Mark Bittman of the New York Times recently referred to Korean food as Japanese food with guts, and got a heated response from a reader who wrote in to say that Korean food is in no way similar to, or derived from, Japanese.
I agree, although most of the Korean food I have eaten in my life happens to have been in Tokyo, where I lived right upstairs from a Korean barbecue joint. But whether in Japan or here, Korean food tends to be badly represented, outside of Koreatown in LA, that is, a community with more than a quarter-million Koreans.
The Korean food in Vegas is monochromatic, as if one single menu had been Xeroxed and faxed from restaurant to restaurant. Most of our Korean places are grills where you cook meat at the table over a brazier, and the rest of the menu tends to be a bit sanitized. So I was encouraged when a Korean friend told me that Min Sok Choi was the best and most authentic Korean restaurant here. Perhaps my excitement was premature.
It's not that food isn't good, but rather it is, for lack of a better term, exotic. A few items on the menu, such as Korean sausage soup and rice cakes with tempura, are off the familiarity chart. Others, such as mixed goat meat and vegetables with spicy sauce, are foods we rarely eat in this country.
Min Sok Choi is a modest-looking place from outside, hard by the Liberace Museum and a place called Badger Café, where Wisconsinites apparently can eat cheese curds and other Dairyland delicacies.
Considering this is a simple space, the restaurant is nicely decorated, with a burbling fountain, booths with colorful cushions resting on hard-pine benches, colored lights strung onto the straw mats that act as booth dividers, and framed color photos of rustic Korean village life.
Whatever you order, you start with pan'chan, a parade of side dishes that accompany any traditional Korean meal. Korean meals are not multicourse affairs. Typically, everything is eaten at once, but since the pan'chan are basically cold dishes, they come first, followed by everything else as soon as the dishes are ready.
The pan'chan change daily, but there is generally cooked spinach, the fearsome fermented cabbage called kimchi, bean sprouts, and cubes of fiery, pickled white radish. One evening, there were tiny anchovies with a mighty crunch and wonderful cubes of cooked potato marinated in soy sauce and the sweet rice wine called mirin.
There are also yellow bean sprouts, broccoli with chili flakes, and amazing pickled onions, peppers and hot chili, all of which turn into a symphonic poem when eaten with boiled rice. It is customary to serve a clear radish and bean-sprout soup with Korean meals, and they do here, although we did not get ours until the meal was nearly over—and I had to ask for it five or six times.
The aforementioned main courses were just so-so, but perhaps they appeal more to a Korean palate than an American one. Korea sausage soup, served in a bubbling cauldron, is in fact a blood sausage with a funky flavor and tinged with red-hot chilies, leaving you in mild distress. The goat meat is quite good, served in an enormous pile, with a red dipping sauce laced with perilla seed, an aromatic that Koreans say wards off the common cold.
But this is one restaurant where you would probably do better to have one of the more tried and tested Korean dishes, as the woman-run kitchen is adept at grilling or sautéing. Kalbi are grilled short ribs on the bone, redolent of their tasty sesame oil, garlic, sugar and soy- sauce marinade. Seafood pancake, a.k.a. pa jeon, is a delicious griddle cake laced with shrimp, oysters and calamari, eaten with a sweet glaze.
Dolsot bibimbap is one of the menu stalwarts, and perhaps my favorite Asian rice dish. Picture a pot of rice topped with various raw and cooked vegetables, chopped beef and a cooked egg. The dolsot is an iron pot and when you request it, you'll know why this utensil improves the dish tenfold. The rice crusts golden brown around the sides of the pot, and you scrape it out in chunks. Meanwhile, if you like your bibimbab spicy, you have the option to mix in spoonfuls of the fire-hot, red-bean paste served on the side as a condiment. I had this dish once or twice a week when I lived in Japan.
But don't bother with any of the dishes under the heading of spicy rice cake, duk bok ki in Korean. What you get are starchy oblongs of glutinous rice, presented in a sticky red sauce that looks like hot ketchup. They come with a choice of meats, but are not saved by the addition.
Sake and Korean beer go nicely with the dishes, and the bottomless bowls of rice—which for some reason Koreans serve in stainless steel vessels—are expertly cooked. For anyone looking for a culinary odyssey, believe me, you'll find it at Min Sok Choi.