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.
Brothers is not a fancy restaurant, but it has a 20-plus year reputation (since 1987) of serving up authentic “old school” Korean food. It has generous operating hours from 11 am. to midnight Sunday through Friday.
There is a second location a block east at 4014 Geary Blvd. It opened in 1993 but operates only Friday through Sunday 5 p.m. to midnight.
Warning: Do not wear “dry clean only” clothes to this restaurant. You will walk out smelling like a barbecue grill, particularly one that uses real wood instead of briquettes. It’s the first Korean restaurant I’ve visited in the Bay Area that has grills embedded in some tables with vent hoods above.
The staff brought out the glowing charcoal ready to cook right away.
Based on the reviews at Yelp! and Zagat, many go to Brothers for the barbecue. My husband and I ordered kalbi (Korean beef ribs) and dakgui (grilled chicken) from their dinner menu and decided to grill them ourselves. The server brought us two different tongs, one for the raw meat and the other to cook it. The attention to sanitation scored points with me.
The first food item brought to our table was a teapot full of hot barley tea. That scored even more points with me than the double tongs. Next, someone brought out the hot charcoal to get us instantly fired up for the main event.
The “main event” came with 10 different kinds of banchan (side dishes), including cucumber, radish and cabbage kimchi as well as spicy anchovies, spicy odeng (fish cakes). We also had two different ssam options, either romaine lettuce or kim (sheets of seasoned dried seaweed; nori in Japanese) for wrapping the grilled meat.
One of the highlights of the meal was the bowl of soon dubu jjigae (soft tofu stew). It was full of dubu, zucchini and chives. The broth may have had some dashi (Japanese fish broth) or seaweed in it because it had a slight ocean taste but it was really good.
Kalbi ssam with a little bit of salty ssamjang peaking out.
The only item we didn’t like much was the ssamjang (Korean wrapping sauce). It was heavily slanted on the doenjang (Korean miso) side rather than the gochujang (Korean pepper paste) side but it was a bit too salty so we decided to get our spicy and good salty fix by sprinkling our ssam (meat and lettuce rolls) with the spicy anchovies instead.
Dak gui ssam is jjang!
Prepare to pay about $30 per person, including tax and tip, for Brothers’ signature barbecue dishes. But this “old school” Korean barbecue is worth it.
If barbecue is not your style or in your budget, Brothers has a wide variety of Korean soups and stews, including kalbi tang (Korean stewed ribs), kimchi jjigae (kimchi stew with beef), soon dubu jjigae (soft tofu soup) and kori kom tang (oxtail soup).
The restaurant also has about a dozen lunch items offered from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. Prices on that menu top out at about $15.
Cocobang is located at 550 Taylor Street near San Francisco’s Tenderloin district within walking distance of Union Square and the Civic Center.
Owners Huh Joon-young and Hur Joon-seok, operating as Daebak Enterprise Corp., have created a small restaurant with about a dozen tables or so. (The city of San Francisco says the restaurant has less than 1,000 square feet, including the kitchen.) Yet our party of five could be seated comfortably. Our two tables were next to the front windows, so we had plenty of natural light to see our food. If we hadn’t been sitting near the window during daylight hours, it would have felt darker.
Some of the reviews from Yelp.com suggest a number of the patrons don’t show up or leave sober:
You don’t come here for the food unless you plan on drinking soju and beer, or if you have a craving for their fire chicken which is good on its own, but more amazing when you have a couple of beers and shots of soju in your belly.
Ok, it’s exactly what everyone says. Only been here when NOT sober..and it’s not bad. It’s not LA korean food good either. But it’s not like we’re in a k-town…. Although, I bet this place would be ok sober.
I considered it a good sign about interest in the restaurant that several people were queuing outside before it opened the Sunday evening I visited Cocobang. Since we arrived a half-hour before the 5:30 p.m. opening, we went to a coffee shop around the corner and came back just in time to be among the first patrons so we grabbed a seat closest to the window.
Cocobang’s decor includes black tables with paper soju advertisement place mats featuring singer Lee Hyo-ri’s smiling face and a large back-wall video projection screen. Food selections include Korean restaurant standards such as the kimchi fried rice and bibimbap as well as some less-common items such as Korean fried chicken. The restaurant has long hours of operation — 5:30 p.m. until 2 a.m. weekdays or 4 a.m. on weekends.
Korean network TV playing on the large screen gave the restaurant a sports pub feel without the play-by-play chatter. When I visited with family members, a variety show was rolling out one K-pop and other musical acts, prompting a flood of questions about Korean pop culture. If you don’t know any Korean — or Korean-English slang — walking in, you might pick up a phrase or two.
Dragging family to a restaurant for a review allowed me to sample five different dishes. Cocobang doesn’t necessarily serve dishes “family style,” but it does have a few “combo” selections with multiple dishes each.
The banchan (Korean appetizers) featured kimchi, spicy odeng (white fish cake), zippy mung bean sprouts and cubed daikon radish marinated in vinegar and sugar (or mirin). The daikon was the most refreshing banchan I’ve tasted in a long time.
I put in an order a half plate ($8.95) of Korean fried chicken. I ordered the regular version (rather than the hot/tangy or the garlic versions). Korean fried chicken is not simply a knock-off of Southern fried chicken. Thanks to the New York Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Gourmet and Saveur, Korean fried chicken is starting to compete with the classic, all-American fried chicken for plate time.
I noticed a subtle hint of Korean curry powder in the thin, crispy crust. Thanks to double frying, the chicken was cooked perfectly, without charring of the batter and little greasiness in the underlying meat. Colonel Sanders would be either proud or insanely jealous.
Bulgogi ($13.95) is a Korean restaurant favorite, because even the most spice-phobic person can try this savory-sweet sauteed beef dish, commonly served on a hot plate with onions, green onions and sesame seeds. My father-in-law likes the dish for that reason, and Cocobang’s version pleased his picky palate. The salty, savory, sweet components typically found in the marinade were distinguishable and had the familiar balance I’ve tasted on both sides of the Pacific. Traditionally, the marinade includes soy sauce, sesame oil and Asian pear puree.
The sauteed chicken (dakgogi) ($13.95) was grilled in a similar manner seemingly with the bulgogi marinade. It didn’t have the spicy gochujang marinade common to most Korean chicken preparations, so it’s another good option for those who see the phrase Korean food and presume they need a gallon of water to quench the fire.
The bibimbap ($9.95) was served in a large bowl with a sunny-side-up fried egg, spinach, mung bean sprouts, mushrooms and beef and a bottle of bibimbap gochujang, a sweeter, tamer, less viscous version of the spicy red pepper paste found in a number of Korean dishes. Bibimbap is another Korean dish many Westerners enjoy. It has a lot of veggies over the bap (rice), the amount of hot sauce can be controlled and playing with the food is required to mix the rice, veggies and meat.
My husband ordered kimchi fried rice (kimchi bokkeumbap) ($9.95). Normally, the restaurant normally adds Spam processed meat to the mix, but the kitchen made him a pork-free version. The rice was not overcooked and mushy. My husband said it “had texture, almost al dente.”
The menu features other Korean standards, such as spicy grilled rice noodles (tteokbokki), kimchi stew (kimchi jjigae), and barbecued beef ribs (kalbi).
Parking in San Francisco is notoriously inhospitable because the City purposely refuses to build new parking structures, but Cocobang is next door to a small parking garage so you can drive down for your Korean food fix if you aren’t within walking distance.
Another perk (besides the good food) is their amazing opening hours. Most of the nearby restaurants are only open until 10 or 10:30 during the week and 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. Cocobang stays open much later to catch the very late-night crowd.
Since 2010 seems to be the year of the Korean taco truck, I decided to bring this popular Korean fusion food to you. I’m serving up a So-Cal vs. Nor-Cal face off between two very different versions.
California is Korean fusion cooking central, in a manner of speaking. According to the 2007 U.S. Census, more than 322,628 native Koreans make California their home. It has the largest number of Korean immigrants of any in the U.S., even Hawaii.
Kogi-style* Korean Tacos
First off the grill is a version inspired by Roy Choi’s famous Kogi taco truck. The Kogi Korean taco was born in Southern California, with a strong Hispanic influence. A warm corn tortilla is topped with bulgogi (savory-sweet grilled beef), shredded cabbage and the spiciest kimchi you can find.
The key to this recipe is the bulgogi marinade.
1 pound thinly sliced milanesa beef sliced into thin strips 4 ounces pear juice 1/4 cup soy sauce 1/4 cup sake 1 tablespoon honey or mul yoot (Korean malt syrup) 5 cloves garlic, minced 2 tablespoons sesame seed oil 2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds pinch of salt 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
Mix with the beef and marinade for at least a half-hour. The longer the better.
Grill the bulgogi in a cast iron skillet until it is well done.
Place one warmed corn tortilla on the plate with a small handful of shredded cabbage. Top with bulgogi and kimchi. This recipe will serve four.
Namu-style Korean Tacos
Another Korean taco style hails from San Francisco, which has over 150 years of Chinese, Japanese and Korean immigrant history going back to the earliest days of statehood. Many of the leaders of Korea’s independence movement used San Francisco as their base of operations during the Japanese occupation.
The Namu-style Korean taco is a nori — kim, in Korean — “taco shell” with a bit of sushi rice, bulgogi or boneless kalbi (grilled ribs) and kimchi on top. It’s more of an appetizer than a meal, but it packs a lot of flavor. For the seaweed used for the “shell,” I used Annie Chun’s Roasted Seaweed Snacks, which I found during my futile search for locally sourced gochujang sauce. I have both the wasabi- and sesame flavored-wraps and used one of each for these tacos.
Asian grocery stores sell small sheets of kim. Koreans often wrap them around a small bite of rice and pop the package into their mouths, eat the seaweed sheets by themselves or cut them into small strips to sprinkle on bibimbap (mixture of ingredients such as vegetables, meat and an egg with rice).
1 pound carne de taco beef marinaded in bulgogi marinade for at least a half-hour 2 nori sheets per taco sushi rice diced tomatoes
The most complicated part of this recipe is the sushi rice. Here are the basics.
2 cups Japanese short-grained white rice or Calrose short-grain rice 1/4 cup rice vinegar (no substitutions) 2 teaspoons salt 1/4 cup sugar or add more to taste
Heat the vinegar, sugar and salt in a saucepan until the sugar is dissolved. Do not boil the mixture. You can also microwave the mixture for 30-45 seconds to achieve the same result. Leave sitting off heat until needed. You can make this portion ahead of time.
Take 2 cups of rice and rinse two to three times until the water runs clear or nearly so.
If your rice cooker has a sushi rice setting, use it. Otherwise, remember you need equal parts of rice to water. For example, 2 cups of rice needs 2 cups of water. Keep covered until the rice is done.
Once the rice has finished cooking, take off the lid and let the rice cool down for about 15 minutes.
Once the rice is cooled down, add the vinegar seasoning mix to the rice.
Turn the rice out of the pot and into a nonreactive glass or wooden bowl (tradition dictates a wooden bowl to better absorb the excess liquid). Use a tool like a shamoji, which is a flat Japanese rice paddle.
Use a gentle chopping motion to spread out the grains of rice and ensure the seasoning covers every grain. To speed up the cooling process, some people use a hand-held fan to help in the cooling process, but I didn’t find that necessary.
Once it’s cooled off, you’re ready to grill your bulgogi and assemble your tacos.
Put two sheets of nori on the plate, one on top of the other. Add up to a few tablespoons of sushi rice on top of the nori.
Pile a couple of tablespoons of bulgogi and garnish with diced tomatoes
Which version do you prefer? Tell us in the comments below.
* Kogi style tacos are in no way affiliated with the Kogi Taco Truck, just inspired by it.
On July 6 for the sixth straight year, an animal rights group led a protest in front of the South Korean consulate in San Francisco over the raising of dogs and cats for food.
A report published by the Korean Association for Policy Studies said that more than 2 million dogs in the country each year are bred and killed for human consumption in South Korea.
Most of these dogs are raised in putrid, horrifying conditions, according to the Marin County, Calif.-based group that organized the protest, In Defense of Animals. The protesters presented the consulate with more than 20,000 signed petitions asking the South Korean government to enforce current laws protecting dogs and cats from human consumption and to strengthen existing laws.
Hope Bohanec of In Defense of Animals presents her case to a South Korean consulate official in front of the South Korean Consulate building in San Francisco.
“When we found out how horribly these dogs are treated and the horrible conditions they’re in,” Hope Bohanec, grassroots campaigns director. “They are literally tortured to death because of the superstition that the more the dog suffers during its death the more virility a man will receive when he eats the meat. When we learned all of this, we couldn’t ignore that and really wanted to draw attention to the issue.”
According to folklore, when one tortures the dog before killing it, the increase in adrenaline and other hormones from the animal will go into the meat and then into the diner — usually a man — and increase his stamina and virility.
The petitions and literature handed out at the event include a promise of a boycott over the issue.
“I will not support Korean businesses, or visit Korea until the horrors come to an end,” the petitions said.
Pamphlets asked people to “write to the Korea National Tourism Organization and let them know that you will not visit Korea until the country stops allowing the flagrant abuse of man’s best friends.”
Two protesters wearing dog masks seated in makeshift cages to represent the less than ideal conditions that dogs destined for slaughter endure.
Efforts to criminalize the consumption of dog meat in South Korea date to the early 1980s during preparations for Seoul to host the 1988 Summer Olympics. In 1984 the government outlawed manufacturing and processing of dog meat (개 고기). The city of Seoul has its own law against the processing and consumption of dog meat, calling it a “repugnant food.” However, the momentum continued after the Olympics and the laws became more blunt.
In 1991, dogs and cats were legally classified as “domestic animals” rather than livestock. Dog meat and cat flesh (고양이 고기) aren’t a legal food ingredient. In 2008, the government amended its Animal Protection Act to strengthen protections for animals used for food, clothing, experimentation and entertainment.
In a 2008 University of Auckland master’s degree dissertation titled “Dog Meat in Korea: A Socio-legal Challenge,” Rakhyun E. Kim wrote:
“Despite the significance of the industry, there is no clear law governing the trade of dog meat. There is neither explicit recognition of dog meat as legitimate food, nor a clear ban on the sale or slaughter of dogs for food. In the midst of this legal uncertainty, the processing of dog meat has gone underground with no official guidelines to guarantee untainted meat or animal welfare.”
The Wall Street Journal reported that these laws are very poorly enforced in South Korea. There are more 500 restaurants in Seoul alone that serve dog meat soup (bosintang 보신탕 or gaejangguk 개장국) in Korea during the hot, humid summer months, according to the article. It is particularly popular during boknal (복날), or the hottest part of the summer.
John Feffer wrote in The Politics of Dog: When Globalization and Culinary Practice Clash, The American Prospect that “dog is eaten in China, Taiwan, Burma, Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam, Ghana, and the Congo, and by various indigenous peoples and desperately hungry Arctic explorers.” Yet most of the general public in Western countries focus their attention on South Korea’s dog cuisine culture.
Kim asserted that since “Korea is industrialized, Westerners seem ever more compelled to point fingers at Korea (while there are other countries whose citizens eat dogs), unable to comprehend why those Koreans, presumably civilized because of the industrialized nature of the country, insist on eating dogs.”
A protester named Deborah holding a sign in front of the South Korean Consulate in San Francisco
Opponents to doggy delicacies see a potential end to the practice growing with time in South Korea.
“The younger generation wants to be more Western and they don’t eat dog, because they know westerners don’t eat dog,” Bohanec said.
The length of time taken to slaughter a dog — said to take an hour or more — has helped to change their minds, according to Bohanec.
“The new, younger generation doesn’t want to see these dogs being tortured, butchered and murdered,” she said. “It’s really sad for them. Some of the descriptions we have received of the way these animals are killed — it turns your stomach and breaks your heart.”
Culturally, Koreans do not indiscriminately eat dogs. A primary defense from gaegogi lovers is the meat only comes from the Nureongi (누렁이) or Hwangu (황구) breed, which is raised for that purpose.
However, dog farms are accused of routinely butchering stray street dogs, ill dogs and even stolen pets for consumption in local restaurants. Representatives from CARE rescued a Cocker spaniel, Yorkie mix, German shepherd and golden retriever and other dogs from cages at a breeder in rural South Korea earlier this year, according to Bohanec.
“All different breeds of dogs are used and butchered,” she said. “It’s just whatever dog they can find. Some of them are street dogs or stolen pets.”
The Korea Times reported last year that restaurants that serve boshitang are willing to replace dog meat with rabbit, rat and cat meat when supplies of dog meat are low.
Bohanec’s group protests the eating of dog meat to bring the practices of the industry supplies it to an end.
“We understand the majority of South Koreans consider dogs and cats companion animals,” she said. “This is a small minority of people that do this.”
Others at the protest were interested in drawing attention to the treatment of animals around the world and convincing the South Korean government to take a more active role.
“I hope it knows that we know that is still going on and we wish they would enforce the laws that are on their books,” said a woman who gave her name as Deborah.
Namu is a Korean and Japanese fusion restaurant owned and operated by three Korean American brothers — chef Dennis Lee and his brothers, Daniel and David — who have established a presence at the Thursday and Saturday farmer’s markets at the San Francisco Ferry Building. They serve what they call “cutting-edge new California” cuisine.
The market menu (PDF) features kimchi fried rice, okonomiyaki and their own spin on Korean tacos (ssam in Korean), using toasted seaweed as the wrap.
Korean seaweed topped with rice, bulgogi and kimchi.
While there a recent Thursday, I tasted the Korean tacos, which cost $5 for two. Each have two sheets of Korean or Japanese seaweed with some sushi rice topped with teriyaki-marinated beef and kimchi salsa on top. Each taco is two or three bites of Korean fusion genius and more healthful than those wrapped in soft or fried tortillas.
Korean french fries topped with chopped kalbi and gochujang will fill you up.
The gamja (Korean for potato) fries are made from “hand-cut potatoes” and topped with kimchi relish, gochujang (Korean spicy red pepper paste), sweetened mayonnaise (Namu uses the popular Asian brand Kewpie), teriyaki, chopped short ribs and green onions. Orders for the fries were flying off the grill, especially in tandem with the Korean tacos.
The okonomiyaki, or Japanese savory grilled pancake, was in demand as well. Namu makes its “crispy and gooey flour pancake” with kimchi and market vegetables, topped with bonito flakes, okonomiyaki sauce and sweet mayo. Most ordered it with a sunnyside-up fried egg. I saw one brave soul pass me with a plate of okonomiyaki with a raw egg on it though.
The dish’s name comes from okonomi, which can be translated “as you like it,” and yaki, for “grilled” or “cooked.” A thinner version is similar to the Korean flatcake dish panjeon.
The okonomiyaki were made fresh and to order.
Namu, whose Korean name means “tree,” is at the Ferry Building on Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. — get there before the 1 p.m. rush — and Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
The brick-and-mortar restaurant is located at 439 Balboa St. in the city, near Golden Gate Park. The menu there also includes Korean fried chicken, ramen, bibimbap and additional Japanese-influenced items. Also served there are more than 30 selections of wine, sake and soju.
Walk down any grocery store aisle in the United States and you will find a bounty of olive oils flavored with garlic, orange, lemon, chili pepper and rosemary. You may have one or two spending shelf time your pantry shelf right now. But you probably don’t have smoked olive oil hanging out there — yet.
Smoked olive oil is the newest flavored oil to hit the market. It’s produced by a Santa Rosa, Calif.-based company called The Smoked Olive. The oil was featured on an episode of chef Emeril Lagasse’s Discovery Channel show Emeril Green. The oil has also received rave reviews from Sonoma County chef John Ash as well as Food Network chef and San Francisco Bay area resident Tyler Florence, who called it, “the sexiest new flavor I’ve tasted in years.”
It’s easy to understand why no one has tried to make it before. Olive oils are very sensitive to heat, light and oxidation. Al Hartman, the chef behind The Smoked Olive, developed a patent-pending technology to smoke the olive oil without damaging it. The last thing a chef wants to do is ruin a batch of top-shelf California extra virgin olive oil.
The Smoked Olive currently sells three different varieties of smoked olive oils, described this way on the company website:
Sonoma Olive Oil, which starts off bold and smoky and finishes with a subtle olive finish
Napa Olive Oil, which has a light smoke flavor that makes the olive oil flavor even more pronounced
Santa Fe Olive Oil, which includes a dose of chili with the smoke. The chili sneaks upon you gradually but the chili does not overwhelm or overtake the olive and smoke flavor.
If you are interested in trying some Smoked Olive Oil for yourself, they do ship in North America and internationally (including South Korea) as well.
We discovered the company at the St. Helena’s Farmers Market in St. Helena, Calif. while we were preparing some B-roll — background images — for our follow-up video interview with chef Hector Marroquin of Pupusa Griddle Catering as he served up his kimchi pupusa plates.
Production-wise, this was our first outdoor video session. The first on-location episode was “Innovations With Kimchi,” recorded in The Green Grocer, which is now closed.
Recording outdoors presents all sorts of problems not faced indoors. Wind can rumble in microphones and tousle hair. Differences in lighting between a person in the shade and a sunny background can mess up camera light settings, leaving the person too dark on camera. Sunlight can also make potentially unsightly lens flares without a substantial lens hood. Ambient noise can be loud and distracting, sometimes imperceptibly so until the recording is reviewed in a quiet location.
We controlled the wind noise with a basic foam windscreen for the handheld microphone, and the windscreen also lessens — but doesn’t prevent — popping in the microphones from spoken T’s and P’s. For really windy conditions, we have a special “hairy” foam windscreen for the lapel microphone.
For lighting, it’s best to use a very bright camera light or a reflector to counteract harsh facial shadows from direct sunlight. The best solution is to diffuse the sunlight falling on the on-camera subject then reflect light back on the subject to fill in shadows. However, that requires several people.
We have just me on camera and Jeff behind the camera. To hold the reflector, he had to set frame the shot on the camera, start recording and then hold the reflector. The shot composition couldn’t be adjusted until the end of the segment. The head-to-waist composition of this video did work for most of the shots, because the booth could be seen as actively attracting customers.
The reflector we use is a Lastolite collapsible one, with silver on one side and alternating stripes of silver and gold on the other. The manufacturer said that pure gold would make the image too yellow, and the wisdom of that design was evident on this video. Probably, we should have used the silver side to provide whiter light to blend with the rest of the image.
The background music came from Jamendo again. This time we used a song called Coming Home by Kendra Springer. At the time I discovered this song, Springer’s album, Hope, was number one listened to album that week with over 18,000 downloads since it was posted on November 19, 2009.
This is the second interview-style video we filmed outdoors. The first one — about The Smoked Olive — was recorded earlier the same May 2010 day at the same farmer’s market. (We’ll be posting that interview in the near future.)
The Smoked Olive interview grew out of scouting the market for background video. We were visiting St. Helena Farmer’s Market because Pupusa Griddle Catering and Napa Valley Chef Catering’s Hector Marroquin was introducing a new formulation for kimchi to go with Central American and Caribbean favorites. (If you want to check out my original interview with Chef Marroquin, it’s posted on YouTube as well.)
Normally, we record our videos indoors, where we have much more control over the environment. Recording video outdoors is a challenge, since we do not have a crew to help us. It was just my husband controlling the camera and lighting. Unlike the foggy, shaded conditions for The Smoked Olive interview, this one was in direct sunlight, which casts dark shadows on faces. I was in front of the camera interviewing chef Hector.
To control harsh shadows in direct sunlight the videographer needs to have a very bright light, which is expensive and cumbersome for an unobtrusive video rig, or a reflector to bounce sunlight to light the harsh shadows on faces.
If we had another person we could also use a diffuser, a partially transparent cloth that eliminates the harsh shadows on subjects while still allowing the Sun to light the scene. However, unless the shot is tightly cropped to the head and shoulders of the subject or subjects, it can be difficult to keep such a diffuser out of view in the recording.
So we used a collapsible Lastolite handheld reflector. It has silver and gold-and-silver sides. Silver or white reflectors are best for shade or overcast days to keep the color tones toward the bluish side of the visible spectrum for correction en masse in postproduction. However, in direct sunlight, the warm golden reflector side worked well on chef Hector and me.
Yet, highly reflective materials such as metallic fabric on these reflectors has to be used with caution to prevent blinding or excessive squinting. Jeff has found success in standing 15 to 20 feet away at a 45-degree angle between the reflector and the camera. That allows good profile lighting without reflecting bright light directly into the eyes of the subject.
All that work for a two and a half minute video.
If you would like to buy a hoodie similar to the one I’m wearing in this video, you can purchase it from the civil rights group Liberty in North Korea. It appears they have run out of black hoodies but they are currently selling a grey version of the same hoodie.
Finding appropriate music for our videos has been a struggle in the past but Jamendo has made that process much easier. This time, we found a song is called “Platanote” by Tunacka from their album Ensarada. Tunacka are from Venenzuela and you can find other songs by this artist on Jamendo as well. It has become our place to find creative commons, royalty free music.
If you find yourself in the San Francisco Bay area, go to the other side of the bay for some Korean style good eats at Seoul on Wheels. Photo couresty of http://www.flickr.com/photos/arndog/ / CC BY 2.0
ABC7 News TV morning program View of the Bay featured Chef Julia Yoon of Seoul on Wheels. Chef Yoon taught ABC7 new’s TV anchor Leigh Glaser (and the entire San Francisco Bay Area) how to make Korean-style Chicken Tacos for Cinco de Mayo slathered in gochujang and sour cream. The recipe and Seoul on Wheels scheduled stops are posted on ABC7’s page.
Stone Korean Kitchen is the newest Korean restaurant in San Francisco, officially opening in November 2009. To be fair, I waited four months for any mistakes or deficiencies common to all new restaurant ventures to be resolved.
The restaurant is located in Embarcadero Center office and retail development in the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District. That helps why explains the hours of operation — 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday–Friday and closed on Saturday and Sunday — are not very tourist-friendly. Yet the restaurant is an easy walk across the street from the Ferry Building, through which boatloads of commuters and tourists pass daily from the north San Francisco Bay counties.
I prefer to take a ferry to San Francisco from the Marin County city of Larkspur, because parking is difficult to find and can be expensive. San Francisco and other California cities are adopting a transportation-management policy called “congestion pricing,” which increases parking fees during high-demand times to discourage traffic congestion from drivers circling the streets looking for open spaces and to encourage walking, biking or riding mass transit.
As is increasingly common, the lunch, dinner and take-out menus are available on the restaurant’s website. I’m grateful for that, because I like to take my time studying a menu but don’t like to waste the waitstaff’s time.
I arrived at the restaurant at 11:50 a.m. just before lunch rush and ordered japchae and kimbap to get an idea of how the kitchen treats Korean classics. The menu also has a few fusion options, such as bulgogi sandwiches.
A view of Justin Herman Plaza from the front of the Stone Korean Restaurant. The landmark Ferry Building clocktower and palm trees along the boulevard are visible.
The restaurant is small, so the indoor seating is somewhat limited. As catching a sunny day in San Francisco during winter is rare, particularly this year amid week upon week of rain, I opted for the alfresco seating on Justin Herman Plaza. From that warm, breezy location I could see the row of palm trees that line the Embarcadero boulevard along the San Francisco waterfront.
My order arrived within five minutes. The japchae had the common mixture of marinated beef, mushrooms, spinach and carrots with cellophane noodles. It was a tasty dish, but the sauce seemed a little light on sesame oil and heavier on soy sauce, garlic and black pepper. For those who don’t like the heavy hand of sesame seed oil in a number of Korean restaurants, Stone Korean Kitchen’s japchae might be what you’re after. The accompanying white rice was perfectly cooked, not crunchy or mushy.
My husband shared leftovers with his co-workers that afternoon, and this japchae didn’t fail as a palate-pleaser for Korean food initiates.
Want some kimbap?
There were several packages of kimbap — one of my favorites — stacked at the front desk just inside the front door. How could I resist? The marinated beef, pickled daikon radish, egg and garlic-marinated spinach rolls were some of the best kimbap I’ve had in a long time.
It was certainly worth taking a day off from work for the four-hour car and ferry round trip to visit Stone Korean Kitchen. Now, if only the restaurant were open on Sundays.
Stone Korean Kitchen 4 Embarcadero Center, Street Level, San Francisco, Calif. (415) 839-4070 www.stonekoreankitchen.com Social network connections: Facebook and Twitter
