Café V now serves fried chicken

Café V, the coffee shop at 7131 Little River Turnpike in Annandale, has added fried chicken and beer to the menu.

While continuing to serve high-end coffee and related hot and iced drinks and pastries, the café now houses a bb.q Chicken franchise.

“bb.q” stands for “best of the best quality,” not barbeque.

All chicken at bb.q is trimmed, brined for 24 hours, marinated twice, physically tenderized without chemicals, and fried lightly in olive oil at a low temperature.

“The result is chicken that’s very juicy and soft inside and crispy on the outside,” says franchisee and Café V owner Steve Lee. “We’re serving the best-quality chicken anywhere.”

Diners can choose a spicy “secret sauce” or another hot or mild sauce. The menu includes a whole or half chicken and boneless or bone-in thighs or wings.

bb.q Chicken also offers rice bowls, dumplings, three types of ddeok-bokki (a rice cake dish), and other items. According to Lee, the chicken fried rice has more chicken than rice.

The Korean bb.q restaurant chain has some 4,600 locations worldwide and more than 260 in the United States, including 10 in Northern Virgina.

Café V had temporarily taken some of its sandwiches off the menu to focus on starting bb.q Chicken, but plans to eventually bring them back. As of now, breakfast sandwiches are available on weekends.

When Steve and Victoria Lee opened Café V in 2022, they wanted to create a place for local residents to hang out. That has happened, as the café is often full of people meeting up for coffee and working on laptops for hours. In fact, Lee says, two people who started writing books there have now finished them.

People mostly drink coffee in the mornings, so Steve hopes adding chicken and beer to the mix to draw more people throughout the day and evening.