194 Duckworth Street
St. John's, NL
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8 out of 10
Korean
Korean cuisine and I get along. Ever since I lived in Koreatown in Toronto I've made a habit of scouring Korean menus and church bazaars in search of home-made, high-quality, spicy marinated vegetables and meat. Meals in even the cheapest and most humble Korean restaurants are served with a side of steamed rice, a true comfort even when your meal is a soup.
Korean food generally breaks down into beef (or seafood and sometimes pork or tofu) in the following forms: Grilled, soups, stews, and noodles. Kimchi and assorted
banchan (side dishes - mostly pickled or marinated vegetables) are served on the side and are brought at the beginning of the meal, usually with a clear broth miso soup.
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| House-made kimchi (fermented cabbage, below) and marinated root vegetable (sweeter than a potato) of some kind in a sticky sweet sesame sauce |
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Most places re-fill them for free, like an empty water glass). Korean BBQ is hugely popular in Canada's major cities, and the only reason J Korean in St. John's hasn't adopted the concept of setting a DIY-barbecue down on every table that orders grilled meat (or building one into the table itself) is because of fire codes in old downtown heritage buildings.
And the city is better off for it, because give a Newfoundlander a chance and he'll char his $25 marinated galbi beef ribs to a crisp, and that's a sin.
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| St. John's Galbi Jeonsik: Barbecued marinated beef short ribs on hot plate with special sauce, lettuce, and rice |
For the Korean food novitiate start with the bulgogi (if you like beef), the pork bone soup if you like spicy, and Haemulpajeon korean-style pancake if you like seafood, and the bibimbap if you're vegetarian (go with the kimchi jigae vegetable version if you're vegan). I vote for the bulgogi over the obviously delicious marinated ribs simply because of the price. The bulgogi is $8 less than the ribs ($27.50, though somehow marked down to $16 at lunch, while the bulgogi only drops $4), so if you don't like the special sauce that comes with it, you'll be less disappointed. If you like sweet and spicy, however, you'll love the sauce. It basically makes the dish. The bulgogi is also BBQ-ed marinated meat, but it's cut up finer and served with green peppers and onions on a very heavy hot plate that continues to cook the items after they're placed on it. The trick here is to take some (or all, if you like) of your rice and put it on the hot plate. the rice then browns and gets a crisp crust. In Korean food (and Asian in general) texture is very important, so you just added an extra texture to your otherwise chewy and soft meal. You might be staring at your plain lettuce leaves and wondering if the kitchen forgot the salad dressing, but no, just pour the sauce on top of the beef, mix it up, and wrap the lettuce around pieces of the beef to create little parcels that you can pop in your mouth.
The bibimbap ($15.50) was the best thing I ate here, all thanks to the sauce. It wasn't too spicy but had real depth and a balance of sweet and almost verging on smoky (and tasted almost meaty). You can see the bottle of rooster sauce in the kitchen (Sriracha hot sauce - the kind in the big plastic bottle that's red with a green tip at the top) but the sauce tasted much fresher than that. The rice-based dish comes in a stone bowl (get the stone bowl version, not the stone-less version - it's just more fun this way and you'll end up with some crusty rice without even trying), and is topped with marinated vegetables including carrots and cucumbers, and either topped with meat and then a fried egg, or just the egg. The egg will be soft and you can break it over the vegetables and rice and stir it around to let the stone bowl cook it into the dish, kind of like a do-it-yourself fried rice but with a much, much, much better sauce. The chicken version didn't really add much to the dish, as it had no real flavour, but in Korea bibimbap is known as a healthy, even diet meal. That's all relative to the huge amount of beef, though.
Other lighter options are the soups. Soup is served with most meals, but a meal of soup is a satisfying specialty. Most are spicy broths laced with crushed chili powder or Sriracha sauce (often you'll have a bottle on the table to add your own, but not here as plastic definitelry does not match the fine-dining decor). Above, julienned vegetables hide a mountain of homemade udon noodles (thick wheat-flour noodles) and are topped with mussels, squid pieces, and shrimp. Squid is a very common Korean seafood choice (you won't find a whole lot of traditional salmon or white fish) and they're also very affordable (as are the mussels). The broth was perfectly warmed but not boiling, so the noodles never got to the mushy, over-cooked stage. The noodles themselves were a good texture, but I couldn't really taste them in the spicy soup. Next time I'll try them stir-fried. The broth here was just fine but just couldn't be as intense as the sauce for the meat dishes and bibimbap because the broth dilutes it. Maybe you should request some sauce on the side for your rice. It's not traditional Korean to eat it that way, but that's what my tastebuds wanted.
The vegan option I gave above of kimchi jigae ($15.50) is a large soup served in a traditional silver bowl of broth flavoured by the pickled, fermented cabbage (the flavouring seeps into the soup and the cabbage becomes very mild), soft cubes of tofu, and mixed vegetables. I originally tried the version that was just a bean paste broth (Doenjang Jigae - $15.50), but it was pretty bland. So I poured in some of the kimchi from the banchan (don't tell...) and suddenly there was flavour.
So what do you do if you don't like spice? Get out of a Korean restaurant!
No, just stick to the sesame-oil based dishes like the seafood pancake and the japchae ($14.50). Japchae is ridiculously easy to make. You take potato starch noodles (or sweet potato or yam noodles - perfect for those with wheat and gluten problems), warm them in hot water with some dried mushrooms (not even boil) until they're translucent (the noodles, not the mushrooms), add some carrots, onion, green onions, spinach and sesame seeds and toss it all with a slightly salty, sweet and savoury sauce of soy, sesame oil, sugar, and maybe some pepper. The trick is the get the ratio of salty, sweet, and savoury in the sauce correct. You can also make it better by toasting the sesame seeds and using a toasted sesame oil. It also needs to be made fresh so that the noodles don't harden or get soggy and cover the flavour of the sauce. So japchae for $14.50 is a bit overpriced unless you get it with beef. That will also add some more "savoury" to the dish, but it's often vegetarian for a "light" lunch ("light" meaning simple, quick, and easy to digest, not "low-fat" - there's a WHOLE lot of delicious sesame oil in there).
Korean sushi isn't exactly like Japanese sushi (or what we think of as "Japanese" maki rolls, but are really North American inventions, ie the California Roll). It's not better or worse, just different. Sushi from the Korean grocery store near my Koreatown apartment in Toronto consisted of pickled vegetables (spinach and carrots and cucumber, not always the standard ones your'd find in Japanese sushi) combined with sweet egg, so that all the rolls were huge and sesame-flavoured and sweet before you even thought of adding soy sauce. They were also dirt cheap because there was no meat in them. At J Korean there are some standard North American-type rolls, the kinds of rolls you'll find at Sun Sushi, but there are some other options. And that's great because variety is the spice of life. In fact, spice is the main difference. Well, that and beef. The J.K.K. Gimbab ("gimbab" - or "gimbap" - means Korean sushi) contains vegetables and beef and most of the other rolls are served spicy, from the kimchi option to the salmon option. You will also find standard volcano, dynamite, spider, and dragon rolls of deep-fried shrimp, avocado, cucumber, and fish eggs ($15.50). You can splurge on the lobster gimbab ($19.50) that's basically the same but with breaded, fried lobster instead of shrimp. So the rolls are pretty expensive, though at lunch they're about on par with Sun Sushi.
So this is a special occasion place, or a nice lunch place. A big bowl of soup will get you through the rest of the afternoon, and a plate of ribs or beef with rice and side dishes will warm you up on a cold evening. The endorphins (and romantic decor) from the chilies make it the perfect place for a date as long as you don't have a runny nose, and that heavenly special sauce on the bibimbap will bring you back when you want a healthy meal served in a giant stone bowl and all the marinated and sweet pickled side dishes you want. The perfect ending is the traditional tea with pine nuts and dates, served with ginseng candies (soft, miraculously savoury-sweet bites) and crisp, airy rice cookies that start to become chewy once they hit the warm tea...
Congratulations, St. John's. Another restaurant winner.
J Korean
Where: 194 Duckworth Street
St. John's, NL
709-579-1133
When: Mon-Fri noon-10:30pm, Sat-Sun 3pm-10pm
How Much: $20 at lunch, $35-$60 including an appetizer, main, tax and tip at dinner
