So, the place is down a little one block alley that doesn't look like one should be walking through…read morethere. Not at all what I expected - I mean, it's a hole in the wall, but it's freshly painted, the tables and chairs are relatively new, there's both a downstairs and upstairs dining room, plus the terrace, and the staff, including the kitchen staff, seem to be a mix of Korean, Chinese, and Argentine. The food on offer is Korean-Chinese, much like the menu at Castellum, just a few blocks away, and a cuisine I don't know much about.
I order up the gun-mandu, fried dumplings. At a glance, they're more like mini-empanadas than what I think of as either Chinese or Korean dumplings, but they're fried to a beautiful golden brown, and they're filled with a deliciously spiced pork mix. I have the usual soy - vinegar - chili flakes to mix up a dipping sauce. I'm happy. 180 pesos for 10.
One of my favorite dishes of this type of cooking is jajangmyeon (or, chachangmion as they have it on the menu here) - warm noodles with a black bean, pork, and onion sauce that you mix to your own tastes. And, they offer two versions of it here, the classic, and also the meun chachang, the spicy version of the same. And, it comes out exactly as advertised, and the spice level is up there, just where I like it (and, I also like that they asked how spicy I wanted it). And, it's dead-on, in fact, one of the better jajangmyeons I've had, and easily the best one I've had here in BA. And for 220 pesos, it's almost more than I can finish... though I did eat the entire plate of dumplings beforehand, so my bad.
I like the space, service was attentive and friendly, the food, excellent. I get together a group of friends to return and try more.
We order up a couple of plates of the dumplings - it's really the only appetizer type dish on the menu of 24 dishes. And it quickly turns out, disappointingly, that almost half the menu simply isn't available at lunchtime, they only serve it at dinner. This swiftly eliminates a good percentage of what we want to try. At lunch, they basically offer the simplest dishes - the sweet and sour, the quick noodle dishes, the fried rice. None of the stir fries are available, and the only seafood dishes out of 10, are shrimp fried rice and a bowl of spicy noodle and shellfish soup.
One person gets the black bean noodles that I'd had. We end up with two orders of sweet and sour chicken, one of sweet and sour pork (which bizarrely, doesn't come coated with the sauce, but has it on the side to dip into), two shrimp fried rice (which in the Korean adaptation comes with a side of black bean sauce), and one bowl of the seafood soup.
Look, they were all good. Well, the pork one was a bit bland - the sauce was somehow different from the sauce used on the chicken, definitely missing some flavor. No question the best dishes were the black bean noodles and the spicy seafood noodle soup. They were short a cook for the day, so food took a long time to get to us, and came out one plate at a time - a couple of us were finished before a couple of others had even gotten their plates.
It was good enough that I'd consider going back in the evening some time to try what look like far more interesting dishes. But again, really disappointing that they don't have them at lunch - I mean, they're pretty much open straight through, so one has to assume they have the ingredients on hand, they've just simply decided they won't cook certain ones until later in the day.
All told, with drinks and tip, we leave for 420 pesos ($11) apiece, a little less than I spent solo, but then, we shared the dumplings. Recommended, especially for something different.
Look, they were all good. Well, the pork one was a bit bland - the sauce was somehow different from the sauce used on the chicken, definitely missing some flavor. No question the best dishes were the black bean noodles and the spicy seafood noodle soup. They were short a cook for the day, so food took a long time to get to us, and came out one plate at a time - a couple of us were finished before a couple of others had even gotten their plates.
It was good enough that I'd consider going back in the evening some time to try what look like far more interesting dishes. But again, really disappointing that they don't have them at lunch - I mean, they're pretty much open straight through, so one has to assume they have the ingredients on hand, they've just simply decided they won't cook certain ones until later in the day.
All told, with drinks and tip, we leave for 420 pesos ($11) apiece, a little less than I spent solo, but then, we shared the dumplings. Recommended, especially for something different.
