Tuesday, October 22, 2013

Bibim-YUM!

I love Korean food.  I grew up with Korean food as our neighbors were Korean.  And it saddens me that Korean food is not nearly as popular or as accessible as it should be.  But there are oftentimes when I just crave it.  So I used Yelp to try and find the closest quality Korean restaurant near my home one Saturday and found myself at the Greenland Market Shopping Center in Van Nuys.  There are many restaurants there, but the one stuck in the corner with the sign with two Korean letters and the word Evergreen is the one to choose.  In Korean the restaurant is called Cho Eun 조은, but it also goes by its English name, Evergreen.

You know how you can tell if you picked the right ethnic restaurant?  Look at the customers and if they are of the same ethnicity, then you picked correctly.  The restaurant isn't fancy, but I enjoy that aspect as it minimizes the "stranger in a strange land" experience since the restaurant is a true Korean restaurant owned by Koreans and serving food to Koreans, and not a franchise operated by someone whose family came over on the Mayflower.

As is traditional in any Korean restaurant, once you are seated and order food the servers immediately come out with a tray full of side dishes to nosh on while you wait for your meal, or to complement your meal.  In Korean its called banchan.  Banchan varies from restaurant to restaurant and probably even from day to day, but it almost always includes at least one form of kimchi (traditionally fermented cabbage in chilis).  It also often includes some form of bland soup, which I sometimes appreciate depending mostly on the weather outside.


Banchan (side dishes, including kimchi, bean sprouts, among others)

On this particular day I was craving glass noodles, or transparent noodles, also known as jap chae.  Jap chae is a Korean dish made from sweet potato noodles, stir fried in sesame oil with various vegetables, sometimes served with beef, and flavored with soy sauce, and sweetened with sugar.  I found Cho Eun's glass noodles a little on the sweet side, but it was still delicious and hit the spot.

Transparent noodles with vegetables

It might seem odd that I'm making a point of discussing the rice and even showing a picture of it, but because it wasn't the traditional white or brown, it deserves mentioning.  I'm not sure what gave the rice its purplish hue, but it certainly was tasty.

Rice

BBQ spicy pork is one of my favorite Korean dishes.  At Cho Eun its served sizzling hot like Korean fajitas on top of onions on a hot iron pan shaped like a cow.  Shaped like a cow?  Yup, shaped like a cow.  Well, its definitely a statement to serve hot pork "inside" a cow.  When we ordered two servings for lunch (one for each of us) our server made a point to state that they are large servings as if to change our minds, but to me it just meant "Yay!  More leftovers!"  And so I got to satisfy my Korean cravings for a few more days.


BBQ Pork in Spicy Sauce (marinated in special soy sauce and served in a sizzling hot pan)

If you want traditional Korean food that actual Koreans eat, then I highly recommend Cho Eun.  Its a friendly simple atmosphere with an easy to decipher menu.  Be careful not to be lured in by the fancy signage of the all you can eat Korean barbecue in the same shopping center and find the simple sign in the corner.  You'll be glad you did.

Mac and Cheese, Please

I can't recall how I learned about Elbows Mac n' Cheese, but when I did, I couldn't wait for the opportunity to try it out.  I mean, an entire restaurant dedicated to macaroni and cheese, its got to be good.  But the restaurant is in Cerritos which is closer to Disneyland then it is Los Angeles, so it wasn't somewhere that we could go to easily.  And then Alton Brown came to town.  If you didn't know, Food Network personality and host of Iron Chef America Alton Brown is doing a national tour and his Los Angeles stop was in Cerritos.  Hooray!  Dinner at Elbows is in order.

Before we headed south I did do a small amount of research on the restaurant; well, at least enough to determine that I didn't need a reservation and that it was casual dining.  What I didn't realize until we arrived was that the restaurant was more of a fast food establishment like a Panda Express or a Baja Fresh, then it was a traditional casual dining restaurant à la Claim Jumper or TGI Fridays.

We approached the counter and perused the menu above the ordering station.  It should be noted that the posted menu varied from the paper menu that they had available for you to take home.  I also didn't notice the menu addendum on the side wall that offered up combo options and a make-your-own mac n' cheese option.  So if I could make one suggestion to them it would be to shore up the menu so that its clear and concise to those who are new to their establishment.

I saw the green bean fries and turned to my husband to inform him we would be ordering them.  When they arrived they looked like they had come directly out of a frozen package and into the fryer.  They tasted like it too.  They had so much breading that it was impossible to taste the actual green beans.  And the breading itself didn't have much flavor, so it was necessary to eat them with the two sauces they were served with, but that were never described.  Presumably the sauces were ranch dressing and cheese sauce, but the ranch was from a bottle and the cheese sauce quickly hardened and even it was lacking flavor.  We didn't even eat half of the green bean fries as they were just a waste.

Green Bean Fries (seasoned and battered crunchy green beans)

I ordered the lobster mac, hoping it would be oodles and oodles of yumminess.  It wasn't.  First it was a game of Find the Lobster.  And then once you found the lobster, you couldn't really taste it as it was overpowered by the cheese sauce.  I don't know if it was the asiago or the garlic, but the sauce was so intense in flavor that even if I was hungry enough there would be no way that I could finish the dish.  It was just too one note and that one note was too strong.  I was happy every time I found a piece of asparagus as it broke up the flavor palate.  In the end I just gave up eating the mac n' cheese and searched for the remaining lobster and asparagus.  The dish was served with two tiny pieces of garlic bread, that while tasty, needed to be toasted a little longer.



Lobster Mac (real lobster and fresh asparagus in a rich Wisconsin Asiago and Parmesan cheese sauce)

My husband ordered the jalapeño mac which I was a little jealous of.  Actually when I saw that it resembled traditional mac and cheese I regretted not ordering the Elbows Classic.  My husband took one bite and exclaimed that it was very creamy.  I did get the opportunity to take one bite and it was a lot better than my dish, but I didn't want to commit to that much jalapeño flavor.

Jalapeño Mac (spicy jalapeño and Wisconsin cheddar cheese topped with jalapeño slices and fresh tortilla chips)

Overall I would say the dinner was a disappointment and not worth another trip, even if we did find ourselves in Cerritos in the future.  One positive I will say is that I liked that the mac and cheese was served in individual baking dishes that would be easy to take home as leftovers and reheat.  That's it.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Some Privacy Is In Order

I had an event to go to in Hollywood on Saturday night, so I used my favorite Open Table app to find a restaurant within walking distance of the Dolby Theatre.  I came across Public Kitchen & Bar which is located in the famous Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel and thought that that for sure must be the place we should go.  Boy was I wrong.

After going down the wrong street due to a sign on the building that read "Public Kitchen & Bar" with an arrow pointing that direction, we arrived a few minutes after our scheduled 6pm reservation. We checked in and were seated by the hostess who spent an inordinate amount of time organizing the appetizer plates with the napkin-wrapped silverware as our place settings before we could take our seats.  Then she gave us our menus, poured water in our glasses, and returned to the hostess stand.  And there we sat for ten minutes in the half-back booth before anyone paid us any attention again.

During our wait we not only decided what we wanted from the menu, but started deciding what other restaurants we could go to instead.  The waiter finally arrived and he seemed to be a novice.  No, novice is not the right word.  He seemed like a time traveler who suddenly appeared and was doing the waiter job because it was a way to fit it.  I'm not sure if he was from Journeyman or Quantum Leap, but he definitely is not from this time.  That said, we were in Hollywood.  We ordered our dishes and hoped for the best.

A few minutes later our appetizer appeared.  It seemed unusual that Brussels sprouts would be listed as an appetizer, but we went for it as (A) we like Brussels sprouts, and (B) it could count as our vegetable for the evening.  Forgive me for the pictures below as I forgot to take a picture before I served myself.  So instead there are pictures of my plate and the serving dish after I took my helping.  You'll notice that the creme fraiche is oddly placed inside the serving dish, and yet strangely that is appropriate as we still can't figure out why the Brussels sprouts were served with creme fraiche.  This was an interesting preparation of Brussels sprouts as the kitchen took the time to delicately remove each leaf instead of serving the vegetable whole, chopped, or shredded, as is traditional.  In fact, the dish seemed to be the restaurant's take on kale chips replacing the kale with Brussels sprouts and adding creme fraiche for absolutely no discernible reason.  The appetizer was quite tasty, though a tad sweet, likely from what appeared to be balsamic vinegar at the bottom of my dish.  Not my favorite preparation for Brussels sprouts (http://count4food.blogspot.com/2013/09/another-night-another-meal.html), but it was okay.

Brussels Sprouts (pistachio, herb, creme fraiche)

Serving dish, post serving

Now I'm used to waiting for my food to fired up once the appetizer is completed.  And since we both ordered the sauteed scallops, that meant our entrees should have been served to us within five minutes of the appetizer dishes being bused away.  No such luck.  After twenty-five long minutes spent analyzing just how extremely loud the restaurant was and how inhibitive it was to being able to have any form of conversation with your dining partner, our server finally arrived to tell us our entree would be served in four minutes.  Yes, four minutes.  Not five.  Four.  And how do I know for sure it would be four minutes?  Because he actually held up his hand with his thumb folded down to show me.  Oy.

Except it wasn't four minutes - it was more like ten minutes.  So when our entrees were served and our waiter appeared moments later to ask if everything was okay, I asked for the check.  I mean, I had a show to go to and if it takes thirty-five minutes to cook scallops, how long would it take to process a credit card transaction?  Mind you, never once was an apology made or an explanation given.

We each looked at our dishes and laughed to ourselves.  Was this really an entree?  Two scallops (and for anyone who watches Chopped! you know that two scallops is an appetizer serving and not an entree), two tiny clams, two lardons, one potato (despite the plural in the description) and one tiny piece of carrot that I didn't realize was a carrot until much later.  Oh, and let me not forget the three tablespoons of clam chowder.  That might not be accurate - it was possibly only two tablespoons.  Before we dived in (can you actually say "dive in" with so little food?) we joked about where we would go for Second Dinner as this certainly would not sustain us, but we definitely were not ordering anything else from this establishment.

The meal strategizing stopped and we dove in, no snorkel equipment needed.  The scallops were tasty and cooked perfectly.  The bacon was smoky, which my husband liked, but I didn't.  That's right!  You heard it here first!  Bacon that I did not like.  The clams were so tiny they were barely noticeable and I'm not sure why I bothered to use my knife with either the potato or the carrot, but maybe i did so just to make them last.  And then thankfully we were given a soup spoon to spoon up our heaping helpings of clam chowder.

Sauteed Scallops (clam chowder, braised bacon, leeks, potatoes, carrot)

I signed the check while finishing my slurping and out of the restaurant we quickly went as I didn't want to spend one more moment there.  I would not recommend this place to anyone.  The food was okay, but not worth the money and the service was terrible.  And maybe its just me, but when I go out to eat with someone, I like to be able to hear what they say.  But thankfully I had my phone to entertain me.