Category: Worldwide

VIP Restaurant, Anchorage, Alaska
On trips to see family in Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage, I make it a point to visit VIP Restaurant at least once. It’s located in the Valhalla Center, a retail and office building amid the Korean business cluster along West Northern Lights Boulevard.
There are a few other Korean restaurants in the city, but I have a personal connection to this one. A relative built the center the 1970s and leased the space to the restaurant in the early 1990s.
VIP Restaurant is on the ground floor of the Valhalla Center on the far right side. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
VIP Restaurant — 영빈관 in the Korean name means “house for special guests” — serves a large variety of Korean food, particularly soups and stews (탕 tang and 찌개 jjigae). VIP also has a selection of broiled fish, beef and pork dishes.
For those reluctant to try Korean food, also offer a modest selection of Chinese restaurant favorites, such as curry chicken, fried rice and Mongolian beef.
My husband and I brought my mother-in-law and stepfather-in-law for a weekday lunch. The restaurant was not crowded, and we received attentive service.
Land of the Morning Calm in the Land of the Midnight Sun: A 13-banchan display was traditionally reserved for royalty, but this is not a snooty, royal cuisine restaurant. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
The waitress brought out 13 반찬 banchan (appetizer plates), the most I’ve seen at any Korean restaurant I’ve visited so far in the States.
One of the banchan highlights was the seaweed salad. My husband normally eschews chewing seaweed in its various forms. This was first seaweed salad he said he enjoyed, partly because the type of plant used was the more delicate wakame seaweed (which is called 미역, miyeok in Korean) and partly because the savory-sweet marinade pleasantly masked the taste.
The main course came with a small bowl of 동민 dong min radish kimchi broth flavored with green onion and beef. That was another first for me on this side of the Pacific.
Between the four of us, we ordered 갈비 galbi (grilled beef ribs), two variations of 돌솥 비빔밥 dolsot bibimbap (hot stone bowl filled with mixed vegetables and rice) and Mongolian beef.
Ordering galbi ($12.99 lunch) and Mongolian beef ($11.99 lunch) allowed a side-by-side comparison of Korean and Chinese foods. The galbi was grilled wang-style (“king” cut with thin meat along two- to five-inch-long ribs) rather than L.A.-style (a thin flanken cut) more common to Korean-American restaurants.
The galbi had the typical Korean sweet touch, likely from fruit juice or corn syrup in the marinade. The Mongolian beef was stir-fried with ample green onion and certainly was more savory than the galbi. My Korean cuisine–averse builder-relative scarfed up the galbi and barely touched the Chi-Am dish.
The dolsot bibimbap dishes — served at this established in thick metal bowls rather than earthenware — hit the key cue: a blazing-hot bowl to crisp the rice in sesame oil and keep the food warm throughout the meal. The latter is nice for a typical Anchorage August day: in the 50s Fahrenheit and raining.
Kimchi bibimbap with the required fried egg. The other veggies are hiding behind the kimchi (Jeff Quackenbush photo)

My husband ordered dolsot kimchi bibimbap ($14.99). He noted for our Korean cuisine–cautious tablemates that cooked kimchi takes on a mellower flavor from its banchan brother.
Royally Jeonju-style bibimbap: I decided I preferred having kimchi on the side this time around. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)

For my hot bibimbap, I chose to eat like a queen: 전주 Jeonju bibimbap ($15.99). This specialty of Jeonju incorporates cues from Korean royal cuisine. My dish was overflowing with veggies: shredded laver, carrot, radish, soybean sprouts and gosari. My taste buds appreciated a generous squirt of bibibimbap 고주장 gochujang (a sweetened version of Korea’s go-to spicy red pepper sauce) from the tabletop squeeze bottle.

VIP Restaurant
Valhalla Center, 555 W. Northern Lights Blvd, Ste. 105, Anchorage, AK 99503
(907) 279-7549
Hours: Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Yelp: www.yelp.com/biz/vip-restaurant-anchorage
August 13, 2011
San Tung Chinese Restaurant – San Francisco Bay Area
Jajangmyun (자장면) is one of the national foods of Korea, you will not find one Korean person who doesn’t like it. Okay, that might be an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
The said tasty noodle dish is Chinese in origin. However, it was created with Korean people’s taste in mind, by Chinese restaurateurs, in Incheon. This is why Koreans call jajangmyun Chinese food and Chinese people call it Korean food.
So, is San Tung Chinese Restaurant (산동 – Mountain East) Chinese or Korean?
San Tung is definitely Chinese, with true Chinese food offerings, but they also make the best Korean jajangmyun in California.
You can order two different types of jajang sauce – wet (regular) or dry (gan-jajang). More specific, they serve wet or dry 삼선 자장 samsun jajang, meaning that the sauce has the three seafood ingredients – squid, scallops, and shrimp.
The flavor of San Tung’s jajangmyun leaves nothing to be desired when compared to the authentic Korean ‘Chinese’ restaurants back in the motherland. Everything from the consistency of the sauce, savoriness, just the right amount of sweetness, not overly greasy, and even the preparation of the ingredients… it’s a home run!
The only knock against this ‘oh-so-close-to-perfection’ dish, is that the noodles are still the machine extruded or hand cut variety. Jajangmyun connoisseurs will tell you that the best jajangmyun is with 수타면 sutahmyun (hand pulled – table beaten noodles). I’ve been disappointed with a few places that I have tried, in the Bay Area, that serve sutahmyun jajangmyun. Mainly their sauces have been severely botched in someway.
The other main attractions are the 간풍기 ganpoongi (dry deep-fried soy garlic chicken) and 물만두 mulmandu (steamed/boiled potstickers). The chicken wings are double fried, for extra crispiness, then sauced in a soy based sweet spicy sauce. You can also order the diced boneless breast meat if you don’t like wings. This marvelous concoction at San Tung is some of the best you will find anywhere. So much so, that my friend who travels all around the US, for his work, stated that San Tung’s ganpoongi is the best he’s ever tasted. My frequent visits to the Los Angeles area, the epicenter of Korean-American culture, can back up his claims.
So, my quest continues for the perfect magical unicorn jajangmyun, the dish with the perfect jajang sauce over some great sutahmyun…
[googleMap name=”San Tung Chinese Restaurant” description=”San Tung is on Irving St in between 11th and 12th Ave, in the Sunset Area”]1013 Irving Street San Francisco, CA 94122[/googleMap]
April 28, 2011
San Francisco Restaurants: YakiniQ
I’ll admit, despite how it looks or tastes, it’s pretty hard to mess up Korean BBQ. Let’s call it Korean grilled meat, to be more accurate. The Korean meat marinade is not that difficult to make, either. The real art is in the type of meat and its preparation. Of course, there is the grilling aspect of the experience. You see, the table side grilling at home can be quite cumbersome. If you cook the meat with a frying pan or in an oven the experience is not quite the same. Then there is the ventilation factor and fire hazard.
So, to get an authentic Korean grilled meat experience most of us will venture out to our favorite Korean BBQ restaurants. There are two flavors of Korean grills, all-you-can-eat (AYCE) and the regular pay-as-much-as-you-eat fare. In this posting, I will talk about the AYCE stuff. The more people in your party, you should more favor the AYCE restaurants… just trust me.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, there are a couple of decent AYCE joints in the Oakland/Richmond area and a very popular ‘Palace BBQ Buffet’ on the ‘K-Town El Camino Real’ in Sunnyvale, CA, but it is hard to find one in the city of San Francisco. So what to do when you’re in the City? You should check out YakiniQ in Japantown SF.
What’s the deal with a Japanese sounding name? ‘Yakiniku’ means grilled meat in Japanese. You figure out the rest. Despite the name of the place or the location in Japantown, make no mistake, this is a Korean restaurant. At YakiniQ, they offer two AYCE menus. At $19.99 you get chadolbagi (beef brisket), LA style galbi (Korean short ribs), samgyeopsal (pork belly), dalkgalbi (spicy chicken), butter garlic chicken, daejibulgogi (spicy pork), and some beef and pork internals. Add $3 more and you get bulgogi and some more various beef and pork internals.
Then you have the add-ons, not unlike buying a car with optional equipment packages, such as kimchi jjigae, lettuce for your ssam, naengmyeon, bibim naengmyeon, etc… at very low additional charges. However, ddeokssamji (rice cake wrap skins) and gyeranjjim (steamed eggs) are free, as much as you want.
There were six of us in the party and we called ahead for reservation, so the seating wasn’t a problem. But you might want to get reservations on the weekends, this place does get packed.
So, how was it?
First of all, the service is top notch. There are plenty of waiters and waitresses that walk around and tend to your needs–heck, sometimes they even cook the meat for you. If they are busy, there is a convenient push button at every table side to alert them, like paging for a flight attendant in an airplane.
Call me cheap, we did the $19.99 menu. I cannot comment on the bulgogi, but the rest of the meat offerings were very good. The daejibulgogi and dalkgalbi were neither too sweet nor too spicy, the samgyeopsal had some thickness but still could have been a little thicker, in my opinion. The banchan they served was pretty average, but you’re not going there to eat banchan.
I almost forgot to mention that YakiniQ is an ‘order-as-you-go’ AYCE, not the buffet style.
To complete our experience, we ordered some saeng makgeolli and some soju. There’s just something magical about soju and makgeolli with bulgogi… ahhhhh!
March 21, 2011
Tov Tofu, Santa Rosa
Tov Tofu in Santa Rosa opened in late 2010 and is the latest Korean restaurant to open in Sonoma County, a winegrowing region about an hour north of San Francisco. Bear Korean in Cotati opened several years ago, followed by the now shuttered Nha Bee in Santa Rosa and Honey Cuisine in Rohnert Park in 2008.
My husband and I visited Tov Tofu for the first time on Dec. 24 for a late lunch with a couple of our friends and their two children ages 2 and 4. It’s good to invite, cajole, plead or drag your family and friends with you to a new restaurant, so you more can sample more dishes and get a variety of opinions, from the expert Koreaphile to the first-time 한식 hansik (Korean food) diner.
The dipping sauce was beautiful, but it was the pajeon itself that kept the children happy. (Jeff Quackenbush photo)
Our menu included vegetable 판전 pajeon (egg and flour pancakes), 오무라이스 omurice (fried egg omelet over fried rice), 꼬리곰탕 ggori gomtang (oxtail soup), 비빔밥 bibimbap and 냉면 naengmyeon ($9.95). Both the pajeon ($8.50) and the fried egg omelet turned out to be a kid-pleaser.
The waitress brought out salt and pepper shakers to spice up the oxtail soup. (Jeff Quackenbush photo)
The oxtail soup ($12.50) was a mellow and non-spicy option, which ties into its reputation as a health tonic. Some who are not familiar with Korean cuisine might be put off by the milky-white bone broth, but it is full of minerals, including calcium, iron and potassium.
As part of his repeated challenge to K-pop and now Hollywood star Rain, Stephen Colbert said, "I'm all over it like egg on bibimbap." This bibimbap was garnished with strips of scrambled egg. (Jeff Quackenbush photo)
Tov Tofu’s bibimbap ($12.95) was the first such dish I’ve seen that didn’t have a large fried egg placed on top, but I enjoyed the sliced egg omelet homage to the fried egg as well as the pile of kimchi, beef, mushrooms, shredded daikon radish, seaweed (김 kim) and spinach.
A surprising discovery for newcomers to Korean cuisine is 옥수수차 oksusucha (roasted-corn tea), because corn often is not thought of as a tea ingredient. I’ve found that it has to be requested at a number of Korean restaurants I’ve visited in the U.S., rather than being automatically served as green tea is at Chinese restaurants. The hint of corn in a hot beverage is a welcome way to warm the insides while waiting for the food to arrive.
We went back to Tov Tofu on my birthday. This time, my stomach drew me toward the Korean cuisine stalwart 불고기 bulgogi. Tov Tofu’s version was served in typical fashion, layered on a bed of onions and sizzling on a hot iron plate.
Bulgogi and its grilled onion bedding. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
The savory side of bulgogi was more prominent in this interpretation than the characteristic sweetness, which is usually imparted by a Korean pear-forward marinade. Yet the grilled onions added a little sweetness and were just as tasty as the bulgogi itself.
My husband ordered the beef version of 김치 순두부 찌개 kimchi soondubu jjigae (kimchi stew with silken tofu) ($9.95). Those who may be averse to kimchi may want to give kimchi jjigae a try, because cooking gives kimchi tames the tang. Also, the tofu soothes the fire of this spicy dish. The broth had a slight fishy flavor, which likely came from either a fish broth or the fish paste used in many versions of kimchi.
Tov Tofu
1169 Yulupa Ave., Santa Rosa, Calif.
www.tovtofu.com
Hours: Six days a week and closed Mondays. Lunch is served from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.; dinner, 5 to 9 p.m.
Customer reviews: Yelp pages 1 and 2
Maps (Bangkok Villa closed at that location in July 2010): Bing, Google, Yahoo
February 11, 2011
Review: New Garden Restaurant, Los Angeles area
Written by Taeyang Yoon
Rowland Heights restaurant known for jajangmyeon
Continuing our journey down the ‘Korean’ section of Colima Road in Rowland Heights, we stop at one of my favorite places. I have been coming here on a fairly regular basis for a few months now. This restaurant is renowned for its ‘joonghwa yori’ (Chinese-Korean cooking), the people in the know go crazy over their jajangmyun (jajangmyeon) and tangsuyook – and I am one of them.
I found this place by asking some grocery store clerks nearby and almost unanimously they recommended this restaurant – New Garden Restaurant. It’s on Colima Road near the Paso Real Avenue intersection.
The restaurant itself is fairly large; it has a main dining area with about 100 seats and also a couple of private banquet rooms. The decor is clean and somewhat dominated by the two large big screen Samsung TV’s on either side of the dining area. Also, you can always find some customers slurping on some jajangmyun noodles at anytime of the day.
A huge plus for the restaurant is that the staff is excellent, probably some of the best service I receive in a ‘Chinese’ restaurant – they are very attentive and courteous. As soon as you sit down, they bring you some hot tea. After you order the food, they immediately serve you the dice onions with chunjang sauce (AKA jajang sauce) and joonghwa style cabbage kimchi. The main dishes come out not too long after the order. Just the scent of the food being served make the salivary glands instantly work in overtime, not unlike the Pavlov’s dogs.
Jjajamyun with kimchi and radish banchan served with a side of extra black bean sauce. (Photo by Taeyang Yoon)
The beauty of jajangmyun is in its simplicity. It’s just jajang sauce served over thick noodles. The sauce is made with onions, squash, and beef stir fried in black bean paste (chunjang) sauce which is thickened with some corn starch. Some gringos might call this the Chinese spaghetti, and they are not too far off in saying so. But we all know where the Italians got their noodles from…
The New Garden’s version of jajangmyun can be described as perfect sauce with machine extruded noodles. A true dish of jajangmyun is served with ‘sutamyun’, which is made by hand-pulling and beaten over the worktable. This type of noodles gives it a superior mouth-feel, but artisans who can create such noodles are getting rare today. At any rate, the New Garden’s offering gets a top-notch score in flavor, texture, and in preparation. The sauce is not sugary, not greasy, and not salty. It has just the right amount of savoriness, or umami. The noodles are cooked just right, although it is a shame that this great sauce does not get the deserved sutahmyun!
Their tangsuyook also deserves a very high praise. The meat is perfectly deep-fried with no funny, oily aftertaste. The meat actually stays crispy and the longer it sits in the sauce, the coating on the meat become chewy. At most restaurants, the tangsuyook goes soggy after a few minutes… not here. Also, to note, the sauce is not overly sweet as it often is at other places.
The ending verdict is that if you are a fan of jajangmyun, one of Korea’s national foods, or want to try it for the first time, New Garden Restaurant in Rowland Heights is one of the best.
New Garden Restaurant
18740 Colima Rd.
Rowland Heights, Calif.
(626) 912-9588
[googleMap name=”New Garden Restaurant”]18740 Colima Rd., Rowland Heights, CA[/googleMap]
December 1, 2010
Zazang Korean Noodle, San Francisco
This restaurant dominates San Francisco's jjajangmyun market and has a reputation of making the best in the Bay Area. (Photo by Tammy Quackenbush)
I found this little Korean noodle shop in San Francisco within walking distance of the University of California at San Francisco’s medical offices and a Kaiser Permanente hospital. This section of Geary Boulevard is a busy boulevard with little parking. The nearest public parking is a couple of blocks away at UCSF, which charges $2 for 20 minutes, or $6 an hour.
When I came in at 3:30 p.m., I had the place to myself. Customers started arriving around 4:30 p.m.
Jjajamyun (짜장면), typically made with pork, onions and other vegetables, is the restaurant’s signature dish, but I wanted something spicier. I ordered bibimmyun (비빔면, $8.95), which is wheat noodles smothered in a thin, spicy red pepper sauce and garnished with thinly julienned cucumber.
My bibimmyun did not come with scissors to cut my noodles, but the woman at a table next to me received scissors for her noodle dish. I could hear the snip, snip, snip as she chopstick-sized her noodles.
Zazang's ganjjajamyun makes excellent leftovers. (Photo by Jeff Quackenbush)
I ordered ganjajamyun (간자장면, $7.95) to go for my husband. Ganjajamyun is a wheat noodle dish covered in a black bean sauce with beef and vegetables. Zazang’s sauce was not as “glossy” or oily as the stereotype of jjajamyun would lead you to expect.
The ganjajamyun for carryout was packed in separate cups for the sauce and noodles. Be careful with storing the noodles and sauce separately in the refrigerator. The noodles got clingy in the fridge, which didn’t affect the flavor but certainly affected the aesthetics of the photo.
The banchan, or side dishes traditionally served with the meal, included pickled yellow radish (danmuji), raw onion and a tablespoon of jajamyung sauce. Surprisingly, the banchan didn’t include baechu kimchi, the traditional spicy fermented nappa cabbage version. I wasn’t even asked if I wanted some.
The menu has several spicy dishes. Those include gochujapchae (고추잡채, $14.95), which adds zippy red pepper to the popular garlicy, sesame-savory cellophane noodle dish japchae, and me-un gan zazang (매운캄짜징, $8.95), a spicier version of the black bean sauce dish.
Adult beverage options include soju, bokbunjaju (raspberry wine) or Hite brand beer.
If you find yourself visiting San Francisco and have an insatiable craving for jjajangmyun, this is the first place you should go to quench it.
Zazang Korean Noodle
2340 Geary Blvd. (Pacific Heights neighborhood on the edge of Japantown)
San Francisco
Open every day, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.
November 18, 2010
Honey Cuisine Sushi & BBQ, Rohnert Park, Calif.
Honey Cuisine Sushi and BBQ is located in the Wolf's Den shopping center near the south entrance of Sonoma State University. (Photo by Tammy Quackenbush)
Honey Cuisine Sushi and BBQ is just a stone’s throw from Sonoma State University. Since the restaurant opened May 2008, its patron mix has been 50-50 college students and locals, according to restaurant owner Hyun Kim. Most of the diners on the two nights I visited didn’t appear to be of Asian descent.
Kim said they’ve been blessed with busyness from day one, even though they opened just after the start of the recent U.S. economic recession in December 2007.
The restaurant is a newcomer to the sparsely served north San Francisco Bay area Korean food scene. Two Korean restaurants in Santa Rosa — one focusing on barbecue and the other on fusion fare — opened and closed in the past decade. Traditional-leaning Bear Korean Restaurant in the Sonoma County accordion capital of Cotati also opened in that timeframe and remains open under new ownership.
Honey Cuisine has traditional Korean selections at the back of the menu. But as sushi in the name suggests, much of the menu features a number of Japanese dishes, mainly sashimi, sushi, tempura and intriguing mixtures of the three, including baked sushi. So Honey Cuisine deserved at least two visits to sample the spectrum.
On our first trip, we focused on Korean standards.
Honey Cuisine’s bibimbap has the traditional elements, as seen here before one pours a lake of gochujang on it and puts the bibim (mixed) to the bap (rice). (Photo by Jeff Quackenbush)

My husband ordered 돌솥 비빔밥 dolsot bibimbap with chicken ($10.95). The hot stone bowl featured a mix of mushrooms, carrots, onions, zucchini, spinach, grilled chicken and sunnyside-up egg. Adding a familiar Korean restaurant touch, a squeeze bottle of 고추장 gochujang on the table allowed for do-it-yourself spiciness.
The barbecued chicken was brought on a hot iron plate, just as the bibimbap was brought out in a hot stone bowl. (Photo by Tammy Quackenbush)
I ordered barbecued chicken ($12.95). It included some zucchini, mushroom, carrot and jalapeno peppers mixed into the smoky, spicy sauce. Barbecued menu items, which include beef and pork, come with kimchi and steamed rice.
This was the first time I tasted Korean barbecued chicken with a strong smoke flavor. The use of smoke as a flavor ingredient is commonly thought of as an European-American trademark.
The kimchi was the only banchan on the menu, and it's only offered with the Korean barbecued dishes. (Photo by Tammy Quackenbush)
Honey Cuisine does not overwhelm customers with the typical Korean practice of covering the table with small-dish appetizers, called 반찬 banchan in Korean.
Even the classic spicy cabbage kimchi (배추김치 baechu kimchi) is not king in this Korean restaurant. Our server asked me, “Do you want to try some kimchi?” Of course, I did. Honey Cuisine’s baechu kimchi had the balance of sweet, spicy, sour and salty one expects from this Korean staple.
White daikon contrasts well with the green seaweed. The delicate crunch of the daikon went well with the more chewy texture of the seaweed. (Photo by Tammy Quackenbush)
I also ordered seaweed salad ($4.95). The seaweed was thinly julienned and piled on a bed of thinly julienned, slightly pickled daikon radish and drizzled with sesame oil dressing.
The 911 Sushi dish featured spicy tuna sashimi and seaweed, tucked in a wrapping of white rice and topped with avocado and a couple of different spicy sauces. (Photo by Jeff Quackenbush)
One the second visit, I had to try something from their extensive sushi and sashimi menu. The sushi that caught my eye was called 911 Sushi ($9.95). This spicy sushi featured a spicy tuna center rolled in 김 kim, or the rolled seaweed wrap the Japanese call nori. A layer of rice circumferenced the kim and tuna core.
A top view of the 911 Sushi dish shows the decorative plating with two sauces, pickled ginger and wasabi. (Photo by Jeff Quackenbush)
Avocado covered the top along with a playful sunbeam-like painting across the plate with a spicy, creamy sauce and a savory oil. The spiciness slowly sneaked up on me, causing a light sweat and a little drip from your nose. It’s not “I dare you to eat this” spicy.
Honey Cuisine’s japchae seems to be a fusion of the traditional Korean noodle dish and teriyaki-style stir fry. (Photo by Jeff Quackenbush)
My husband ordered chicken 잡채 japchae ($9.95), which seemed to be a fusion dish of japchae and chicken teriyaki. The dish arrived on a plate had white rice on one-third, and on the rest was a mound of chicken strips grilled in a teriyaki-style marinade as well as lightly steamed and stir-fried onions, zucchini, broccoli and carrot. Peeking out from underneath the chicken and veggies were cellophane noodles, appearing dark golden brown from the sauce.
Japchae can be a bellwether for attention to detail in Korean cuisine because of the subtle balance in the noodle sauce among pungent sesame oil, salty soy sauce, strong garlic, zesty black pepper and sometimes a touch of sweetness.
Honey Cuisine’s japchae sauce tasted heavier on soy sauce and light on sesame oil, garlic and pepper. I’ve had successes and failures in achieving that balance when making the dish myself. And even Bear Korean’s japchae has been soy sauce–heavy at times.
The noodles were left uncut — i.e., more fork-friendly than chopstick-friendly — and had a more rubbery texture than we’ve tasted to date. The appearance of food-only scissors when food is served can be off-putting to foreigners visiting Korea, but it is a hallmark of hospitality to serve food that one can eat with chopsticks and without cutting. Yet the ethnic mix of Honey Cuisine’s clientele mentioned earlier explains the restaurant’s place setting with fork, steak knife and bamboo chopsticks, rather than the traditional Korean setting of chopsticks and spoon.
Here are some additional pointers:
- On a busy night (Friday and Saturday, especially) exercise some patience in getting your meal, and expect a 30 minute wait for your meal.
- The restaurant seats about 40 people inside and accommodates small parties.
Honey Cuisine Sushi & BBQ
1712 E. Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
(707) 795-9700
Hours: Monday–Saturday, 11 a.m. – 9 p.m. Closed Sundays.
October 18, 2010
Korea House, Santa Clara, California
After a five-month stay in Southern California, I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area. I began to miss good Korean food following a few evenings in various Japanese restaurants.
Jonesing for home-style 조선 Joseon food, my date and I stopped at Korea House restaurant (한국의집) in Santa Clara, located between San Tomas Expressway and Los Padres Boulevard.
Santa Clara is near San Jose in the South Bay part of the San Francisco region. A section of El Camino Real between Wolfe Road and Lincoln Street is known locally as K-town. While not as extensive as the real Koreatown in Los Angeles, this area in the city of Santa Clara has a variety of Korean cuisine.
I’ve been frequenting Korea House since I moved to the Bay Area in 2000. It’s been consistently good, even though the restaurant has changed hands a few times. The service is still great, and the food quality hasn’t dropped off. The owner of the establishment greeted us after we sat down.
The menu is well-organized with a lot of suggestions for combinations of dishes — dinner packages of sorts. We ordered 김지 찌개 kimchi jjigae (kimchi stew) and 갈비 galbi (grilled ribs).
They usually bring out first a complimentary plate of 잡채 japche (cellophane noodles with a garlicky zesty sauce and vegetables). Then a couple of minutes later, the various 반찬 banchan (side dishes) come out in myriad little dishes.
There is no fancy banchan presentation, but all the usual favorites are there: 막김치 mak-kimchi (quick kimchi), 콩나물 kongnamul (cold-boiled marinated mung bean sprouts), 시금치나물 shigeumchi namul (parboiled and marinated spinach), fire-roasted sheets of seaweed and 어묵 eomuk (fish cake).
A few moments later, we received our bowls of 밥 bap (rice), and you can’t help but start eating the rice with the various banchan. Who needs the main entrees anyways? In a number of restaurants, banchan have become the appetizer course Western diners recognize.
As we started filling up with bap and banchan, the dinner dishes makes their way on to the table. As is traditional, the kimchi jjigae is served inside a blazing-hot stone bowl, and the galbi is presented on a hot cast-iron plate.
The key to a great kimchi jjigae is, obviously, the kimchi itself. It has to be great-tasting and aged properly to give it that tangy taste. Our jjigae was seasoned properly, but the kimchi it was made from was just average in taste. Although the kimchi was aged correctly, the taste wasn’t quite over the top.
The galbi, on the other hand, was perfect in every way. The new owner did brag about how good the galbi was, and she wasn’t lying. The meat was not too sweet, was perfectly tender, and the smokiness was just right.
The first owner of this joint fed me like her own son. I have never left that place without feeling miserable due to eating too much.
The second owner kept the same food, but the service wasn’t quite the same.
The current owner seems to have her own recipes for the meat dishes. The service was great on my last visit, just like with the first owner. The owner even gave us more rice and banchan to take home with the leftover galbi, so we could have it for the next day’s lunch.
Korea House
2340 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95050
www.koreahousesantaclara.com
408-249-0808
Prices: $10–$23 (one combination barbecue dish is $58)
[googleMap name=”Korea House”]2340 El Camino Real Santa Clara, CA 95050[/googleMap]
October 10, 2010
The magic of Korean-Uzbek food at Cafe at Your Mother In Law
I saw the mother-in-law. She definitely looked Korean.
This NY Times review by Dave Cook of Eating in Translation intrigued me and several of my friends. Korean-Uzbek food? At Cafe at Your Mother in Law? What could that mean?
It turns out that there is a sizable Korean population in Uzbekistan, who call themselves “Koryo saram” which means “Koryo people,” and they have been there for a surprisingly long time. Korea, especially when it encompassed North and South, isn’t far from Far Eastern Russia. Ethnic Koreans began migrating there in the mid-19th century. After years of assimilation and integration into Russian life, the Koreans were deported in 1937. Most of them ended up in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. According to this article, many under 30 no longer speak Korean, but “[t]he level of self-esteem and ethnic identity among Korean adults is very high.” So typically Korean!
So was the food typically Korean?
Some of the dishes clearly had Korean roots, but much of the food was Uzbek or Korean and not really both.
The Uzbek bread was flavorful, and as Catherine put it, sort of like a giant bialy. The crust was present but pliable at the same time. The kind of plain food you end up eating way more of than you intended to.
The “salads,” as Dave noted, were like banchan. This is half a pound of “chim-chi.” It looks just like Korean kimchi, but it had a much stronger ginger flavor and a rawer, more vegetal taste than I’m used to.
Much more popular with our crowd were the other pickles, the pickled fish and the pickled eggplant. Eggplant is supposedly made into kimchi in Korea as well, but I’ve never had it. This was lovely, firm, and tart. The pickled fish actually tasted more like Korean banchan to me than the “chim-chi.” It had the toughness I associate with dried pollack, that often gets made into a spicy Korean banchan with vegetables. We loved this, too. We were scarfing up these two small dishes, and almost ordered more before we realized we had a lot more food coming.
The lamb in the plov was as fatty as the NYTimes review promised. Who doesn’t love a plate of greasy rice and meat?
These are manti, which tasted distinctly of lamb, served with a dollop of sour cream. The sour cream is very not Korean. But the Central Asian word manti may have morphed into the Korean word for dumplings, mandu. These were absolutely delicious. Thankfully, there were five, one for each of us.
Stuffed cabbage. Also very lamb-y. I love lamb.
The bowl of “kuksu,” which is Korean for noodles, was probably the most Korean-Uzbek dish of all. The broth was tangy and sweet, not unlike naengmyeon, with plenty of lightly pickled cucumbers and shredded cabbage, as colorful as all Korean dishes aspire to be. But there was quite a lot of dill, a flavor that is distinctly un-Korean. As refreshing as Korean cold noodles.
The “fried chicken” was actually broiled or pan-fried and nothing to write home about. (“Dear family in Korea, in Uzbekistan, we are eating chicken, but we miss dakdoritang!”) Better to save stomach space for the meat crepes, which Mark saw being delivered to another table and quickly added to our order.
These were my absolute favorite. The crepes were similar to blintzes, eggy and just slightly sweet. The filling was, yet again, lamb spiced with cumin or another fragrant spice. These were emphatically not-Korean, and I was glad that my people, somewhere far away, had come to claim these as their own.
Take a closer look.
We washed it all down with Russian beer and vodka, courtesy of Mark and Morgan and At Your Mother In Law’s BYOB policy. That is very Korean, and I’m guessing, also very Uzbek.
Afterward, we sat on the beach and ate Russian pastries I’d bought earlier from La Brioche.
Russians, like Koreans, clearly believe quality in a bakery is indicated by a French name.
The best one looked like a Korean walnut cookie, except it was almost crunchy and filled with caramel.
Brighton Beach is a magical place. You can find dumplings by the pound in a freezer case.
You can find wafer cookies called “Kindly Advice.”

Not to mention psychic solutions.
But is there any better evidence of magic than Korean-Uzbek food in New York?
Cafe at Your Mother in Law, 3071 Brighton Fourth Street (at Brighton Avenue), Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, NY, (718) 942-4088.
August 14, 2010
Go Hyang Tofu Restaurant, Los Angeles area
Written by Taeyang Yoon
There is a pretty nice Korean community in the Rowland Heights/Diamond Bar area on the border of Los Angeles and Orange counties. Along Colima Road, between Fullerton Road and Fairway Drive, you can find a number of Korean and Chinese restaurants.
I was having one of those Mondays. A day filled with meetings and odd waiting times led me to skip lunch. After the last meeting, I got in the car and just started to drive. Traffic in Los Angeles was no joke that day — typical Monday evening going-home traffic. I wanted to wait until I got home to eat, but I just couldn’t hold off the hunger any longer.
On this day, due to some silly drivers on the road and bad construction markings, I ended up at Galleria Market Plaza at the corner of Fullerton and Colima roads. In the shopping center, my choices narrowed down to either a tonkatsu restaurant or Go Hyang Tofu Restaurant. The Korean script above the English sign read, Gohyang Sulungtang, or “Hometown Sulung Soup.”
It is a small place, with about 25 seats. The straightforward menu had no appetizers but various soondubu soups and some other Korean favorites. It seems this restaurant specializes in two main tang dishes — soondubu, or soft tofu, and sulung.
As for banchan, or side dishes, I was served baechu kimchi, the common spicy Nappa cabbage kind of pickled vegetables; gagtooki, or cubed daikon radish kimchi; and soy sauce–braised potatoes.
The star attraction: sulungtang
If sulungtang is in the name of the joint, it had to be good. My bowl of it came a couple of minutes after the banchan. The broth looked great. I added some sea salt and chopped green onions to my taste. Then, I dumped the accompanying bowlful of rice into the soup.
Personally, I’m a gomtang kind of a guy. If you like gomtang, you may not like sulungtang. The two soups may look very similar, but they are slightly different. Gomtang uses more types of bones in the stock and it’s cooked much, much longer, providing a much deeper taste. Sulungtang is lighter in taste, because it’s cooked relatively fast. Sulung is roughly translated “haste” or “hollow.”
Go Hyang’s sulungtang had nice texture or viscosity. The meat was excellently prepared, sliced thin and without the funny aftertaste it often has in basic Korean restaurants.
One reservation I had with the soup was the flavor was rather bland. I know, it was sulungtang and not gomtang, but there was absolutely no umami, or savory, taste to the broth. Maybe it was an off-day for the kitchen.
So, in the three categories that make a great Korean tang, Go Hyang gets top-notch scores on two: color/viscosity and meat preparation. This makes me want to go for a second time to confirm the impression.
Go Hyang Tofu Restaurant
18311 Colima Road
Rowland Heights, Calif.
(626) 913-7104
[googleMap name=”Go Hyang Tofu Restaurant 고향설렁탕”]18311 Colima Road Rowland Heights, CA[/googleMap]
Taeyang Yoon is an entrepreneur who has owned and operated a small Asian fusion restaurant with a sushi/sake bar. He loves to marry flavors and textures from various parts of the world and tries to make them his own. Although, he is not professionally trained in a culinary school, nor journalism, that doesn’t stop him from opining on the world of food. He founded KarFarm.com and bokko10.com, and you can find him roaming around the San Francisco Bay Area or Southern California.
August 6, 2010