We may have actually reached the end of the Koreatown overview of Korean restaurants, out in Bajo Flores. I think we’ve hit them all. There are still a couple of sushi bars, but I haven’t found any other Korean spots listed, or spotted while walking around. There are still a couple in the newer Koreatown, in Floresta, and we will, hopefully, get to them all!
This time around, a visit to a sort of trifecta of the restaurant world. It’s an old converted home at Av. Carabobo 1340 (with no sign indicating it’s a restaurant), the downstairs is a sushi bar called Yagalchi (not yet visited, other than to take a look at it), and the upstairs is a huge banquet hall that apparently takes turns between being a catering space called Geulin, which means Green, and a Korean restaurant with a limited menu, called Daeseong-Gag, meaning something to the effect of Great Angle. The only other daeseong-gag I found in an online search is for a small, strip mall Chinese seafood restaurant in Seoul. Interestingly, a couple of months ago, I’d poked into this place enroute to one of our other ventures, and at the time, the menu was all Chinese, and they billed themselves as a Chinese restaurant.
The menu is no longer in Chinese, it’s now in Korean, which makes sense given the change in cuisine. Google’s optical translator just wasn’t doing a great job for some reason on this visit, so we reverted to relying on our waiter. Unfortunately, he seemed most interested in just getting us to order something really simple, like seafood fried rice or noodles, or soup. He kept insisting that really, there were only a couple of dishes on the menu, nothing like the ones we were looking for. It turns out, after sitting down to translate the menu, that he’s pretty much right. The first column is basically variations on either vegetable, seafood or beef noodles, mild or spicy, and in soup or not, and the second column is pretty much just different versions of fried rice, or rice with a simple vegetable or seafood saute on the side. The shorter third column has a little more variety, with one grilled and one sweet and sour beef dish, a couple of egg dishes, and a single chicken dish. No pork dishes anywhere on the menu according to him.
This has to be the most paltry array of banchan I’ve ever seen in a Korean restaurant – kimchi, pickled daikon, raw onions, and some black bean paste – the latter two presumably just to mix into dishes down the line.
We started off with an order of mandu, Korean fried dumplings, a generous portion of eight (my two dining companions grabbed a couple before I got the photo, as I was still in the midst of trying to order the rest of our lunch). Apparently not the typical pork filling, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was – to me it seemed like pork, but I suppose it could have been beef. Decent flavored, a little greasy, crispy exterior. They’re not listed on the menu as far as I can see, and it seemed he was offering them as a possible starter while we considered other dishes, so they may not be always available. 180 pesos.
Perhaps hearkening back to its recent incarnation as a Chinese restaurant, this isn’t what I expected when ordering it. The waiter described it as spicy Korean fried chicken, so not surprisingly, I had visions of sticky, sweet and spicy fried wings or pieces of chicken in some form or another. Instead, we got fairly greasy fried nuggets of chicken breast sitting atop a lake of sickly sweet, syrupy liquid, and a moderate sprinkling of chopped mild chilies scattered about. On translating the menu name, it came out to lagoji, which translates into English as razor, but on searching for the dish online, Google instantly goes to laziji, or, Szechuan peppercorn chicken. No peppercorns. Not spicy. Not a dish I’d care to eat again. 300 pesos.
Our waiter was pushing the champon, pretty much as the only other dish that we could count on as a spicy one. Champon is a traditional Japanese dish, common in Korea, basically a seafood version of ramen, usually though not always with pork broth. This one had a pile of grey-green noodles in the bottom, some onions and beansprouts on top, a bit of scattered seafood around it, and a broth that tasted like murky dishwater with some chili paste mixed in. Unpleasant, and we definitely didn’t finish this one. 220 pesos.
Our waiter had pretty much disappeared after serving us and another table. After about 20 minutes of waiting for him to come into the dining room, I went back and found the owners, both of whom were asleep on a sofa next to the cash register in the back. They gave me the wrong bill after I woke them up, about 50% higher than what it should have been, and then started screaming for the waiter, who showed up a few minutes later (maybe he was sleeping in the back), and he brought us the correct bill. Overall experience – mediocre would be generous.
Glad I missed it. Still trying to get to one of the fried chicken places.
It’s not that hard to get to them… 😉
Why do you think these Asian places have these features in common? A menu just there for show, rude waitstaff and they will bring you what’s available, regardless.
Is it because you are not Asian? Or are they just cover ups? I can’t see why someone would go through the hassle of opening a restaurant if they won’t tend to customers properly.
I wasn’t aware that “these Asian places have these features in common”… I’ve only encountered two Korean restaurants, one in Floresta and one in Flores, that had Korean only menus. I wouldn’t call the waitstaff rude in either place – at the first place that I wrote up a month or so ago, Kil Jung, it was simply a matter of some suspicion about how we got there (recall that that place is located inside the owners’ home) and why we had a copy of their menu already, pre-translated. The waiter in this place wasn’t at all rude, I think he just was steering us to the more popular dishes for non-Koreans (nor was he Korean, he was Argentine). He was also, as I said, more or less right, the menu was pretty much just minor variations on a couple of dishes. At the first place, overall, service and food turned out great, at this place, not so much – not because the former was rude, he just disappeared after serving us and the other table our food. Inattentive and rude aren’t the same, at least for me. And no, I don’t think the menu is for show, at least according to him, they had everything on the menu available, they just didn’t have a Spanish translation of it available – you either read Korean, or you don’t – obviously locals from the community are their more intended market.
If you click on the map at the top and go to full size in a new tab, you’ll see that this is the only place in the Flores Koreatown that we’ve not liked, out of 12 Korean restaurants there that we’ve tried.