To Korea with love

I like Korean food. My first taste of it was at a Korean barbecue restaurant in Taman Megah called Manna-2. The restaurant featured brass grill pans on gas stoves on which diners cooked their meats and vegetables on. Each pan had a rim which was filled with oil and water and we’d dabble our raw food in them before putting them on the grill. The groove also caught the juices of the grilling meat as it cooked, and made great demi glace at the end of the meal. 

When that joint closed, there was an eat-all-you-can Korean barbecue buffet in Ampang Park Shopping Centre. After that there was a dearth of places like that. Korean was out of vogue. Or else the greedy, grabbing Malaysian consumers were deemed to be bad for business since they had the nasty habit of piling way too much on their plates and wasting food. 

Happily, the last few years have seen a resurgence in the popularity of Korean barbecue. Most of them seem to be stand-alone places, owned more than not by hardworking, enterprising Korean folk. The last eat-all-you-can Korean barbecue place I visited was an outlet in IOI Mall which was pretty good, and Malaysia owned, as far as I can tell. 

Real Korean barbecue is not cheap. I eat at one in SS2 and come away at least RM120 poorer for two people. Same for the one in Tropicana City Mall. Of course, one can always eat Korean food for much cheaper at the very same restaurants, where a bowl of bibimbap (rice topped with seasoned vegetables) is only RM12. 

Today at Cinnamon Coffee House at One World Hotel I did not have to fill up on rice. Crystal Koh, Assistant Public Relations Manager of the hotel invited me to sample the Korean food promotion called Seoul Good which runs until October 23 2010. 

I’ve known Crystal since the hotel first opened. She was a young executive at the time, but I had the feeling she’d be an asset to the Malaysian hospitality industry and time has proven me right. She’s blossomed into a very capable young professional and I like the way she still enjoys her food. It’s really embarrassing to be going for seconds, thirds and ninths when your host has stopped after salad, so I was mucho glad when she gamely walked the buffet line with me. Again and again.

Cinnamon has won a Tourism Malaysia award for best all-day dining. Even without it, (and I’ll be the first person to say that many awards aren’t worth the paper they are printed on), I feel it has one of the best spreads in both the capital and Selangor. 

The hotel dedicated a whole counter to the Korean offerings and I must say, working with the limitations of needing to be necessarily pork-free, what was served up was authentic. This was due to the two guest chefs from Seoul Palace Hotel, Korea, who were flown in to ensure the food was as authentic as it could be. 

The beauty of Korean food lies in its simplicity. The Koreans of the southern peninsula and Manchuria were nomads before they were agrarians, and so when they finally set down roots and founded homesteads and farms, they brought with them the philosophy of eating food which rooted easily, and sprouted quickly – things they could eat before they left a particular hunting ground or campsite.

Because of this need to eat what was grown, the tradition of banchan developed. Banchan is a variety of side dishes, most of them vegetables, which is served at most meals. I believe the small portions of banchan has its origins in the fact that sometimes crops were sparse and the hunter-gatherers had to make do with what was available. Today, banchan is constantly replenished when dining in a Korean restaurant and most popularly comprises of spinach, bean sprouts, diced tofu, kimchi, sliced potatoes and whatever is in season.

Oyster mushroom salad - simple and refreshing.

Kimchi -the essential Korean condiment.

Of these little side dishes, there were two different types of kimchi – the common white cabbage with fermented red chili paste (gochujang) and the less pungent variety, the mul kimchi which is white cabbage marinated in soy sauce, salt, garlic and ginger, with no chilli. There was also a mushroom salad which utilized oyster mushrooms marinated in sesame oil with julienned red, green and yellow capsicums. Most side dishes are very neutral in flavour, as main Korean dishes are very flavourful. 

The exception to the rule are dishes like sweet walnuts which have a brittle sugar caramel coating and are sprinkled with sesame seeds. Another is the robust garlic with red beans with honey which is simplicity perfected, using perfectly roasted garlic coupled with just cooked Adzuki beans and honey. 

Chefs Jang Yong-jun and Jeon Dai-hwi from Seoul Palace, Korea.

Glass noodle salad - yummy, but a tad bit heavy on the kicap manis!

Another aromatic dish was the glass noodles with wood ear fungus and capsicum shreds which had a lovely smoky taste. It’s very easy to pig out on these sides, to the extent of forgetting the real stars of the show. 

The beef short ribs were worth the buffet price!

Beef and pork are standouts on any Korean menu and this was demonstrated to great effect with the short ribs. Usually pork is used for this dish, but beef short ribs were substituted and they were excellent. Moist, tender and perfectly seasoned, it was a perfect bite each time.

The bulgogi rocked! Thank you, God, for cows!

The famed bulgogi is a notoriously difficult dish to manage in large quantities. It is always seared and cooked in small portions with the finest fillets and to find an entire chafing dish full of it was a bit startling. There was some dryness but truly I have to say that the dish was very well represented and did the chefs credit. 

Poultry and fish are not on the hit list of most Korean restaurants or chefs, but there was a chicken dish served, which was stir fried in fermented bean paste (passable but nothing to write home about) and a mackerel dish whose time sitting in the chafing dish did it no good at all, rendering it fishy and hard. 

Crystal; Assistant Director of Communications Florence Leong; Kit and I had a good giggle over the desserts. As Kit put it, “Korean dishes are sweeter than their desserts.” And in this case it was true. I have a suspicion that the guest chefs were not pastry chefs so to speak and as such their prowess was more to the entrees. Still, it was great fun to sample the range of pretty looking desserts, even if only one found favour with me.

Korean desserts are nearly always made from rice – either pounded rice, pounded glutinous rice or rice flour. Ming beans, red beans, Adzuki (kidney) beans, pumpkin, sesame seeds and honey are the main additions to the sweetmeats (I use that term very liberally). There was a cake (again the term is loosely used) which had a crumbly texture akin to semolina and which tastes like the Chinese fatt koey which is a rice flour sponge cake coloured pink and used in prayer ceremonies. This was the only similarity I could find in the seven desserts presented. All were uniformly not to our tastes, but looked very pretty. The most palatable was a fried honey dipped cake which I think may have been yakgwa which is a combination of honey, sesame oil and wheat flour.

Even with the desserts taken in account, I have to say I enjoyed the meal at Cinnamon. Both Florence and Crystal are good lunch companions, and I had another Korean boost when I saw golfer Se Ri Pak as I was leaving the hotel. One World Hotel is hosting the players who are competing in the CIMB Asia Pacific Classic. I did not ask for an autograph. I like Korean chefs more than Korean golfers. Or any golfer. I prefer my birdies spitted and barbecued, thanks!