Seoul Soondae |
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| 158-15 Northern Blvd. | |
| Flushing, NY 11358-1640 | |
| 718-321-3231 | |
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Hours:
Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. | |
As its name indicates, this restaurant is devoted to soondae, a traditional sausage and popular snack food sold by street vendors in Korea. Unlike meaty European or American sausages, soondae is mostly sweet rice (a type of sticky rice) and rice vermicelli (noodles) flavored with bits of pork and pig's blood and spices. It reminds me of Asian rice cakes, but savory instead of sweet.
Shortly after we sat down, the waitress eyed all the non-Korean members in my party, and singled out the most bland dish on the menu -- a plate of steamed meat and vegetables -- as "what they should be able to eat." I told her my party included intrepid eaters, eager to cross cultural boundaries, but she didn't believe me until the end of the meal when she surveyed all the empty bowls.
Soondae, which is served sliced along with pieces of boiled liver and pork, tends to be one of those dishes people love or hate. If it doesn't sound appealing, don't worry, there are a lot of other things to eat here, but you should like pork because almost all the dishes are made with this meat.
The restaurant is also unusual in featuring ondol barbecue. One of Korea's famous inventions, ondol is a system of home heating based on hot stones placed beneath the floor to radiate heat upward; in olden days, these stones also doubled as a means of cooking. In this restaurant, you can grill thin slices of fatty pork on the thin, black stones brought heated and placed on the gas burner in the table. The meat has not been seasoned and is meant to be dressed up with accompanying ingredients; the practice is to fill a crisp lettuce leaf with rice, soy bean paste and pork and to wrap it into a bundle you can eat with your fingers.
One of the men in our dinner party, thinking that his palate again was being racially profiled, was offended when the waitress advised us to skip the grilled pork skins; so, of course, we had to order them. Once the skins were cooking, sputtering and splattering oil off the flat stone and onto our clothes, we realized why it might not have been such a good idea.
Other dishes included grilled, tender pork marinated in a spicy chili sauce, stir-fried pork and vegetables, and several hot casseroles. I especially enjoyed the pork and potato hot pot -- a thick stew of tender short ribs and a whole, creamy potato in a rich, spicy broth flavored with hot chile paste and garnished with toasted seeds that popped open in your mouth. For a mild, but just as delicious variation of this dish, order pork short ribs soup with a clear broth.
At the end of the meal, we received a complimentary beverage, a sweet, summertime concoction combining cinnamon, ginger and sugar with water.
Reviewed by Rose Kim, 8/8/2003.
