Mekong Korean: Cold Weather Food for the Tropics

Mekong Korean Restaurant
Sothearos Drive
Phnom Penh, Cambodia



Korean restaurants are rife in Phnom Penh, and family restaurant Mekong Korean occupies a convenient location in the very center of the city. Dishing up rustic versions of Korean standards such as bi-bim-bap, tofu stew, stir-fried pork with red pepper and chicken stews, the restaurant has an entirely nondescript interior, few Western customers, and background music trending towards "Christian Celtic Songs Of the 90's." I find it all rather relaxing.



My favorite dish here is definitely the bulgogi stew at $8. It's not really bulgogi - they use ground beef here - but I love the slightly sweet, beefy, sesame infused broth. It's served with cabbage, carrots, sesame seeds, onions, and a bunch of enoki mushrooms. All the vegetation can make you pretend you're being healthy. Also a great option when dining with people who are red pepper averse, which is a serious, serious malfunction in Korean restaurants.



Another good dish here is Korean chicken stew, an exceptionally homey dish of braised chicken in a spicy red pepper sauce with potatoes, capsicum, onions, and chilis. It's spicy and delightfuly rustic at the same time. Great over rice, big pieces of skin-on, bone in chicken, something you'd make yourself in cool weather. It's almost getting into the low seventies at night in Phnom Penh now so I feel cold-weather food is entirely justified. It's around $14 for 2, and the stew's serving size was big enough that Giant Iowa Boyfriend and I could share it and be more than satiated.



The reason Korean restaurants may seem somewhat pricier than other restaurants is undoubtedly due to panchan, the ubiquitous selection of side-dishes trotted out at any Korean restaurant worth a damn. As these side-dishes are always refilled upon request (or without request), you could consider a good Korean restaurant something more of an all-you-can-eat buffet—and entree portion sizes tend to be healthy as well.

Mekong Korean does excellent marinated eggplant, fishcakes, beansprouts and daikon, but you'll get something different every time. I find their classic cabbage kimchi only OK, however. Something a little too harsh in the flavor. You'd be surprised how specific kimchi lovers can get. Also, how hard it is for kimchi lovers to get their non-Korean significant others to kiss them after they eat it.

OZ Again

Oz Korean BBQ
3343 Bradshaw Road Sacramento, CA
95827
916-362-9292



I love Korean food. Some of my earliest and happiest memories involve it: dipping crisp-fried yakimandu into soy sauce full of floating green scallions, chewy strips of spicy squid, fermenting kimchi tossed on top of almost anything. California has proved to be a Korean food afficinados dream: even Sacramento brims with Korean joints, small and fancy, fast-food and grill your own, endless purveyors of kimchi! (Yay!) You can buy kimchi at the grocery store here. I eat it often.

My favorite Korean place here in Sacramento is OZ Korean Barbeque. Located somewhat outside of town, it's a big restaurant in a big edifice of a building, adorned with big scary looking smoke-stacks to let off the smoke - coming from the tabletop grills inside. The entry way is dramatic and rather gorgeous - a brush painter came in to produce a gigantic painting of Tahoe in the Asian style that snakes up the walls. The dining room itself is big, stone and wood paneled, and noisy. Eating Korean food is not a quiet or austere art. It should be done in groups and you should order beer. (OZ is happy to hook you up.)

Panchan or Korean side-dishes appear quickly. The selection changes often, but you'll usually get at least five dishes - expect kimchi, squid strips, seaweed salad, marinated bean sprouts, pickled cabbage and jalapeno, radish, and other such delectables. You're in luck - refills are free and endless. (I ground through three on my last visit. I like kimchi.)

You should sit at a grill-table. It's fun to grill your own meat, and OZ's galbi (marinated short ribs) and bulgogi (marinated beef sirloin) are high quality and delicious. Don't miss the Tokyo X, which is the polite name for marinated pork belly, that fatty and delicious food. You can also get chicken and seafood to grill on the tabletop,but both strike me as unnecessarily healthy.



However, you should also order off the menu, for one needs accompaniments for the orgy of meat you are about to engage in. Japchae, or sauteed glass noodles with beef and vegetables (pictured above) are just plain wonderful - slippery, beefy, easy to eat. Stone Age Bi-Bim-Bap, a dish of sirloin, egg, vegetables, and pickle served over rice in a crackling hot stone bowl is also excellent. The rice caramelizes merrily away at the bottom of the stone vessel, and once you mix up the slightly burned rice with the toppings and the bean paste....perfect.



Don't miss the soup. Korean soup tends to be red hot, literally and figuratively, and filled with delicious silken tofu, vegetables, and the protein of your choice. I love OZ's Korean "cioppino" filled with various unlucky creatures of the sea, floating in a super spicy broth with tofu, garlic, and enoki mushrooms - scrumptious.



Seafood is a winner here. Begin your meal with the seafood pajun, an eggy pancake filled with squid, shrimp and crab along with vegetables, dipped in a sweet soy sauce. Finish with the squid pan fry as pictured above - a burbling cauldron filled with spicy hot bean paste, vegetables, and squid tentacles. It's absolutely addictive and tastes distinct from anything other cuisines might offer.

If you're in the mood for Asian food and are growing increasingly sick of eating Thai food again again again, you owe it to yourself to try Korean food. Experience the wonders of sticky bean paste and glass noodles and grilled beef. Eat some kimchi and be unabashed about the toxic garlic breath you will provoke. OZ serves food that is worth social censure for. (Or bring your friends to eat kimchi with you, and then no one will be bothered. That's a good plan.)

Berkel-Berkel Korean: Tentacles On The Cheap

Berkel Berkel
2428 Telegraph Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 981-1388

I love Korean food. Something about the combination of chili spices and red bean paste fills me with joy and glee. Since Korean food is incredibly rare where I go to school in the mountains of Massachusetts, I was craving it something strong when I returned to California. So when I stumbled upon the very literal hole in the wall that is Berkel Berkel, I had to give it a try.



The dining area is tiny and totally no-frills, with lots of people filtering in and out. We were immediately given a few dishes of panchan, which seem to be serve yerself when it comes to refills. These were pretty good but nothing special, although I did enjoy the cucumbers.

The menu is short and sweet, listing various BBQ items, lots of tasty looking tofu stews, bibimbap, and a few stir-fried items. I picked out the stir-fried squid and the dolset bibimbap with beef as my options, and we were ready to go.



The squid emerged with terrifying rapidity. The portion was huge (especially for the six bucks or so I paid), and the flavor was quite good, with a rich chili burn coming out from underneath the red-bean sauce. There were even perceptible green vegetables, including some tasty zucchini. I enjoyed slurping down the meaty tentacles, one of the many disgusting but oh so good pleasures that come from eating squid.

The bibimbap arrived next (of which I, being an idiot, have no photo of), and it was a pretty standard version on theme, sizzling merrily away in its stone pot. We let it go for a while so we could scrape off the blackened and thus yummy rice from the bottom. The flavor was good, although I wish the beef had been a little meatier.

If you're around the UC Berkeley campus and want some decent Korean food at bargain-basement prices, Berkel Berkel is your sugar daddy. Don't expect ambience or over-eager service, but that really shouldn't be your first aim when you're going for discount Korean food anyway.

OZ Korean Barbeque

Oz Korean Barbeque
3343 Bradshaw Road
Sacramento, CA 95857
(916) 362-9292


(All photos from Oz's website here.)



OZ Korean Barbecue serves excellent Korean food in a beautiful space. If you love kimchi, bulgogi, and other Korean flavors, you owe it to yourself to drive out to Bradshaw and grill some meat.

Korean meals begin with panchan, an assortment of delicious side dishes, usually focused around kimchi and other incarnations of pickled vegetables. (And it comes free with your meal!) The selection changes daily, and OZ is no exception, bringing out seven or eight different little dishes for your eating pleasure. I enjoy the spinach cooked in sesame, the spicy dried squid in red bean sauce, and the bean sprouts - and the delicious, spicy kimchi, infused with lots of garlic and chili pepper. This may not be the best date food.

OZ features a variety of appetizers. We like the fried pot stickers or yakimandu for $7.99, which are filled with beef and vegetables then cooked to an appetizing crisp - and the order comes with 10 pieces, so there's more then enough to go around. I especially love the vinegary dipping sauce, covered in a raft of crisp green scallions. If you're into noodles, jobchae ($8.99) is a great option, featuring sauteed rice noodles with beef and vegetables. Jobchae takes on a distinctive smoky Korean flavor very distinct from other Asian noodle dishes, and it's totally addictive, especially with the juicy chunks of beef. It's even better the next day, which is good to know since the portion is huge and you will probably have leftovers. Finally, I dig the seafood pajun ($9.99), a "Korean style pancake with green onion and assorted seafood" as the menu describes it. This is delicious and also bigger then your head, filled with crisp green onion, squid pieces, fish cake, and bits of crab. Dip it in the included ponzuish sauce and life is pretty good.



The standout entree here is meat you grill yourself at the table grill, and OZ offers a wide and very high quality selection. We like the OZ Galbi ($20.99), which is marinated beef short ribs cut in the Korean style. Another favorite is Bul-go-gi,($17.99), which differs from galbi primarily in that there are no bones. We've also tried the decadant but delicious Tokyo X pork belly ($17.99), which is swimming in tasty, tasty fat. OZ provides lettuce, red bean paste, and jalapeno to wrap up the meat in, producing awesome lettuce wraps. Have at it.




There's more then just grilled meat on the menu, though. I love the Korean-style crab "ciopinno" ($14.99), which bears no resemblance to ciopinno other then the red color, and is in my opinion far tastier. This is a bright red seafood soup full of various unshelled sea creatures, ripe for dismemberment. I happily chowed down on crunchy prawn heads infused with chili soup, finishing with the spicy tofu chunks left at the bottom of the bowl. It's pungent and delicious, like most Korean food. The sirloin bibimbap ($11.99) is another popular Korean dish, composed of various vegetables and mushrooms, covered in meat, egg, and red bean chili sauce. This is served in a hot skillet, which browns the rice to a wonderful consistency (and cooks the included raw egg.) If you like Chinese fried rice, you'll probably love this.



OZ's outside might look like a giant intimidating UFO (due to the smoke stacks off the grills), but the interior is lovely and expensive looking, with beautiful wood walls and a massive mural spanning the entrance way. Service is usually prompt and efficient, and our servers are always happy to recommend dishes to us or bring us refills on the kimchi. A lot of families frequent this place for various events, so the volume level is fairly loud - but Korean barbecue isn't exactly an austere kind of dish anyway. Loosen up and enjoy yourself. Korean food is worth it.

Why I Like Asian Food

For some reason, I'm trapped in an Asian culinary aesthetic and I can do jack shit about it. It embarrasses me because I'm all too aware of the trendy kids who, obeying the Hive Mind, have convinced themselves that their skinny, withered bodies are only capable of metabolizing 200 dollar slices of sashimi and not much else. This of course is bullshit, further evident when you watch them attempt to use chopsticks. But I digress.

Now, I am lily white. You could probably see my whiteness from space. I've never even been to Asia. But my family on my mother's side has lived in, worked in, and generally tooled around Asia rather a lot and some of it has rubbed off on me, some perverse notion of how much much more interesting things are Over There. Last time I was at my grandparents house, my grandfather joined me in sneering at Italian food, about how there wasn't enough there there. "I like spicy," he said, and then we went out for lamb vindaloo and wounded ourselves, self flagellation being another aspect of the dominant culinary aesthetic in my family. I suppose we enjoy gasping for air and getting chili peppers in our eyes because we are just that hardcore.

I realized I'd reset myself to a distressing degree when I found myself vaguely turned off by macaroni and cheese. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with macaroni and cheese, other then the occasional tendency celebrity chefs have these days to put lobster, truffles, and whatever other overpriced ingredients they can find in their cuboards in it. But yet I wasn't interested, I didn't find the taste worth the calories or worth my time. I found myself thinking, "This is okay, but it could really use some fish sauce." Which would of course be an abomination before God and possibly get me zapped by a lightening bolt, because it wouldn't even taste good. And yet.

One is often asked what their desert island cuisine would be, at least among the yuppified foodie circles I find myself in. There's a certain ingenuity in answering "pizza," as if that were a cuisine, mainly because you can put whatever the hell you want on it without violating the rules. (Thus the California Pizza Kitchen trying to convince us a tostada on a pizza covered in barbecue sauce and gypsy tears is delicious and worth money.) But I would answer, eyes glazing over in a red bean paste induced haze, that it's either Vietnamese or Korean for me. I cannot decide. I have eaten them both in short succession this week and they were both so damn good that it would feel like a horrible affront to pick either. Nuoc cham or spicy tofu seafood soup? But they're both equivalent to crack! Profoundly, deeply, antisocial crack if you intend on breathing on anyone afterwards.

I suppose my mania for Asian food has only increased since I have lived in a rural and extremely twee Massachusetts town, where seasoning is generally considered with distinct suspicion and the Mexican place in town puts cheddar cheese on everything and charges 8 bucks for a deeply unpleasant burrito. Needless to say good Asian food is hard to find. My friends all swear by a truly woeful Chinese takeout joint that has the art of gloppy neon-orange sauces down to a sophisticated science. General Tso's Chicken generally has one redeeming feature for me - the damn broccoli - and they even managed to louse that up by giving you two florets and extra MSG infused fried chicken parts. I believe there is not a single vegetable based dish on the menu, which is made all the more infuriating by the fact I walked in once and saw the family that runs the place chowing down on steamed lemon grass fish, Chinese greens, and some delicate looking dumplings, all nowhere in sight of their actual menu, of course. Dammit. Yes, there's an okay Thai place in town whose owners I have befriended. They can even whip up a rendition of papaya salad that sort of tastes like the real thing if I squint, although it's woefully under seasoned. They know me now and I've convinced them to actually spice my food, so they can throw a seafood stir fry at me that has that good smoky chili pepper taste that the Sodexo run college dining hall is mandated not to dispense. Still, I pay 12 bucks for the privilege at lunch and 20 at dinner, and it makes me miss California all the more, land of the 5.00 Vietnamese lunch that is at the same time smack yo' mama good.

So that's why I intend to return to California: better food, less stinging ice pellets in winter, fewer New York scene kids with attitude problems. I feel comfortable in a state with a big Asian influence on its culture, feel at home and pleased when I'm elbowing with elderly Asian ladies for the last fish part on offer at the Vietnamese grocery store. I like to live in a place where a weekend shopping excursion can involve curry braised chicken necks and durian. Life is more pungent here but it tastes a hell of a lot better too.