CLEVELAND — In the latest installment of “Table for Two,” Doug Trattner takes Mike Polk Jr. on a culinary adventure to the Asiatown neighborhood.
When it opened in 1978, Korea House became the first restaurant in Cleveland to offer genuine Korean barbecue, with items like beef bulgogi prepared tableside.
Over the years, Korean barbecue has been a quiet draw for well-seasoned diners looking for a fun, delicious and unique night out on the town. But over the past few years, the trend has absolutely exploded, with scores of flashy new Korean barbecue – often abbreviated as KBBQ – restaurants popping up in cities big and small. The interactive, communal nature of the meal has managed to introduce an entirely new generation of diners to authentic Korean cooking.
“When I was a kid, I remember coming in here and it was just a lot of Asian families,” explains Christian Hanna, whose family owns the restaurant. “But it's really, in this last kind of 10 years, where you’re seeing a very diverse mixture of people coming in here.”
Meals at Korean restaurants always include a volley of banchan, an array of small dishes containing raw, pickled and fermented vegetables for nibbling and pairing with food. For diners looking to enjoy Korean barbecue, Korea House features a handful of tables with built-in grills. Meats like thinly sliced beef short rib, marinated ribeye steak and sliced pork belly are the stars of the show.
The thinly sliced meats cook quickly on the grill (they are best cooked in stages so they don’t all finish at once). After being plucked from the grill they get tucked into a fresh lettuce leaf along with steamed rice and, if desired, some crisp banchan like kimchee. The rolls get dipped into sauces such as spicy gochujang, aromatic sesame oil and soy sauce and then eaten out of hand.
For many, Korean barbecue serves as a gateway to a wider array of Korean food – and Korea House offers a huge variety of flavors and textures worth exploring.
“This is, if you looked at the menu, homestyle Korean cooking,” says Hanna. “My mother kind of curated this menu all from herself in the nineties. One thing I'll say about this menu is it's pretty expansive.”
To wash it all down, there are small bottles of soju, a low-alcohol beverage from Korea.