Why, my editor wearily asks, do I keep writing about Korean restaurants that require a 20-mile drive to Lynnwood or Federal Way? Because the restaurant explosion along 99 to the north and south of the city is one of the most vital things occurring in the Puget Sound food scene today. And it's an explosion invisible to most Seattleites--not just because it's far into the suburbs, but because Korean restaurateurs make it hard for outsiders to figure out what they do best.
Peter Mumford
The ssambap is fresh from the garden.
Peter Mumford
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Garden Korean Cuisine 1636 S. 312th St., Federal Way, 253-941-2483. Open for lunch and dinner Mon.–Sat., closed Sun.
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Even in the Korean-populated 'burbs, Korean restaurants can't shake the curse of being an "ethnic restaurant" in America. It's the same curse that leads Tamil cooks in Seattle to make godawful versions of Punjabi dishes and Salvadoran restaurants to serve wretched Cal-Mex burritos. With Korean restaurateurs, the curse takes two forms: First, they pack the menu with dishes they know Westerners will recognize (like japchae and spicy pork bulgogi), even if their clientele is primarily Korean-American. Second, they generalize. In Seoul, a restaurant will serve just a few specialties; you go to one spot for braised pork shank and mung-bean cakes, another for grilled beef and beef tartare. Not many restaurants here can fill a 50-seat room with people who want only jokbal or kalbi. So most places create an exhaustive menu, resulting in a hell of a lot of mediocre food.
But when you have 30 or more Korean restaurants in one stretch competing for the same discerning audience, as we do in Federal Way and Lynnwood, this strategy doesn't quite work. The places in Koreatowns North and South have to distinguish themselves. So they make a peculiar compromise. While each place prints a menu listing 40 to 50 dishes, each actually cultivates six to ten true specialties. Unfortunately, these specialties aren't singled out on the menus. The dishes are made known only by word-of-mouth or through advertising in Korean-language media.
I asked two Korean-speaking friends to help me translate the restaurant ads in the latest edition of the 2009 KCR Blue Book. It's the Northwest's Korean-language business directory, which I plucked from a six-foot-high stack outside the H Mart, one of Puget Sound's two competing Korean supermarket chains, in Lynnwood.
The restaurant that most piqued our curiosity, Garden, advertised its specialty as Cheju-style cuisine, or the regional food of South Korea's answer to Corfu: a rocky island off the southwest coast and a popular vacation spot. What could Cheju cuisine possibly be, we wondered. When we drove to Federal Way for a meal, it turned out that Garden's regional specialties weren't nearly as interesting as its seasonal, organic fare.
When we asked the waitress about the restaurant's Cheju food, she picked out two dishes for us (easily identified by the word "Cheju" in the name). The first was a soft-tofu stew. While the classic mainlander version has a fire-engine-red broth and curds of delicate tofu, the Cheju-style stew starts with a deep, sea-rich anchovy stock, the flavor amped up with soybean paste. From it we fished cubes of firm tofu, a small cracked crab whose shell we sucked meat from, fat mussels, and even a sea whelk. She set up the larger dish, Cheju duroochiki, on a table burner, and we watched what looked at first like a bright-red haystack sizzle and melt down for a few minutes before we began spooning the fragrant mass onto our plates: thin slices of pork rimmed with just enough fat to moisten the meat, smothered in bean sprouts and green onions and coated in a mild red-pepper sauce. We picked up tufts of the sprouts and pork and rolled them in lettuce leaves.
"The lettuce comes from our organic garden," the owner told my friends in Korean. "We grow many of our herbs and vegetables there." Now for a high-end Pacific Northwest bistro, having your own herb garden is as much a cliché as holding wine dinners with high-priced tastings and winemaker handshakes. But an Asian restaurant doing the same? Never seen that before.
Garden also proved that the links between local and seasonal aren't limited to English-speaking foodie circles. The back page of the menu is devoted to seasonal offerings. Right now it lists a half-dozen chilled noodle dishes in various guises, and samgyetang—a poached young chicken stuffed with ginseng, which people eat to restore all the nutrients sweated out during the sticky, sweltering Korean summers.
The dish that allowed us to taste the full spectrum of Garden's own produce was the ssambap, a $13 item that filled the entire table. (Ssam means "to wrap," while bap is "rice.") One platter held a fan of Korean lettuce—elongated, ruffly leaves with blushed tips and a small hint of bitterness—and purple-veined dandelion leaves. These were all grown in the owners' garden, the waitress informed us as she set the platters down, as were most of the vegetables on a second plate of cooked leaves: heart-shaped Korean shiso; pale-green cabbage; squares of glossy, olive-hued seaweed; fuzzy pumpkin greens the color of moss. Alongside these platters came bowls of rice, a plate of grilled pork, a chocolate-colored fermented soybean paste called ssamjang, and a clay pot containing a dense, squash-spiked, meaty soybean stew. All of this, of course, was in addition to the array of saucers filled with panchan, kimchi, and other pickles and vegetables that accompany every Korean meal, no matter the region.
