Flaming Table Korean Barbecue by Ruth Paget
Flaming Table Korean Barbecue by Ruth Paget
Korean Barbecue is a lot of food to eat. It is expensive, but I still queried The
Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200, 000) to do an article on it. They asked me to go and have fun with little
Florence.
Nak Won Barbecue is no longer in business, but there is
still a barbecue house where the old restaurant was. They just have new owners. They do not use the fire pit tables anymore
to barbecue. Barbecuing is done in the
kitchen now.
My entire family learned a lot about Korean food on this
review. I looked at a Korean cookbook
before going, but it is always fun to see what you are actually served in a
restaurant.
I did this review in the Year 2000 and love it that Korean
food is the big “in” thing now like Vietnamese and Thai food. I consider this to be another use of my
degree in Far Eastern Languages and Civilizations. I knew my extended family members were
joking, but they did ask me when I graduated, “What is that? How are you going
to make a living?”
My family no longer laughs about that degree that I got in
1986. With that thought in mind, my
family and I went to Nak Wan Barbecue, looking to have a fun time. I wrote the following restaurant review for
the Monterey
County Weekly (Circulation: 100, 000):
Nak for Barbecue
My daughter Florence loves Korean bulgogi, thin strips of
grilled beef that have been marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, garlic, and
sugar. Nak Wan Barbecue in Marina, with
its charcoal pit grill tables tops her list as the “most fun place in town” to
sample this delicacy.
My entire family shares her opinion. Usually when we go to Nak Wan, we all ordered
bulgogi. The night I reviewed the
restaurant, we allowed our daughter to order bulgogi as usual.
My husband Laurent ordered dak bulgogi, a grilled chicken
version of this dish, and I ordered dol sot bimimbap, a mixed rice, meat, and a
vegetable dish. We sat in the regular
dining area. You can still order a grilled
dish there, but it will be prepared in the kitchen rather than at the
table.
The owner opened his restaurant eight years ago, using
recipes he learned from his mother: waiting for your food is half the fun at
this family restaurant.
If you sit at the fire pit, the waitress will turn on the
flames in the charcoal pit. Then, she
will add the charcoal, which turns out to be no ordinary charcoal. This charcoal comes from oak trees. The redolent smell of oak trees rises up from
the table as customers warm their hands above it. You could see all of this from the regular
dining room area, too.
We picked up the pieces of bulgogi with our chopsticks. Laurent has become handy with chopsticks,
too.
Nak Wan’s bulgogi is tender and less sugary than what you
get in other restaurants. The beef gets
tender by having length-wise and cross-wise incisions made into it before it
marinates. The oak charcoal contributes
a woodsy flavor to the meat. The chicken
bulgogi that Laurent ordered was equally tender and juicy.
I have learned enough Korean to know that I have to order
bibimbap in its “dol sot” version, if I want it to arrive piping hot instead of
cold, which I find unappetizing, especially since I like it topped off with an
over-easy egg.
The cookbook Traditional Korean Food published by
the Korean Ministry of Culture and Tourism describes bibimbap as “steamed rice
with assorted wild vegetables.” The
owner described it to me as “mountain food” with tamer vegetables at sea level.
Bean sprouts, thin slices of zucchini, carrot matchsticks,
tofu rods, strips of bulgogi, and purplish, brown onion-tasting straws
decorated the top of the rice, wagon-wheel-style at Nak Wan.
A fried egg reigned over it all. The stone bowl arrived sizzling with the rice
adhering to the bowl. I mixed all these
ingredients together with kochusan hot sauce made from red peppers and soy bean
paste. The spicy sauce was balanced out
by the savory, onion-tasting stems and salty-sweet beef.
The sauce formed a crust with the rice on the bottom of the
bowl that tasted like a salsa-flavored rice Krispie treat. The bibimbap was such a tasty meal that I
could only pick at the pan ch’an (side dishes) that I usually finish.
Pan ch’an surround you at almost all Korean formal
meals. They run the gamut from hot and
spicy to salty, savory, and outright bland to counter the effects of the hot
and spicy offerings.
The food you will always find in a selection of pan ch’an is
cabbage kimchi, Korea’s national food.
“Kimchi is over 4,000 years old,” the owner said, “and each
family has its own recipe for making it.”
To make kimchi, cabbage is sprinkled with salt and gets
passed down like sauerkraut, but there the resemblance ends.
The Koreans add lots of red chili pepper, garlic, and secret
family ingredients to kimchi. I like Nak
Wan’s crunchy cabbage kimchi as well as its cucumber version.
Rice cools off the tongue from both of these dishes, but I
actually liked letting the temperature go up as I drank some of Korea’s
thirst-quenching OB beer with the kimchi.
The only thing I really did not care for was the turnip
soup, which I thought was bland. They do
have hot sauce you can add to make the food spicy.
Nak Wan Barbecue is well-known among Marina’s Korean
community; all the seats around us were full of Koreans. I knew that was a good advertisement for a
good restaurant.
End of Article
Book Recommendation:
Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall
By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France
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| Ruth Paget Selfie |
