2 a.m. Eats: K Top
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
KTop | 911 Race St., 267-909-9306, k-top911.com.
We were already pretty tanked when we arrived at KTop’s futuristic, Tron-like upstairs lobby a few minutes before 2 a.m. As we waited next to a smoking teenager for the rest of the group we’d recruited for after-hours karaoke and Korean food in Chinatown, the kind hostess let us know that if we wanted to drink anything else alcoholic in the next couple hours, we had to order it in the next minute. The kitchen stays open until 4, but the booze stops at 2. We planned for the future, getting a large ice bucket of Korean OB beers for $50 and one potent Long Island iced tea, and were steered to our room and given a primer on the very confusing karaoke machine.
You should call ahead to reserve one of the private karaoke rooms if you’re trying to go on a weekend. They’re an excellent deal — technically $40/hour, but you can count food and drink purchases toward it. Each room has its own restroom, screen, mics and a wall touchpad with a bunch of icons with Korean script underneath that our drunk asses were too nervous to touch, aside from an obvious “summon waitress.”
KTop, I’ve been told, has very good Asian-fusion food downstairs; in the karaoke rooms you can order off a smaller but still expansive snack-skewer menu. I wish I could tell you I based my order on something other than being very drunk, but I can’t. I can tell you that the “grilled baby steak” was generally agreed to be about as tender as a hypothetical human infant. Butter salt tendons were a little mushy, and tasted neither buttery nor salty. A non-novelty order of Xing Jiang lamb skewers was excellent — hot, cumin-y and tender .
And the bar-until-2, kitchen-until-4 situation worked out surprisingly well. Because though we arrived at KTop wasted and left after a sloppy, ecstatic 3:59 a.m. rendition of “Livin’ on a Prayer” — and then only because our screen stopped working — nobody was hung over the next day.
