dinner at California Kitchen

In the Gyeongnidan area of Seoul, among the foothills of Namsan, there sits a bar/restaurant called California Kitchen. I went there with my buddy Charles tonight. It's a place he knows, and I'd never been there before, so I said yes to a new experience. Got there, gift in hand, and chowed down on a double burger and chorizo burrito. 

ambiance

belching beaver

artisanal soda... after which I drank three Cokes (cheat day!)

menu

chorizo burrito—very potato-y, not very chorizo-y

double burger—the star of the show (note the restaurant-grade, heavy-plastic plates, which I use at home)

All in all, California Kitchen is a good place. Not a 10, but somewhere between a 7 and an 8. The chorizo burrito was rib-stickingly voluminous, but it was stuffed with fries (not necessarily a bad thing; the Greeks do something similar with gyros), and the chorizo didn't come through. That said, it was a good burrito, and it had a nice, smoky dipping sauce. What I really enjoyed, though, was the burger. My only complaint, there, was that it was billed as a double burger, which it technically was, but the two patties were smash-burger patties, i.e., very flavorful, but also very small. Two smash-burger patties equal a single regular patty, which is why this is only technically a double burger. That said, the burger was cooked perfectly, and the cook even somehow managed the trick of making smash burgers while still managing to keep part of the patties' center rare and juicy. That's not normally how it works with smash burgers, which generally cook through (to well done) in under a minute. The dipping sauce for the french fries was another smoky sauce, this time barbecue. Charles pointed out other interesting items on the menu, so I'm motivated to come back here.

As Charles noted, it was a humid, sweaty, uphill walk to California Kitchen from Noksapyeong Station. Lucky for me, our table at the resto was directly under an A/C vent. At other times, I might complain about being too cold, but not tonight. After dinner, we walked over to Itaewon because we both had things to buy at the Foreign Food Mart in the middle of that district. That meant another sweaty, hilly walk over a steep rise, then down to Itaewon's main drag, then up the final little hill to the Foreign Food Mart. I got my frozen hunks of lamb (which I'll grind to make qeema as a prelude to making meat emulsion for gyros) and a 1.2-kg bag of frozen peas (the American kind!). I took a cab directly to my place from the mart.

So the gift I gave Charles was a bag of 12 toll-house cookies (chips probably melted in the summertime heat), about 250 g of fusilli pasta for him and the wife, and a mess of my boeuf bourguignon, done right this time (no burned taste from overcooked bacon!). This was all part of a "redemption package," if you will, since I had fucked up a batch of chocolate-chip cookies and boeuf bourguignon before. Here's hoping everything is in order this time.