’t add toppings it starts to feel one-note. Angel Dabang’s iteration did little to change my mind, even with the welcome inclusion of a few slices of fishcake, though it’s clearly competently done. If you like tteokbokki more than I do, you’ll enjoy this too.

Still, I’d skip the tteokbokki and stick to kimbap if you can get hold of them. Like a few dishes at Dabang — three trips in, I still haven’t managed to eat a croquette — the kimbap tend to sell out if you don’t get down early enough. All the more reason to grab one of the rice rolls if you see them: they’re light, crisp, and crunchy, and surprisingly filling too. They’re a summer special apparently, so get them before they go — I’ve not yet had better kimbap in London.

Then there’s the fryer. There’s chicken, of course, available in a soy glaze or the classic sweet-spicy sauce. This isn’t quite the best Korean fried chicken in the area — nearby Masigo is better for my money — but it’s hot and crisp, interspersed with a few fried rice cakes for good measure, and avoids the usual pitfalls of either drowning in sauce or running impossibly sweet. I’m less a fan of the sausage roll, which despite the name is closer to a Korean corndog: a cheap frankfurter dunked in batter and thrown in the fryer, which doesn’t do much to improve on the basic sausage at the centre. Don’t let it distract you from the less common gimmari: deep-fried knots of glass noodles and seaweed, transformed by the fryer into salty little bundles of joy.

The strangest thing about Angel Dabang, both its blessing and its curse, is that even its array of sandwiches come packed into a house-made fried bread roll with a crispy panko crust. This essentially makes a sandwich out of a doughnut, which has the obvious potential to be delicious, but also poses a problem: the bread is extraordinarily sweet. The best sandwich here, packed with fried chicken, manages that balance thanks to the heavy hit of spice and a good number of pickles that cut through the sugar. It’s exceptional, and kimbap aside, likely the single best order on the entire menu — not to mention fantastic value at just £5.50. The punchy flavours of beef bulgogi hold up in the sandwich well too, but others, like the potato and egg or the standard ham, are neither savoury nor sharp enough to withstand the sugary wrapper, and so don’t quite work.

I won’t pretend that a sandwich of fried chicken, in a sugary sauce, wrapped inside a deep-fried bun, is something any of us should aspire to eat on the regular. Would that I could, don’t get me wrong, but my basic biology insists otherwise. There’s not much at Angel Dabang, kimbap aside, that feels especially close to NHS dietary guidelines — even the coffee comes with condensed milk. Then again, mental health matters as much as physical, and in that sense the curative role of eating fried food on a park bench on a sunny day cannot be overstated. Perhaps I can make a healthy habit of this after all.