In a restaurant climate as cruel as the present one, in which several kitchens have wheezed their last already this year, you essentially have two choices when it comes to how to run your business. You can throw away all the blueprints and re-evaluate everything, leaving no gimmick untested: Will a longer happy hour work? How about ads in the Clipper? That guy with the box in front of UPS — think he could spin plates?
Or, you can brush off the hard times and just keep doing what you’ve always done, serving up good food and service to keep ’em coming in the door.
This is what Korea House is about. There are no compromises here, no half-hearted kowtows to pan-Asian mishmashes. Straight-up Korean food, cooked the way they do it back home, is why Nashvillians of all backgrounds, albeit mostly Koreans, come here.
You’ll still find foods utterly foreign to American tastes on the menu, such as ox-knee soup, spicy goat stew and a big mess of ox innards, served with veggies and noodles. But you’ll also find more familiar tastes like bulgogi, a generic term for fire-cooked meat served with rice, and pork dumplings. Even timid diners can find something to like here, though it may take a few stabs at the menu to come up with a winner.
Let’s start with the bulgogi. Traditionally this classic Korean dish is made over a grill, but at Korea House they pan-fry the meat. This method works fine with the chicken and pork varieties (all $11.99), but it made the beef too greasy and stringy to be any good. A weakly sweet sauce did nothing to enliven the dish.
Most entrees at Korea House, as well as any true Korean restaurant, come with banchan, a series of side dishes that’s sort of like a far Eastern version of free chips and salsa. Here you get seven or eight small bowls of assorted supporting elements, from fiery kimchee, a foundational spicy cabbage salad that Koreans regard the same way we do sweet tea, to a wee tangle of anchovies. I particularly liked the sliced daikon radishes and bits of seafood pancake.
The ocean is never far here, as in the excellent soondubu chigae ($7.99), a bubbling iron cauldron of tofu and mixed seafood bathed in a spicy, fishy broth. Among the chopped zucchini and large hunks of tofu lurked savory hunks of large prawn, squid, oyster and small shrimp.
The seafood pancake appetizer ($11.99) is a pretty tame but delicious dish suitable for sharing with many. The goonmandu, or pork dumplings ($7.99), have the usual mystery meat filling, but a strong scallion bite gives them a bit of attitude.
Vegetarians aren’t left out by any means. While summer lasts, I highly recommend the seasonal bibim naengmyun ($8.99), a bowl of thin buckwheat noodles coated in a spicy chili sauce, topped with cucumber and snow-white slivers of fresh pear. Bite after bite, as the heat of the chile noodles locked horns with the cool crunch of the pear and cucumber, it emerged as one of the finer dishes I tried here, if not the best.
All this is served in a very small slot of a strip mall, so on weekend nights be prepared for a wait. Getting a table is relatively easy at lunchtime, and indeed I recommend going midday, as the ambiance at night isn’t anything to crow about: fluorescent lights, strange foreign television, etc. You know the drill.
But should you head there for dinner, there’s a decent squadron of Asian beers on hand as well as a few rice wines, among them a variety of soju, a rice wine popular in Korea that’s often crafted with sweet potato, tapioca and other starches. When it’s good, soju mixes earthy sweetness with a furious alcoholic whip, but the only kind served at Korea House, the mainstream Jinro Chamisul, is too caustic to be good for much more than novelty shots.
Still, I’d say it’s worth a try, especially as it gets you closer to an authentic Korean dining experience than a soft drink. And that’s really what’s fun about coming to Korea House; it’s not necessarily that you’re going to be blown away by every dish (indeed, some may rankle your taste), but that you’re immersing yourself in a completely different cuisine, with no lifeline to the familiar. If that scares you, just order the fried rice and look at what your neighbors are eating. But if it sounds like an adventure, go for it; you won’t be sorry you branched out.
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