Al Bap Addendum II: Twists of Korea and Japan

Since my love affair with al bap began in the summer of 2012, I have mostly been resigned to making it myself.  After all, if the shortest route to al bap involves 40 minutes on the freeway, why shouldn't I raid the fish roe section of H-Mart and make my entire house smell like chopped kimchi and sesame oil a few times a month?

It took me a few months after I moved to Los Angeles to realize that the shortest route to al bap was no longer 40 minutes on the freeway.  It was 10 minutes in a car (followed by circling insane parking lots full of jostling valets, but I digress) to Koreatown.

Desiring to start my descent into al bap madness in a controlled fashion, I carefully chose two restaurants who boasted wildly divergent approaches to the dish.  (You have no idea how happy it makes me that my potential al bap selection is now so enormous that I can type the previous sentence.)

The first, Chunju Han-Il Kwan, was a bustling stew-ladling madhouse at lunch, the whole place smelling like Seoul distilled and echoing with enthusiastic Korean vowels.  Four waitresses served the whole restaurant; there were no assigned 'areas' or 'sections'.  They came by the tables in shifts while the others filled banchan dishes, refilled and shook the barley-water machine, and visited the kitchen.  Each took care to warn us, in studied tones, to be careful of our hot stone bowls!

The second, A-Won Japanese restaurant, though Japanese in title, murmured quietly with the sounds of Korean just the same.  I was politely shown to the sushi bar with all the other single diners.  Everyone else except me was a Korean businessman silently and methodically scooping up chopstickfuls of rice, fish, and fish eggs.  The sushi bar was staffed by a tall, thin chef who made al bap and hwe dup bap in rows like a single-man assembly line.  He took a break to gaze at me with an unreadable expression as I started mixing the beautiful rainbow of fish eggs, seaweed, uni, and tamago he'd just carefully arranged.  I couldn't read his gaze.  Perhaps I should have taken more than five seconds to admire the swirl of color and its deliberate asymmetry.

Chunju Han-Il Kwan's version came with the normal dizzying array of banchan - some standouts like spicy zucchini and marinated fishcakes were terrific and gone in no time - but the main attraction itself was surprisingly low key on flavor.  Of course, it came out angrily splattering hot oil everwhere, and when I nudged it with chopsticks it sizzled menacingly.  Leaning my whole upper body away, I stirred the rice, dodging the explosive snaps, knowing that my reward would be a perfectly crunchy, yet not unrecognizably blackened, rice layer.

And so it was, and it was the best part of the dish, once I got to it.  Until then, the little piles of tiny roe dissolved so thoroughly into the rice that they left little in their wake but a slight oceany tinge on the tongue.  I ate it enthusiastically nonetheless - the upbeat atmosphere was contagious and the promise of the crispy rice on the bottom propelled me through.

If this al bap was understated, I expected the al bap at A-Won to be overstated.  I'd cheated and looked at pictures of it online, and it was an absurd carnival of colors.  Fully four different shades of roe provided a pointillist background to a big old yellow slash of uni, two different types of seaweed salad (the light green wakame and the earthy green hijiki), and the giant orange marbles of ikura (salmon roe).  Even the rice was speckled under the roe with tiny chopped pieces of tamago.  A few strands of surimi poked their stupid meddling heads up around the bowl.  I scowled at them, but mixed them in with everything else.  My chef was watching.

A-Won's al bap, though, was a whole lot of showmanship masking a similarly muted flavor.  The presence of yellow pickled daikon helped, but the only major difference here was the ikura, which burst showily between my teeth, and the lucky few times I was able to get some uni goo in a bite with all the rest of it.

What have I learned?  I've learned that al bap may only be transcendent when taken as a welcome break from a constant overdose of gochujang, but it's always going to be a comfort food, and whether it's due to bursting ikura or crackling rice, my teeth are going to enjoy the ride.

Al bap: an addendum

Writing my recent post about al bap must have left me with a raging and untamable subconscious craving for it.  While I'd managed the nine months between Korea and last week fairly well, yesterday morning I had scarcely woken up fully when I discovered that I was at the wheel of my car, speeding down the 5 freeway towards the apparent eden of al bap, Buena Park, CA.

As bossy subconscious cravings aren't known for their attention to details like when it is appropriate to eat lunch, I ended up being that creepy customer with her nose smushed against the front door glass trying to peek through when they rolled the shades up at Surah Korean Restaurant at 11AM.

Precisely like this.

The waiter recovered beautifully from the shock of seeing a hungry and inquisitive face at arm's length, and invited me to take a seat.

Now, I am not unfamiliar with the custom that Korean restaurants have of loading your table with everything but the kitchen sink, regardless of what you actually order.  I love that banchan is pervasive and expected.  However, when I ordered the al-bap lunch special with sides of sashimi and fried fish, I was not quite expecting this:

I literally couldn't fit all the food in the frame without standing up, knocking my knees on the BBQ well, and almost tripping.

See the al bap?  It's in the middle there: the little splotchy rainbow in a bowl.

And even flanked by fanciness such that it was, it was delicious.  I suspect they might make a more simple version for the lunch special combo, as it was a basic, spare rendition: three kinds of roe, pickled red peppers, and rice.  There weren't any turnips or seaweed or sesame seeds.  I imagine that if the al bap is ordered alone, the fully adorned version comes out (also, I saw a picture on the menu).

So it is with pleasure (and relief) that I report that al bap can indeed be had stateside.  Don't miss the cinnamon tea they serve at the end!

Al bap

I visited Korea in the summer of 2012.  Despite Korea's lightning-pace development, the communication barrier was absolute, and nowhere was this more apparent than when I wanted something quick to eat.  

When I felt fresh and adventurous, ready to eat whatever came out of the kitchen, or when I felt flush, ready to jet off to some specialty restaurant chosen from the guidebook, I didn't care that I couldn't communicate.  But when I was nearing the end of a long day, exhausted and in need of sustenance (that wasn't convenience store ramyun) before collapsing into bed, I didn't have the energy to risk inadvertently ordering some twelve-plate four-course monstrosity.

I couldn't speak Korean or read the script (all I retain now is the flourished underline of the ‘n’ sound) and I recall many a stomach-rumbling night where I peered through doorways into rooms austerely decorated with inscrutable text.  Often, it was actually carved into wood like an art project.  This was both beautiful and utterly irrelevant to my interests.

Ah.. I see.  You serve food here.
Thanks, Joshua Lurie

I was occasionally thrown a bone in the form of hilarious, yet ultimately decipherable neon...

or something that at least let me know there’d be an interesting selection to choose from...

... but when this didn’t happen, I felt utterly lost.

I would scour the guidebook for the characters for the dish I sought, and try to remember it, but it faded like the details of abstract art.  A few days of this and I started writing the dish of the day on the back of my hand.  

Unfortunately, I still had to peer through doorways like a myopic looky-loo and squint at long lists of menu options, and Koreans were too friendly to stand aside for my confusion.  Up they would bound, cheerily pointing at their abstract menu art, and I would consider the implications of standing in the doorway comparing the back of my hand to the wall for ten minutes, then flee.

My unlikely savior turned out to be in the form of a fish roe rice bowl (al bap, 알밥).

My hero!

Nearly every casual restaurant had a version.  The characters were easy to spot.  It tasted amazing, and I always felt healthy and fully nourished afterwards.  They even laid off on the omnipresent red pepper paste (gochujang, 고추장) a tiny bit.  

It would briefly occur to me as I was eating my fourth al-bap of the week that a stone pot full of crackly rice, fish eggs, seaweed, hot-sauce drenched cabbage and radish, and egg was a strange comfort food for someone raised in the Midwest, but I honestly felt like this dish was stroking my forehead (though sweaty from gochujang), murmuring soothing words, and tucking me into bed.  It wiped the dancing Korean script from in front of my eyes.

And the taste!  Pure ocean over rice, but unmistakably Korean in how strongly the vegetables were pickled.  The individual tiny snaps of the eggs breaking, contained by the crackling seaweed strips and pot-blackened rice, gave my teeth reason to pay good attention, and set up a kind of hypnotic rhythm section in my jaw.

It formed a perfect beat for me to find a subway stop and stumble home.

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Where to get al-bap in Orange County:

According to Yelp, a smattering of restaurants in Buena Park, and of course, Koreatown in LA.  However, I have so far been hesitant to ruin my amazing memories by trying it here.