A trio of Asian spots this time around, two Korean, one pan-Asian. I’m going to start with my favorite. Actually, I’m going to start with the only one I liked. So there. Prewarned.
It starts with a delivery order, when I spotted a relatively new Korean restaurant in the listings, and they had kimbap. I wasn’t overly hungry, and one kimbap and some kimchi on the side sounded perfect. So, I placed an order from Kimchi Garden, San Martin 687 in Microcentro. And, it was pretty much a perfect light dinner. I’ve ordered more kimbaps since, and even occasionally tried another dish alongside – their Korean fried chicken nuggets are good, but the sauce is a bit too sweet and not spicy enough for my tastes.
And so, a visit was in order, and I wandered my way over to the restaurant one recent afternoon. Placed my order – no kimbap this time, wanted to try something new. I expected to have to come back up to the counter to retrieve my food, but no, they deliver from the kitchen to table. Some lovely iced barley tea – a personal favorite – hit the spot.
A haemul-jeon, or seafood pancake, sounded delicious (accompanied by a side order of kimchi, of course). One of the more abundant of these I think I’ve had, and in some ways, the least pancake like. The crust was barely existent below, and it was more omelet-y than pancake-y. Loaded with green onions, calamari, and mussels. And, delicious.
Prices are reasonable. The kimbap runs the equivalent of about $7, the pancake around $10.
I will continue to order from them, and it’s nice to have a third Korean restaurant in, more or less, walking distance (half an hour or a tad more, but still). All in the same area part of downtown too. Choices!
For quite a few years, one of our favorite spots to go to in the Bajo Flores part of Barrio Corea was Midam. I noted way back that at some point, they decided to convert to yet another Korean BBQ place, and given that there were already three others within a block, and they weren’t nearly as good as the others, they didn’t survive. The place has been renovated and reopened, I’m assuming not the same people, though maybe it is, as Tuk Tak, Av. Carabobo 1559. Service is a little slow, through no fault of our waiter, who is handling the entire place by himself, and it’s full, and there are people outside waiting. It is noteworthy, perhaps, that there’s not a single Korean person in the place, in a neighborhood where every other Korean restaurant is brimming with them (later in the meal, one Korean guy came in solo – he ordered up what might have been bibimbap, ate about half of it, pushed it away, paid and left). Still, the menu looks promising, with both usual suspects and a few more outré dishes.
The banchan are not promising, however. A meager amount of pretty bland, uninteresting stuff.
There’s apparently only one person cooking as well, and our beef-pork combo dumplings take a solid half hour to get to the table. They’re okay at best. A bit waterlogged, and not very well seasoned.
Another twenty minutes go by before one of our main dishes shows up, a stir-fry of pork, touted to be picante, but not. Again, it’s okay, nothing special. This dish is long gone before our final dish arrives (and we were only semi-sharing, so my lunch companion had finished his lunch before I got mine).
A bubbling pot of spicy and shiso laden stew of sundae, Korean blood sausage and chinchulines, small intestine, a favorite dish that I don’t often see. Unfortunately, this isn’t a very good version of it, the intestines rubbery, undercooked, and the sausage just… odd. And other than the shiso leaves, the whole thing kind of bland. Certainly not very spicy.
Pricing is moderate – dumplings around $6, the pork around $9, and the stew around $13. Still, given that there are a dozen Korean restaurants within a two block radius that offer better food and service than this one, I’ll pass on returning.
I did get one piece of good news, however. Right next to this place is a passageway leading back to a carriage house that for a long time was our favorite Korean soup place, Bonga. It disappeared during the pandemic and we had despaired of its loss. But a guy was carrying some stuff into the passageway while I was waiting for my friend to arrive, and I asked him if he knew about what happened. Turns out, it just moved to a new location on Av. Asamblea. To be visited soon!
This, in some ways, was the real disappointment. A long awaited visit to Cochinchina, a trendy cocktail and Asian street food bar at Armenia 1540 in Palermo. The cocktails are curated by one of the city’s preeminent mixologists, Inés de los Santos, who is also behind Kona Corner. We sat at the bar for a cocktail before dinner. The two bartenders, while friendly, were completely uninterested in offering suggestions or even discussing the cocktails. The response was more or less “they’re all good, look at the ingredients and pick something you like”. And then the drinks were mixed up on the other side of the bar, so we didn’t even get to see them being made – something that if you’re into doing creative cocktails, is kind of part of the show. The two cocktails we ordered turned out to be pretty insipid, and we didn’t finish them. We moved to our table.
This was ostensibly a small shot of gazpacho. I’m not sure what gazpacho has to do with Asian street food, but okay. Except it’s not much more than a bland tomato puree. This is already not boding well.
And the boding turns to foreboding turns to… well, this was all a big mistake. A steak tartare supposedly with a “creamy sauce, pickles, and herbs” seems to have none of those things, though it does have a mound of the promised papas pays, shoestring potatoes, which are, unfortunately, so oily they’re soft and falling apart.
The cha gio, Vietnamese springrolls, are oozing oil, not crunchy, and near flavorless. The herbs and peanuts are nice, the dipping sauce is some sort of sweet soy sauce, devoid of any heat, and even the rounds of chili have been sort of… candied or something, so they have no spice left.
The pork and prawn dumplings might have been better had they not been chewy and cold. At least the broth they were served in had some flavor to it. Though again, not spicy. At around this point, our waiter appeared to have noticed we weren’t really enjoying ourselves, and asked. Basically noted that everything was rather bland, and nothing was spicy. He headed off, and apparently went to the kitchen, and came back to report that the chef was shocked, shocked, I tell you, that we didn’t find these intensely flavored dishes to be, well, intensely flavored, and spicy to the level of traditional Asian cooking.
It was too late by this point to cancel the fourth plate we’d ordered, some duck springrolls. The mealy, ground meat inside could have been anything – in fact, it could have been the identical ground up filling from the cha gio or the dumplings – there was little to no seasoning once again, and the whole thing was doused in a sickly sweet sauce that made packets of duck sauce from local Chinese takeout seem appetizing.
Pricing is a little steep. Well, maybe not for a trendy bar in Palermo. Cocktails run from about $6-10; the plates run in the $7-10 range (keeping in mind these are all appetizer size bar food). A surprising $8 cubierto charge, which might be the most expensive one I’ve seen in town, and for what? There was no bread basket of any sort (required by law if you charge a cubierto, along with free water), nothing really offered – except, I guess, the shot of gazpacho. That’s a rather pricey mouthful of tomato water.
Looking around, it seemed like most people were enjoying themselves. Most were also, I’d say, in their 20s or at most early 30s. Mostly they were drinking. There was a Russian couple near to us, closer to our age, and it happened that we left at the same time. They had liked it, but were also surprised at how not-spicy the food was, especially given the menu promises of heat. They headed off in a cab, we headed off into the night.
