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

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

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Sampling Filipino Night Club Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sampling Filipino Night Club Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

We have always had a Filipino restaurant that doubles as a nightclub at night in one of our strip malls in Marina, California that does karaoke, dancing, and dinner.

The nightclub has changed names and owners over the past twenty years that I have lived in the neighborhood, but Filipino nightclubs resemble one another as does the food, so I am writing up a nostalgic restaurant review about the spot where I discovered Filipino food with my daughter Florence that no longer exists.

The review for Fiesta Manila is an excellent introduction to Filipino food.  The following restaurant review appeared in The Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200, 000):

Love that Lumpia

Hidden in a U-shaped mall off Reservation Road in Marina (California).  Fiesta Manila has been quietly perfecting its Filipino Cuisine – one of the world’s first fusion cuisines.  All the customers at the restaurant were Filipino the day I went, which I took as a sign that the food must be as tasty as what they would cook at home.

I used the “turo-turo” system of pointing at what I wanted to order from the hot table in this small eatery that evokes the “carinderias” that dot the 7, 000 islands of the Philippines.  Fiesta Manila’s co-owner advised me that the portions easily serve two as she set out a Rabelaisian feast for my daughter Florence and me.

Menu items change daily at Fiesta Manila, but lumpia, pancit, and pork adobo are always offered.  Lumpia, the egg rolls of the Philippines made with the same ingredients as their Chinese cousins, get spiced up with sweet-chili dip here.

Pancit, savory transparent rice noodles stir-fried with scallions, green beans, and carrots reflects another Chinese contribution to Philippine cuisine.  The dish gets its bright, orange color and flavor from a sauce of shrimp juice and annatto seeds.

Fiesta Manila serves scrumptious pork adobo, the national dish of the Philippines.  Pork adobo is made from vinegar, soy sauce, and garilic.  This stewing sauce does not taste sour.  It has a slightly tangy-savory flavor.  Reynaldo Alejandro speculates in The Philippine Cookbook that Mexican puerco en adobo is related to a Spanish dish brought to the islands.

The restaurant’s longanisa sausage recalls Spain’s pork, garlic, and paprika sausages.  These sausages were mild-flavored and tasted great with the coconut juice I ordered.

The restaurant’s longanisa sausage recalls Spain’s pork, garlic, and paprika sausages.  These sausages are mild-flavored and tasted great with the coconut juice that I ordered.

These Spanish also brought beef from the Americas and other foods like tomatoes and peppers to the South Seas; they show up in Fiesta Manila’s unctuous mechado beef stew made with soy sauce.

The owner also served us indigenous Malay fare in a dish called lanka, otherwise known as jackfruit stew.  I had never eaten this before.  It reminded me of tender, somewhat sour artichoke hearts.

The stew is made with coconut milk and shrimp paste.  The coconut milk tempers the pungent flavor of the shrimp paste, leaving a sweet tang in the mouth.

A Philippine meal would not be without fish, and I loved the crunchy, tart taste of the bangus milkfish.  The owner told me that San Miguel beer from the Philippines goes well with this food.

Next, I tried pinkabet, which the owner’s wife suggests for vegetarian guests in addition to stir-fried soy, which her husband whips up in the kitchen.  Pinkabet could be described as a Southeast Asian ratatouille.  It is made with squash, spinach, eggplant, bitter melon, and green beans in a shrimp-flavored sauce.  The sweetness of the squash balances the bitter taste of the melon.

The owner’s wife asked me to try sin-kiang soup.  Tamarind juice polishes off this soup made with barbecued ribs.  The salty, sweet pork had a caramelized crust and tasted better than lollipops.  One thing that I noticed about Filipino food is that it is mild unlike the chili-hot dishes of many Southeast Asian countries.

The one dish I did not care for was the Filipino fried rice.  The scallions, corn, and carrots in the brown rice made it look appetizing, but it was bland.  I prefer salty, hot flavors, so other people might find that rice to be just fine.

You should leave room for “Halo-Halo” dessert.  “Halo” means “mix” in Tagalog, which is exactly what goes into this layered Filipino sundae of caramel custard, diced gelatin, presented jackfruit, ice cream, crushed ice, and sweetened beans.  The crushed ice makes it taste lighter than it is.

I must say that I had never thought of using caramel custard in a sundae before, but it certainly marries well with ice cream.

I am more interested in food and ambience, so the utilitarian décor did not bother me.  I was more impressed with the Holy Child altar above the cash register than the linoleum floor, which was perfectly clean.

End of Article

Just as a note – there is starting to be an American food writing tradition that I feel has been established with these books:

M.F.K. Fisher

Laurie Colwin

Mark Kurlansky

Jay Jacobs

Colman Andrews

Anthony Bourdain

Ruth Reichel

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

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Chinese Banquet at Chef Lee's with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Chinese Banquet at Chef Lee's with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Ruth Paget


When I told my editor at the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) about the Fu Dogs guarding the entrance to Chef Lee’s Mandarin Restaurant in Monterey (California), she assigned me to write a restaurant review of the place due to this great visual to go along with the article.  They had windows looking out onto Chinese gardens for a visual, too. 

I knew this would be a trip to China for my little Florence, who just laughed at my diplomacy-career training sessions when she wanted to sing and act when she grew up.

I took some of my friends along, so we could do a real Chinese banquet with several dishes to sample.  The following is the article that appeared in the Monterey County Weekly.

A Traditional Banquet

A pair of white, stone Fu Dogs, protectors of sacred places in Chinese lore, welcomes diners to Chef Lee’s Mandarin House, which resembles a small palace with its carved red-tiled roof and white walls festooned with oversized Chinese characters.

Chef Lee’s makes me feel like dressing up, so I can fit in among the decorations of deities clad in pastel colors that dance across the walls and across the stained glass in the ceiling.  Wood sculptures of Chinese sages in the mountains vie for attention with the golden peacocks carved into the screens.

I reserved a round table with a round, turntable in the back room.  From our vantage point near a window opening onto the restaurant’s Chinese garden with waterfall, we could watch water stream down a rock face into a pond bordered by garden plants. 

The surroundings whetted our appetites for a grand meal as a waiter in white shirt and black bowtie took our order.

We started with a medium-sized bowl of san-san soup, this a basic egg-flower soup based on a chicken-ginger broth made with the imperial addition of scallops and shrimp.

Chef Lee’s big scallops were so tender that they melted in our mouths like chocolate.  They also had the sweet flavor that fresh seafood has as did the shrimp.  The shrimp had more seafood in it than some other restaurants put on their seafood platters.

While we watched for the arrival of our banquet - walnut shrimp, Chef Lee’s special lab, Mongolian beef, and Mandarin chicken – my friends enjoyed Tsing Tao beer from the People’s Republic of China.

Having all the dishes on the turntable persuaded Florence to share the Mongolian Beef she ordered for once, but that dish was not the banquet star.

That honor went to the Walnut Shrimp.  Three elements go into this dish:

-sugared walnuts
-deep-fried shrimp
-honey-lemon mayonnaise that holds it all together

The walnuts first get boiled with sugar, then they are deep-fried until they are shiny and brown.  While they cool, the shrimp is deep-fried in a light cornstarch and egg-white butter.

The secret to the mayonnaise’s flavor comes from adding condensed milk to the mix.  Florence thought this dish was too rich, but the rest of us gave the turntable a workout as we politely took three morsels at a time from the mound on the serving dish.

One of my friends was more intrigued with Chef Lee’s Special Lamb.  The lamb came coated in a sweetened soy sauce with mushrooms and other garden vegetables.  

When I first  went to Chef Lee’s, I was surprised to see lamb on the menu and thought the restaurant was caught up in the Mediterranean Diet craze.

However, after reading Nina Simonds Classic Chinese Cuisine, I learned that China’s northern regions have a Mongolian population, who influenced the Chinese with their Muslim dietary laws. 

Muslims shun pork and prefer lamb.  The Northern Chinese like lamb, too, to such a extent that Beijing was once called “Mutton City.”

It was interesting to eat thin slices of salty, sweet lamb.
The Mongolian beef came with a mild, soy sauce coating on green, stir-fried scallions and tiny noodles.  The sauce tasted sweet from the addition of brown sugar and savory from the addition of ginger and garlic.

The Mandarin fried chicken begged to be picked up; it resembled Chinese chicken McNuggets.  I bit into the spicy meat and crushed three bones.  You have to pick these out.  The menu did not list that this dish was made from chicken wings.  It is delicious, but be careful.

I now had to indelicately removed bones from my mouth.  We all tried eating the chicken with our forks and chopsticks, but had little success.  We asked for a bag to take this dish home, so we could eat it with our hands.

Chef Lee’s started out as a small restaurant more than 20 years ago.  It now has two rooms for large parties in addition to the two dining rooms, which attests to the restaurant’s role as a real banquet provider.

I secretly hope to be invited to a banquet there one day.  Until then, I can eat palace cuisine without the imperial price tag.

End of Article

Chef Lee’s serves from northern China which is different from the food of Guangzhou in southern China.  (Most Chinese restaurants in the US serve food from Guangzhou, where railroad workers came from.)

Three cookbooks I would recommend that have information about the food of northern China follow:

-Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds

-Complete Chinese Cookbook by Ken Hom

(He does a nice explanation of the four main cooking schools of Chinese cuisine.)

-The Food of China by E. N. Andersen

This is not a cookbook, but a history and ethnographic book combined.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

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Happy Dragon Meal by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Happy Dragon Meal by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The editors of the Monterey County Weekly (Circulation: 200,000) all wanted me to review the local Chinese-American restaurant Happy Dragon. 

I like the Chinese-American dish Beef-Broccoli with rice.  It is a perfect protein-carbohydrate-vegetable dish that made the Chinese immigrants in the US strong enough to lay metal railroad track and wood ties that connected the east and west coasts of the United States.  (Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden discusses how the invention of refrigerated rail cars made Salinas rich on shipping produce to the east coast.)

I told all of this information to Florence before we went to Happy Dragon, because many people made fun of Chinese-American cuisine for not being authentic.  (“Authentic” meaning the food of the rich people in the homeland.  Jook, also known as congee, is not really a desired dish by rich Chinese from abroad in the US.)

“I’m happy Chinese-Americans eat beef, chicken, and pork to their heart’s content.  Chinese-Americans are actually taller than I am now.  They know about the importance of protein and calcium,” I said to Florence.

With my food lecture out of the way, Laurent, Florence, and I set out for Happy Dragon full of fun expectations.  The article I wrote for the Monterey County Weekly around 2000 follows:

Blowin’ Smoke

For six years, Happy Dragon’s owner operated of a much smaller building nearby.  All the neighborhood families who kept coming back to the restaurant convinced the owner to move to more spacious quarters on Fremont Avenue.

The owner has made maximum use of his space.  Two big, red pillars on either side of the counter greet you when walk into the wide reception area.  Large scenes of Chinese landscapes with mountains, clouds, and little villages typical of Chinese landscape painting decorate the walls.

Best of all there are several big, round tables with Lazy Susan turntables in the middle of them designed for serving Chines family-style meals.

So, that was what I decided to do.

“We’re going to eat like a Chinese family,” I told my family as we looked over our menus.

“That means we order a soup, a poultry or meat dish, a fish or seafood dish, a vegetable dish, and rice to share all at once,” I announced, proud of the knowledge I had gleaned from Nina Simonds Classic Chinese Cuisine.

Heeding my proclamation, we ordered egg-rolls, crab rangoons, egg-flower soup, Mongolian beef, shrimp in lobster sauce, and eggplant in Yu Shiang Sauce.  My efforts were undermined, however, when our waiter began to bring us our dishes in courses, starting with the egg-flower soup.  My family was saved from my whims this time.

Happy Dragon’s egg-flower soup tastes of ginger, chicken, and fresh corn.  Crunchy water chestnuts added some texture to the velvety sheets of egg that had been stirred in at the end of cooking.

The soup gets its thick consistency from the addition of cornstarch.  My only complaint was that it arrived warm instead of hot.  I learned later that the restaurant was short-handed the night we were there, which might explain the temperature problem.

Our egg rolls had a yummy, flaky wonton covering and al dente cabbage filling.  Egg rolls dipped in plum sauce with a good dab of mustard for heat on them is one of my favorite dishes in the world.

The crab rangoons resemble four-pointed stars made of deep-fried wontons with a crab filling in the middle.  Laurent liked dipping the crisp rangoons in plum sauce – a Chinese version of chips and dip.  The crab filling seemed buttery to me, but Laurent loved it.

My Chinese family-style dinner plans went further out the window as my Florence claimed the Mongolian Beef for herself.  This dish is typical of the Mandarin cuisine that is made in northern China.

The Mongols introduced barbecuing to Chinese cuisine in this dish that features sweetened soy sauce marinade flavored with ginger and sesame.  Happy Dragon uses fresh scallions to counter the rich flavor of the marinade.  Mongolian Beef is not my favorite dish, but I liked the restaurant’s spicy version.

Happy Dragon bills itself as a specialist in Mandarin and Sichuanese cuisine.  Northern China where Mandarin cuisine comes from experiences extremes in climate brought on by Siberian winds during winter and heat blasts during the summer.

Western Sichuan’s hot, humid climate yields foods like chili peppers and eggplants in abundance.  Sichuan is famous for the eggplants in Yu Shiang Sauce that I ordered.

This dish is usually prepared with ground pork or beef.  I thought this vegetarian dish would be light, but the minute I tasted the sweetly, tart sauce I knew stir-fried vegetables can pack in the calories, too.

Happy Dragon’s version of this dish is mild, so I added some of the chili paste that was on the table to give it some kick.  The traditional recipe calls for a generous dose of chili paste – hot, spicy food is a trademark of Sichuanese cuisine.

Laurent ordered shrimp in lobster sauce.  This dish typifies the haute cuisine of Southern Chinese cooking.  The shrimp were sweet and the sauce, full of peas, corn, green peppers, carrots, and many crunchy water chestnuts.  This sauce was so rich that Laurent could not finish it.  (Personally, I think the crab rangoons dunked in plum sauce had something to do with this.)

There are some other insider techniques and ingredients that made this shrimp in lobster sauce such a great dish.  The shrimp are coated in egg white and refrigerated before they are stir-fried.

This gives them the beautiful sheen I always associate with Chinese food.  Also, ground pork usually gets stir-fried into the sauce, which is thickened with egg.  Often the pork flavor is the taste you just cannot place when you eat Chinese soups.

Happy Dragon was packed with families on a Saturday night having fun just like we were.

End of Article

Cookbook Recommendations:

-Classic Chinese Cuisine by Nina Simonds

-Complete Chinese Cookbook by Ken Hom

Hom has a nice discussion of China’s different culinary regions in his book.

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

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