Episode 11: Little Seoul

My relationship to Korean cuisine is a bit like the one I have to the Russian language: I love it, I appreciate its beauty, and I know some of the basics, but I find its grammar ultimately impenetrable, and thus doubt I will ever be able to perform higher order functions in it. This relationship is complicated by the fact that Hot Librarian, with her aversion to chili heat, fatty meats and cephalopods, finds it nearly impossible to select a dish to her satisfaction in most Korean restaurants. I have tried to reverse engineer a few dishes in such a way as to tone down the heat, add some tofu, and thus make them suitable for home cooking. But for the most part, Korean food has been a solitary pleasure for me, the source of many a nourishing lunch when I lived in Flushing and worked in Bayside, occasionally partaken alongside friends who share my bewildered fascination with it.

Fortunately, however, the Little One likes Korean food. So the two of us were bound to visit Little Seoul Restaurant on one of our days home together, as we did yesterday for lunch.

Let me get the inevitable comparisons out of the way. These are a few of the things that Little Seoul does not have:

• Matronly, middle-aged Korean women bustling about the front of the house, who greet each incoming guest in unison with a chorus of an-jeu-se-yo (come sit down) and see off each departing guest with a chorus of ddo o-se-yo (come again).
• A specialty dish whose identity is made clear through neon hangeul letters in the window, an awning depicting the animal in question above the entrance, and big posters on the walls.
• Blond wood decor.
• Lidded stainless steel rice bowls.

Not that all of those things are entirely to be missed. For example, many of the matrons have the intrusive habit of obsessive-compulsively rearranging your ban chan plates in what they deem to be the proper order every time they pass by your table. That was a feature of Queens dining that got old, fast.

And I know better to expect the specialists. There's a stretch of Northern Boulevard, from Parsons Boulevard almost all the way to the Nassau County line, where nearly every block has at least one of them--here a place specializing in kal gook soo (soup with thick, hand-pulled noodles), there a place that serves a steaming bowl of seollongtang (beef marrow broth) with every meal, a few Korean fried chicken joints, some Korean-style Chinese places where you can get your jjajangmyeon fix (noodles with pork and black bean sauce, a riff off of the northern Chinese specialty, zhajiang mien, which tends to use a brown bean paste instead), another known for its soondae (blood sausage), a place that makes better sushi than many of the Japanese places in Manhattan (colonialism has its benefits) but if you know how and what to ask for you can sample the gejang (fermented crab--something that tastes much better than it sounds), a barbecue joint known for its galbi (short ribs), another for pork belly, another for duck, and if you downed too much soju the night before, you can choose between the places with excellent sam gye tang (chicken soup with rice and ginseng) or the places known for their hae jang gook (literally "morning soup," because what you need the morning after is pig blood). Amazingly, on any given lunch hour or night, even on the weekdays, most of these places are packed (and if they aren't, avoid them, they must be empty for a reason). The Census Bureau says there are 95,000 Koreans in all of New York State. That's more than the entire population of Portland, but even if they were all concentrated in Queens... I think they undercounted.

What I was looking for here in Maine is a good generalist, a place where I can reliably sate a craving. And that is what I found. Little One got the haemulpajeon (seafood pancake), demolishing half of it and making extensive use of the dipping sauce--soy sauce and rice vinegar liberally seasoned with chili flecks. (I, of course, sampled it, and ultimately finished it. It was good.) The kimchi jigae (spicy soup or pickled cabbage and pork) had a good sour tang, that leads me to wonder if the proprietors pickle their own cabbage. Fiery too: I kept the waitress moving to refill my water. (And hey, she actually refilled my water without me having to ask--that's an improvement over Flushing!) I had the option of the rice with red beans (billed as "Korean multi-grain rice"), which was a satisfying rendition of a tasty accompaniment (though perhaps a bit too small a serving).

But, speaking of accompaniments, I have to ask: What's with the ban chan? Now, I don't expect the kind of profusion common in Queens. Honestly, I don't even understand how those restaurants stay in business while giving out so much free food. Even when dining alone, I have seen as many as twelve different small or not-so-small plates--various vegetables, pickled, raw and cooked, at different levels of heat, and perhaps even a few proteins, such as tofu, stewed beef, fish cakes, tiny whole fish (my favorite), fermented oysters or crab. Once I was even served a whole grilled croaker as a ban chan! I may remember it fondly, but that is not what I was expecting.

The problem was not so much the number or the type--three different kinds of spicy pickled vegetables, i.e., cabbage, cucumber and bean sprouts--or even the comparatively small servings--maybe 2 or 3 tablespoons of each, where in Queens it would be twice that (and at some places, with refills if you finished them whether you asked for it or not). The problem was that they only came out with my entree, so instead of being able to whet my appetite with a few piquant bites beforehand, I had to figure out whether and how to integrate them into my meal alongside the jigae and the rice. I also hope that they vary the ban chan, which I can only find out on a return visit, which there certainly will be. We left satisfied, but not stuffed--an unfamiliar sensation for me when leaving a Korean restaurant, but not an unpleasant one.