What Makes a Good Korean Restaurant?
TK has been on a vacation for the last week, during which TK and TKWife made a giant circle driving around Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico, and visited numerous national parks. Overall, it was an amazing experience. What was not amazing, however, was the one Korean restaurant that TKCouple visited, which inspired this Facebook update:
New blog concept: You tell me your favorite Korean restaurant in your town, and I will visit, eat, and tell you everything that's wrong with the food served there.
Inspired by a crappy Korean restaurant in middle America that I'm sitting in. Its walls are covered with awards from local papers, which makes me want to disband those papers.
As TK said in a comment to the update, he won't actually do this. He is a lover, not a fighter, and he certainly knows better than to mess with people's livelihood. However, there is still a teachable moment here. Many people--including many Koreans!--do not really know what separates good Korean restaurants from bad ones. These people simply do not have enough experience to form a frame of reference as to what elements good Korean restaurants have.
Don't just criticize; show the alternative. So TK will give the alternative. Here is a list of things that you should look for in a Korean restaurant in order to tell if it is a good one.
Geographic Location
In U.S.: Let's be straight. Korean food is not yet at the place where, say, sushi is--that is to say, Korean food is not yet mainstream enough for one to expect a dependable taste for it, outside of the people who grew up eating it constantly. This necessarily means the ceiling for the quality of Korean food sold in areas sparsely populated by Koreans will be rather low. In the U.S., Koreans mostly live in Southern California, New York/North New Jersey and D.C./Maryland/Northern Virginia. (The next tier of Korean American population centers are Northern California, Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle, but the drop-off is significant after the top three.) The quality of Korean food tends to track that order.
In Korea: Korea is surrounded by seas on three sides, with each side producing different types of fish. Korea's terrain also ranges from mountains to fertile and flat fields, each yielding different types of crops. In short, Korean food is highly diverse based on geography. Because everything in Korea tends to eventually flow to Seoul, the restaurants in Seoul tend to maintain a certain level of quality. But for the real deal, look for the restaurants that sell the food that is made from the local ingredients.
For example, tofu requires sea water to make. (Bet you did not know that.) Thus, the best tofu comes from Korea's eastern seaboard, in which soy beans grow and the sea water is readily available. Port cities, obviously, are the best places to have fish and seafood. Jeju Island is not only known for its seafood, but also for pork from its native black pigs. Since each locality in Korea loudly advertises its specialty food, it is hard to miss the local delicacy.
Two additional points: (1) in the City of Jeonju, every dish is good; (2) in Daegu, every dish is awful. Just trust me on this. Jeonju is the birthplace of bibimbap, one of the most iconic Korean dishes. In Daegu, locals say the best food available is McDonald's.
(More after the jump.)
Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.
Menu
Both in the U.S. and in Korea, this holds true: watch out for restaurants that sell too many different dishes, because every one of the dishes will be mediocre-to-bad. Unfortunately, this applies to vast majority of Korean restaurants in the U.S., because there simply is not enough demand to specialize in certain types of Korean food. In small towns of America, the menu often crosses the border to include Japanese/Chinese/Thai food, creating an unholy alliance of shittiness. Avoid this type of restaurant at all costs.
In Korea, restaurants with big menus tend to be in and around train stations and express bus terminals, where many different types of people pass through without particularly caring about the quality of the food available. Avoid these places as well.
The good Korean restaurants serve foods that are related to one another. For example, naengmyeon [냉면, cold buckwheat noodles] ought to be sold alongside with suyuk [수육, boiled meat], because naengmyeon's broth is made of meat. (In other words, do not eat naengmyeon at a place that does not also sell suyuk; it means that the restaurant is using canned broth.) Jokbal [족발, braised pig's trotter] is usually sold alongside bossam [보쌈, steamed/boiled pork with kimchi and cabbage] because they are both pork and they both involve boiling/steaming.
The very best Korean restaurants often serve just one item, like this:
A restaurant has to be awfully confident in what it's selling if it intends to make a business by simply selling a single dish. If you see a Korean restaurant with just one item on the menu, stop by and eat. You will not be disappointed.
Food & Flavor
Majority of Korean food will be in some configuration of rice, kimchi, banchan [반찬, side dishes] and the main dish. Because rice, kimchi and banchan will form the backbone of a Korean meal, the way in which a Korean restaurant handles these elements is a great gauge of how good a Korean restaurant is.
Kimchi: At this point, there might be a bit too much mystique surrounding kimchi in popular discourse, as if there can be no proper kimchi outside of the kitchen of some old Korean grandmother. Truth is, one can buy pretty decent kimchi from the store--as long as one pays for it. Therefore, kimchi is a decent yardstick to find out whether the restaurant in question has minimum competence. If a restaurant serves bad kimchi, it either does not know what it is doing with food, or does not care enough to buy good food--which includes good ingredients.
There are two major ways in which kimchi can be wrong: too sweet, or too sour. If either or both is true with a restaurant kimchi, chances are the food will not be good either.
Sweetness is the cancer that is slowly killing Korean cuisine. This cancer is everywhere in Korean food in America, and frequently found in Seoul as well. Gratuitous addition of sugar and MSG (which is also sweet) is ruining the palate of those who did not grow up experiencing the traditional palate. Beyond the subtle sweetness naturally present in the ingredients, Korean food should not be sweet at all. This absolutely applies to kimchi: although napa cabbage and Korean red pepper both bear some natural sweetness, one should be able to tell immediately whether any sweetener was added.
Excessive sourness indicates that the kimchi was improperly made or kept. Kimchi that was properly fermented in the correct temperature has clean, crisp sourness. If fermented too quickly, the sourness becomes overpowering, destroying all the nuances of the dish. Fermentation accelerates if kimchi was kept at a warm place (not a good sign for hygiene) or kimchi has sugar in it. (Excess carbohydrates = hyperactive microbes. To avoid this result, some restaurants choose to add Sweet 'n Low to its kimchi to add sweetness without affecting the fermentation. Vile.)
Note that napa cabbage, which is the main ingredient for the most common type of kimchi, is a winter vegetable. The best Korean restaurants serve kimchi made with seasonal vegetables, not just with napa cabbage. (More on this below.) At least during the winter, cabbage kimchi ought to have a satisfying crunch when chewed, instead of fiber-y toughness. Good kimchi has a strong hint of seafood; cheap kimchi does not, because seafood and fish sauce can be expensive in large quantities.
Rice: If kimchi tends to show the floor of a Korean restaurant's quality, rice tends to show the ceiling. Most restaurant rice is decidedly mediocre, largely because restaurants usually cook rice in one huge batch, which sits for hours in a giant, industrial-sized rice cooker.
Some restaurants place rice in a stainless steel rice bowl (pictured below) immediately after the rice cooks, and puts the bowl in a warmer. (The bowl has to be made of stainless steel in order to conduct the heat from the warmer--which is why the stainless steel rice bowls are commonly seen in Korean restaurants, but rarely in a Korean home.) Doing this improves the quality of the rice, but only somewhat.
The very best Korean restaurants keep numerous small rice cookers, and cook small batches of rice. The rice is served in the traditional porcelain or brass ware--a sign that the rice did not spend any time in the warmer. Good rice is moist enough to have a shiny sheen. Each grain should be intact and visible. One must be able to feel the individual grain when one chews the rice.
To reiterate: good rice is pretty difficult to find in a restaurant. It simply takes too much effort to make each bowl of rice perfect. But this means the restaurant that does put in the effort to serve a good bowl of rice cares about the quality of food it puts out. Good kimchi means the minimum standards are kept; good rice means that you can look forward to the maximal quality.
Banchan: Kimchi is the minimum; rice is the maximum. Banchan is everything in between.
The number of banchan may vary depending on the main dish. Some main dishes only require two or three. In other circumstances, there may be dozens of banchan dishes, like this:
Having a table full of banchan is certainly more impressive than having just two or three. But don't be fooled: restauranteurs also know that big number impresses. They will attempt to impress the customers by having a huge number of banchan that may be old and stale or, worse, buy the banchan from a wholesaler and simply put them on plates. Quantity matters to some degree, but quality matters much more.
Good banchan uses local ingredients. Restaurant in a mountain town should have more vegetables; in a seaport town, more seafood. No matter where the restaurant is, the vegetable banchan has to include more than the three mainstays: bean sprouts, spinach and fern shoots. All things being equal, more seafood in banchan is good news, because seafood is more expensive. Foreign vegetables--like broccoli--have no place on a Korean table. (Don't argue with me about how broccoli might be local to the U.S. It's not Korean. End of discussion.)
Good banchan takes effort. Tossed salad and simple pickles (usually in soy sauce) do not take much effort. Cooked or fermented dishes with processed (e.g. dried, smoked) ingredients take significantly more effort and time to make. Good banchan does not disguise the ingredient. Be skeptical if all the banchan is slathered with soy sauce or gochujang [고추장, hot pepper paste]. This may be a sign that the ingredients are old and stale, and their true flavor needs to be hidden.
Good banchan is also seasonal. As discussed earlier, napa cabbage is a winter vegetable; ideally, one wants to see kimchi made with yeolmu [열무, radish stem] in the summer. Similarly, certain fish are the best in certain seasons. The most famous example may be jeoneo [전어, hickory shad], which is featured in an Korean old saying: "autumn jeoneo makes the runaway daughter in law to return." The best Korean restaurants will serve different types of banchan each time you visit, depending on the season.
Flip these characters around, and you get the idea of what makes a bad banchan. Among the commonly seen banchan, the worst has to be potato salad, because it fails all of the criteria above: potatoes are commonly available everywhere (= not local,) it is usually covered in mayonnaise (doubly offensive on this point, since mayo is not Korean,) it requires very little effort and is definitely not seasonal. In TK's book, any Korean restaurant that serves potato salad as banchan goes down a few notches.
Main Dish, and Overall: With any food with broth or reduced sauce (which starts from broth,) taste for MSG. Unfortunately, MSG is very difficult to detect when the food is hot and spicy--like many Korean dishes. The best, and perhaps the only, way to detect MSG is to have a lot of experience eating Korean food that is MSG-free. If any food tastes "too good," suspect MSG. Look for MSG's telltale chemical sweetness that tends to linger in your mouth after swallowing the food. MSG is easier to detect after the food cools down. Monitor if you feel extra thirsty after eating a Korean meal, because that may be a physiological response to MSG for certain people.
Watch out if the food has only "one speed." Korean food is about delicately balancing multitudes of flavors. Poorly made Korean food allows one or two flavors--usually spiciness or the savoriness from sesame oil--overpower the rest of the ingredients. Despite its reputation, Korean food should not be overly spicy to the point where no other flavor can be detected.
These are just some of the guidelines for discerning good Korean restaurants from bad ones. If you have any additional guidelines, please share in the comments--TK will include the good ones in the main post.
Be a judgmental Korean food eater! There is no need to be a jerk at the restaurant as you are eating, but there won't be better Korean food near you until you start caring about its quality and make affirmative choices to support good Korean restaurants. 맛있게 드세요!
Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.
Don't just criticize; show the alternative. So TK will give the alternative. Here is a list of things that you should look for in a Korean restaurant in order to tell if it is a good one.
Geographic Location
In U.S.: Let's be straight. Korean food is not yet at the place where, say, sushi is--that is to say, Korean food is not yet mainstream enough for one to expect a dependable taste for it, outside of the people who grew up eating it constantly. This necessarily means the ceiling for the quality of Korean food sold in areas sparsely populated by Koreans will be rather low. In the U.S., Koreans mostly live in Southern California, New York/North New Jersey and D.C./Maryland/Northern Virginia. (The next tier of Korean American population centers are Northern California, Atlanta, Chicago and Seattle, but the drop-off is significant after the top three.) The quality of Korean food tends to track that order.
In Korea: Korea is surrounded by seas on three sides, with each side producing different types of fish. Korea's terrain also ranges from mountains to fertile and flat fields, each yielding different types of crops. In short, Korean food is highly diverse based on geography. Because everything in Korea tends to eventually flow to Seoul, the restaurants in Seoul tend to maintain a certain level of quality. But for the real deal, look for the restaurants that sell the food that is made from the local ingredients.
 |
| Freshly made soft tofu from Sokcho. This ended up in TK's stomach within minutes. |
For example, tofu requires sea water to make. (Bet you did not know that.) Thus, the best tofu comes from Korea's eastern seaboard, in which soy beans grow and the sea water is readily available. Port cities, obviously, are the best places to have fish and seafood. Jeju Island is not only known for its seafood, but also for pork from its native black pigs. Since each locality in Korea loudly advertises its specialty food, it is hard to miss the local delicacy.
Two additional points: (1) in the City of Jeonju, every dish is good; (2) in Daegu, every dish is awful. Just trust me on this. Jeonju is the birthplace of bibimbap, one of the most iconic Korean dishes. In Daegu, locals say the best food available is McDonald's.
(More after the jump.)
Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.
Menu
Both in the U.S. and in Korea, this holds true: watch out for restaurants that sell too many different dishes, because every one of the dishes will be mediocre-to-bad. Unfortunately, this applies to vast majority of Korean restaurants in the U.S., because there simply is not enough demand to specialize in certain types of Korean food. In small towns of America, the menu often crosses the border to include Japanese/Chinese/Thai food, creating an unholy alliance of shittiness. Avoid this type of restaurant at all costs.
 |
| From the Oatmeal. (source) |
In Korea, restaurants with big menus tend to be in and around train stations and express bus terminals, where many different types of people pass through without particularly caring about the quality of the food available. Avoid these places as well.
The good Korean restaurants serve foods that are related to one another. For example, naengmyeon [냉면, cold buckwheat noodles] ought to be sold alongside with suyuk [수육, boiled meat], because naengmyeon's broth is made of meat. (In other words, do not eat naengmyeon at a place that does not also sell suyuk; it means that the restaurant is using canned broth.) Jokbal [족발, braised pig's trotter] is usually sold alongside bossam [보쌈, steamed/boiled pork with kimchi and cabbage] because they are both pork and they both involve boiling/steaming.
The very best Korean restaurants often serve just one item, like this:
 |
| Same tofu restaurant in Sokcho. The entire menu is on the wall: soft tofu soup, for KRW 8,000 (~$8). |
Food & Flavor
Majority of Korean food will be in some configuration of rice, kimchi, banchan [반찬, side dishes] and the main dish. Because rice, kimchi and banchan will form the backbone of a Korean meal, the way in which a Korean restaurant handles these elements is a great gauge of how good a Korean restaurant is.
Kimchi: At this point, there might be a bit too much mystique surrounding kimchi in popular discourse, as if there can be no proper kimchi outside of the kitchen of some old Korean grandmother. Truth is, one can buy pretty decent kimchi from the store--as long as one pays for it. Therefore, kimchi is a decent yardstick to find out whether the restaurant in question has minimum competence. If a restaurant serves bad kimchi, it either does not know what it is doing with food, or does not care enough to buy good food--which includes good ingredients.
There are two major ways in which kimchi can be wrong: too sweet, or too sour. If either or both is true with a restaurant kimchi, chances are the food will not be good either.
Sweetness is the cancer that is slowly killing Korean cuisine. This cancer is everywhere in Korean food in America, and frequently found in Seoul as well. Gratuitous addition of sugar and MSG (which is also sweet) is ruining the palate of those who did not grow up experiencing the traditional palate. Beyond the subtle sweetness naturally present in the ingredients, Korean food should not be sweet at all. This absolutely applies to kimchi: although napa cabbage and Korean red pepper both bear some natural sweetness, one should be able to tell immediately whether any sweetener was added.
Excessive sourness indicates that the kimchi was improperly made or kept. Kimchi that was properly fermented in the correct temperature has clean, crisp sourness. If fermented too quickly, the sourness becomes overpowering, destroying all the nuances of the dish. Fermentation accelerates if kimchi was kept at a warm place (not a good sign for hygiene) or kimchi has sugar in it. (Excess carbohydrates = hyperactive microbes. To avoid this result, some restaurants choose to add Sweet 'n Low to its kimchi to add sweetness without affecting the fermentation. Vile.)
Note that napa cabbage, which is the main ingredient for the most common type of kimchi, is a winter vegetable. The best Korean restaurants serve kimchi made with seasonal vegetables, not just with napa cabbage. (More on this below.) At least during the winter, cabbage kimchi ought to have a satisfying crunch when chewed, instead of fiber-y toughness. Good kimchi has a strong hint of seafood; cheap kimchi does not, because seafood and fish sauce can be expensive in large quantities.
Rice: If kimchi tends to show the floor of a Korean restaurant's quality, rice tends to show the ceiling. Most restaurant rice is decidedly mediocre, largely because restaurants usually cook rice in one huge batch, which sits for hours in a giant, industrial-sized rice cooker.
Some restaurants place rice in a stainless steel rice bowl (pictured below) immediately after the rice cooks, and puts the bowl in a warmer. (The bowl has to be made of stainless steel in order to conduct the heat from the warmer--which is why the stainless steel rice bowls are commonly seen in Korean restaurants, but rarely in a Korean home.) Doing this improves the quality of the rice, but only somewhat.
 |
| The ubiquitous stainless steel rice bowl. (source) |
To reiterate: good rice is pretty difficult to find in a restaurant. It simply takes too much effort to make each bowl of rice perfect. But this means the restaurant that does put in the effort to serve a good bowl of rice cares about the quality of food it puts out. Good kimchi means the minimum standards are kept; good rice means that you can look forward to the maximal quality.
Banchan: Kimchi is the minimum; rice is the maximum. Banchan is everything in between.
The number of banchan may vary depending on the main dish. Some main dishes only require two or three. In other circumstances, there may be dozens of banchan dishes, like this:
 |
| (Source) |
Having a table full of banchan is certainly more impressive than having just two or three. But don't be fooled: restauranteurs also know that big number impresses. They will attempt to impress the customers by having a huge number of banchan that may be old and stale or, worse, buy the banchan from a wholesaler and simply put them on plates. Quantity matters to some degree, but quality matters much more.
Good banchan uses local ingredients. Restaurant in a mountain town should have more vegetables; in a seaport town, more seafood. No matter where the restaurant is, the vegetable banchan has to include more than the three mainstays: bean sprouts, spinach and fern shoots. All things being equal, more seafood in banchan is good news, because seafood is more expensive. Foreign vegetables--like broccoli--have no place on a Korean table. (Don't argue with me about how broccoli might be local to the U.S. It's not Korean. End of discussion.)
Good banchan takes effort. Tossed salad and simple pickles (usually in soy sauce) do not take much effort. Cooked or fermented dishes with processed (e.g. dried, smoked) ingredients take significantly more effort and time to make. Good banchan does not disguise the ingredient. Be skeptical if all the banchan is slathered with soy sauce or gochujang [고추장, hot pepper paste]. This may be a sign that the ingredients are old and stale, and their true flavor needs to be hidden.
Good banchan is also seasonal. As discussed earlier, napa cabbage is a winter vegetable; ideally, one wants to see kimchi made with yeolmu [열무, radish stem] in the summer. Similarly, certain fish are the best in certain seasons. The most famous example may be jeoneo [전어, hickory shad], which is featured in an Korean old saying: "autumn jeoneo makes the runaway daughter in law to return." The best Korean restaurants will serve different types of banchan each time you visit, depending on the season.
Flip these characters around, and you get the idea of what makes a bad banchan. Among the commonly seen banchan, the worst has to be potato salad, because it fails all of the criteria above: potatoes are commonly available everywhere (= not local,) it is usually covered in mayonnaise (doubly offensive on this point, since mayo is not Korean,) it requires very little effort and is definitely not seasonal. In TK's book, any Korean restaurant that serves potato salad as banchan goes down a few notches.
Main Dish, and Overall: With any food with broth or reduced sauce (which starts from broth,) taste for MSG. Unfortunately, MSG is very difficult to detect when the food is hot and spicy--like many Korean dishes. The best, and perhaps the only, way to detect MSG is to have a lot of experience eating Korean food that is MSG-free. If any food tastes "too good," suspect MSG. Look for MSG's telltale chemical sweetness that tends to linger in your mouth after swallowing the food. MSG is easier to detect after the food cools down. Monitor if you feel extra thirsty after eating a Korean meal, because that may be a physiological response to MSG for certain people.
Watch out if the food has only "one speed." Korean food is about delicately balancing multitudes of flavors. Poorly made Korean food allows one or two flavors--usually spiciness or the savoriness from sesame oil--overpower the rest of the ingredients. Despite its reputation, Korean food should not be overly spicy to the point where no other flavor can be detected.
* * *
These are just some of the guidelines for discerning good Korean restaurants from bad ones. If you have any additional guidelines, please share in the comments--TK will include the good ones in the main post.
Be a judgmental Korean food eater! There is no need to be a jerk at the restaurant as you are eating, but there won't be better Korean food near you until you start caring about its quality and make affirmative choices to support good Korean restaurants. 맛있게 드세요!
Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com.
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