Mini Review: Seorae Reborn

Seorae Galmaegi (서래 갈매기) was one of the most popular Korean barbecue restaurants downtown. The meat was delicious and of good quality. The sides were tangy and spicy and fresh. The atmosphere was rustic and constantly buzzing with activity. 

Last year they were gutted and their facade torn down. For all intents and purposes, they appeared to have gone out of business. 

They did not. They were closed for renovations. 

The new, shiny, stainless steel and glass Seorae is just as delicious as the old, but I have to say, the atmosphere of the old wooden restaurant was much more comfortable. 

Seorae serves dinner from 5:30pm to 11:00pm weekdays and closes at 1am on the weekend. The servings are smaller than they used to be, but the service is still good. The prices are moderate (15,000 won and up for two people). And the place feels so clean these days you practically need to squint to see through the glare. 

Getting there from Pyeongtaek Station is easy if you imagine the streets as resembling the fingers in your hand. While standing in front of the station, hold your right hand palm up. Cross the street and walk down the index finger road. Turn left after three blocks. You should be able to see Seorae Galmaegi nearly in front of you down the street. It is on the right side of the street as the road bends to the left.

(Some reporting by Park Junsik.)

2015.3.4 | 지도 크게 보기 ©  NAVER Corp.

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The Joys and Sorrows of James' Cheese Ribs

The standard fare at James' Cheese Deung-galbi: cheese deung-galbi (baby back ribs)

I love to play with my food. Decades of french fry fortresses and Al Khazneh temples carved into watermelons slices can attest to the fact. In my mind, the act of creation is as fun or more than the act of eating. Put them together and you have a winning scenario.

The NetBot, on the other hand, simply loves to eat. For robot taste testers, the process from plate to mouth should be easy, smooth, efficient, without interruption except for conversation. There shouldn't be any food creation happening in between.

Today's featured restaurant is definitely not for robot taste testers. James' Cheese Deung-Galbi (제임스 치즈 등갈비) in downtown Pyeongtaek was made for people who think food is just as much fun to play with as to eat. 

James' menu is simple: baby back ribs and mozzarella fondue. That's it. The ribs come in four levels of spiciness, and the cheese in three quantities of cheesiness. There are five automatic sides that basically amount to mashed potatoes, mashed pumpkin, Vienna sausages in tomato sauce, canned corn in mayo, and scrambled eggs. Everything comes out on a big, compartmented, cast-iron pan with each food in its pre-ordained space. Cheese level one ribs liberate 14,000 won from your pocket and increase 2,000 won per cheese level. 

It's a simple and wonderfully organized system. The sides are just okay, but the real focus is on the tender, flavorful ribs and gooey, stretchy cheese. And that is where the fun, or, if you are a taste testing robot, the stress, begins. 

The challenge — or joy — is how to dip your ribs in such a way that the rib ends up cocooned in mozzarella and your fingers don't end up with third degree burns. And then there is the very serious issue of trying to balance your dipping with staying clean and enjoying the side dishes. These things seem simple enough, but if you are lacking coordination and brainpower like a certain food blogger and robot taste tester, these things don't come easy.

Dip success! Careful not to 
burn your fingers.

Lets start with the dip. With the standard cheese order, there was enough to completely cover all our ribs with cheese, and we still ended up scraping cheese off the bottom of the pan when the ribs were gone. But this was less because of the quantity of cheese and more because it was hard to get it on the ribs. So when you eat at James' Cheese Deung Galbi, you need to master the art of the cheese-rib-dip. Our waitress illustrated the method, dipping and twirling an imaginary rib in the air after she prepped the ribs at our table. I picked the movement up quickly. It's all in the wrist. The NetBot, though, either did not notice the demonstration or just couldn't get the hang of it without burning herself in the process. In the end she turned off the camp-stove heating our food to avoid further damage. This killed the fun fondue effect, but made the food much easier to eat. Food preparation, at any stage, is not ideal for taste-bots. They are programmed for processing and judging the molecular composition of food, not making it. An ideal situation for the NetBot would be ribs pre-rolled in cheese. Only then can she place the morsels into her molecular detection and analysis scanner or M-DAS and process the results without stress. Bare of cheese, however, the ribs, she said, were really delicious. If only we had paid more attention to the little tongs on the table designed for holding especially hot items.

Dipping ribs in cheese may be for those better abled, but so also is staying clean while sampling side dishes and twirling cheese around ribs. James' is kind enough to give you a clear, plastic glove to protect your hand from the sauce, but you only get one. Realistically, you only need one, but that leaves the very serious question of which hand to put the glove on. And this choice has grave repercussions for the future of your meal. 

That ghostly hand is the only thing between 
you and the torture of grimy fingers.

Being right handed, I decided to glove my right hand. What a grave error that was. If you're fastidious at all about cleanliness like me, and you want to try a side dish in between cheesy rib dips, you can't pick up your chopsticks with your saucy glove hand. To do so would leave your silverware less stainless than you found it, and a danger to cleanliness of the world around you. The only option is to attempt to use the chopsticks with your left hand — not so easy. There was a spoon, but as I said, this is a hard place to eat at if you are lacking any gray matter. I overlooked the spoon. Ultimately, I decided to switch gloves from right to left, but by that time my hand had sweat so much the glove stuck to my hand. It was no simple feat to get it off without turning it inside out, and I may or may not have eaten a bit of plastic from the tip of the glove in the process. But what a difference a gloved left hand made! With chopsticks in my right hand I became master over my meal. Not only had I easy access to the sides, I gained complete mastery over the ribs. With my left hand I could dip and twirl ribs in cheese with ease and enhance the process with the chopsticks in my right, deftly spinning the cheese around the ribs like a spider cocooning a newly caught fly. Too bad the cheese hardened so quickly after the stove was turned off. It was for a good cause, though. NetBots shouldn't have burnt hands. 

There are three James' Cheese Deung Galbis between Osan and Pyeongtaek. The one we visited is within easy walking distance of Pyeongtaek Station. The main roads in front of Pyeongtaek Station form a hand.  The station sits in your palm and each road is a different finger. Your pinky and thumb form the main street crossing in front of the station. Your middle finger stretches directly away from you. And your ring and pointer fingers are roads that extend at 45 degree angles to the middle road. Cross the street and walk down the pointer-finger road. Turn left on the walking street immediately after ArtBox. Walk straight until you get to a 'K' shaped intersection. Take your first right. You can think of this right as the bottom leg of the 'K.' Near the end of the street you will find James' Cheese Deung Galbi on your right side.

The menu is all in Korean, but the manager has an English version on her cell phone. (Weird, I know)

2015.1.22 | 지도 크게 보기 ©  NAVER Corp.

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VIDEO: Firing Up at Hwatong Sam

Since they opened up last year, Hwatong Sam, a Korean BBQ restaurant, has only gotten busier and busier. On our second visit the NetBot and I actually had to wait for about 10 minutes to be seated. That's nuts for a BBQ restaurant in Pyeongtaek, Korea.

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Meat, Spice and Lots of Fire at Hwatong Sam

There is a Korean barbecue restaurant for every leaf of kimchi in Korea, and it is hard to go wrong when choosing one. However, some do stand out. And Hwatong Sam (화통삼) is one of the chains that rises a little taller than its brothers.

There isn't much of a barbecue without meat, and that is one point in which Hwatong Sam stands out. The prices are reasonable. Around 10-12,000 won will buy one of a variety of quality pork cuts. And the servings are large enough to feed a single person. I ordered the samgyeopsal (삼겹살), pork belly with three layers of fat, and gabeurisal (가브리살), a special cut of pork loin. At many restaurants the meat comes out already cut into bite-sized pieces. However, these came out as solid chunks of meat which the waiter personally cut into smaller pieces at the table. 

Sometimes Koreans assume that foreigners do not know what to do in these kinds of situations and do all the cooking for them. However, this was not the case at Hwatong Sam. They practically had to wrestle the cooking tongs away from me each time they returned because they had a show to put on. After the gogi was flipped the waiter poured a quantity of oil over the meat, and, after cautioning me and the NetBot to sit back, turned the pork into a pyrotechnics show worthy of a MythBusters episode (sorry, no photos). When everything was done, the staff turned off the hot plate so nothing overcooked. 

Meat is important, but no respectable Korean barbecue would be complete without side dishes. And Hwatong Sam succeeds in that as well. Not everyone appreciates cooked veggies, but that is how the sides come at Hwatong Sam. Placed right on the large grill plate are mountains of kimchi, bean sprouts, mushrooms, and chives. A smaller amount of garlic sprouts, garlic, potato, and pumpkin are added as well. If that wasn't enough, there are also pickled perilla leaves called kkaennip jangajji (깻입 장아찌) and Korean hot peppers. And in a unique turn, the waiter cracks an egg inside a thick ring of onion, tops it with a little cheese and leaves it to fry. On the downside, they didn't give us much lettuce to roll our meat in, but I'm sure the waitstaff, a bunch of shy, kind, highschool-aged boys, would have given us more if we asked.

Perhaps what makes Hwatong Sam truly unique, though, are their dipping sauces. Sauces are not unusual at Korean barbecues, but this place's sauces have their own snazzy twist. Typically you get two or three sauces: ssamjang, sesame oil and salt, and some sauced onions. But Hwatong Sam serves five uniquely piquant sauces. They have something resembling ssamjang but spicier, curry powder that tastes boring until you dip your meat in it (the NetBot ate all of hers and asked for more), a surprisingly spicy sauce similar to but stronger than gochujang, a tart oil and vinegar sauce, and lastly their own citrusy twist on the onion sauce. 

There are two Hwatong Sams in Pyeongtaek. The one I visited (which has 9.7/10 stars on Naver) is located in the new development near LotteMart, down the street from the intersection immediately in front of Pyeongtaek City Hall. 

2014.12.2 | 지도 크게 보기 ©  NAVER Corp.

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Big Kamjatang!

Kamjatang (감자탕), which means potato stew, really has little to do with potatoes. It is a delectably rich and spicy Korean stew made from the meaty back bones of that magnificent beast that gifted us with bacon, or at least that is what kamjatang should be.

All too often kamjatang is conspicuously lacking in the meaty part and compensated with extra veggies (not potatoes) and glass noodles. This is the kamjatang that I knew for most of my four plus years in Korea, but then something happened that changed my view of kamjatang forever.

Several months ago my academy received a substitute teacher by the name of Philip. One day during a break between classes he told me the story of a hungry night in Pyeongtaek when he flagged down a taxi and asked to be taken to a kamjatang restaurant. A Korean-American, kamjatang was his favorite meal and he was craving it. The taxi's destination ended up serving some of the best kamjatang he had ever tried. I was sold. Six months followed before I got around to finding the place myself, and what a place it is!

"Nogeol Daekamjatang" (노걸대감자탕), with six syllables, is a mouthful of a name. And that's okay, because they like things large at Nogeol Daekamjatang. "Large" is even part of their name. Dae (대) means big. And true to their name, the amount of meat in their kamjatang is really large. In four years I've eaten a lot of kamjatang at restaurants all the way from from Busan to Seoul, and I have never seen hunks of meat as enormous as the ones attached to the bones of this soup. And it isn't sub-quality meat either. It is tender, rich, fall-off-the-bone meat. It is definitely fatty, but it is fatty in a good way like a pot roast. And all that fat melts throughout the stew making everything it embraces incomparably delicious.

Unlike other kamjatangs the veggie content is low and there aren't many noodles either, but the stew doesn't need these things. This isn't meant to be a casual vegetarian's guilty pleasure. This stew is made for bold, unabashed carnivores, people who do not shy away from the prospect of rending sinew, fat, and vein from bone with their bare hands and then being satisfied with that being their only meal for the day. And the kamjatang at Nogeol Daekamjatang, true to their long name, will keep you satisfied for the length of the day. I ordered the small communal pot (뼈감자탕 전골 小), which serves three people, with my girlfriend late Sunday morning. I didn't feel the urge for a meal until after midnight.

Like most kamjatang restaurants, Nogeol Daegamjatang is open 24 hours. They are located at 963-8 Hapjeong-dong, Pyeongtaek, half way between AK Plaza and Pyeongtaek High School on the road leading up to Sosabol Stadium. Coming from AK Plaza you will find it on your left across an intersection from a Ssangyong Motors service shop. 

Prices range from ₩7,000 for individual bowls to ₩36,000 for a huge communal pot. The owner doesn't speak much English besides "hello" and "thank you" and the menu is entirely in Korean, so it may be difficult for some foreigners to order. If you just ask for kamjatang the owner will ask if you want a communal pot or individual bowls. A communal pot is called "jeongol" (전골). An individual ceramic bowl is called "ttuekbaegi" (뚝배기). If you order a pot then you have to determine if you want a big (大 - dae), medium (中 - joong), small (小 - so), or two people (2인 - du-in) sized pot.

Nogol Daegamjatang in Hapjeong-dong, Pyeongtaek

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