What I ate on Monday:
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| billed as "bacon cream ddeokbokgi" with cheese and dried parsley |
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| three pieces of deep-fried jumbo shrimp |
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| shrimp up close |
This was not a bad meal, but it didn't bowl me over. The Japanese-style fried shrimp had a bit of crunch on the very outside, but the rest of the dough was almost soggy in texture. The cream-bacon ddeokbokgi wasn't bad, but it reminded me of the Korean interpretation of carbonara: lots of heavy cream plus ham or bacon. (Real carbonara doesn't use any heavy cream at all: the creaminess comes from a combination of eggs, cheese, and judiciously applied pasta water. Real carbonara also contains no garlic—which Americans love to add—and no onions—which Koreans love to add because they're onion-obsessed.)
Thus far, nothing I've eaten after that first order of brisket kalguksu has been nearly as good. You never forget your first time, right? So I'm beginning to think of Go Jjang as the place to go for kalguksu and nothing else. Not that these other dishes have been bad, but nothing has risen to those initial heights. I'm still going to keep working through the menu, though; there's plenty more to explore. And I do need to keep in mind that Go Jjang bills itself as, first and foremost, a guksu place, so noodles are its specialty. Oh, yeah: I've also noticed that, while the kalguksu was plenty filling, nothing else has been nearly as filling. What's up with that?
Well, you need to go try the kalguksu again. Maybe it being so good was the aberration, not the standard.
ReplyDeleteAs Jen Psaki might say, I'll circle back around to it.
ReplyDelete