I had a chance to dine at 5 different Korean restaurants during my visit to Paris in early…read moreDecember. Soon Grill Champs-Élysées was a lunch stop on day 2, dining with my nephew who had been doing a semester abroad. Calling it a Korean bbq restaurant does Soon an injustice. It is a fine dining establishment with very competitive prices, and a pretty complex variety of dishes, giving good examples of how far Korean cuisine can go.
"The Korean government, through the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (MAFRA), designated "Excellent Overseas Korean Restaurants" to promote high-quality hansik (Korean food) globally." There are seven now, with 3 in Singapore, 3 in Los Angeles, and only one in Europe: Soon Grill Champs-Elysees.
This is the second branch of Soon Grill, which opened its first Korean BBQ in le Marais 10 years before. And of the five restaurants I visited, Soon was at the top.
Like most Paris restaurants serving lunch, it opened at noon. We got there early, sitting in a nice outdoor waiting area. They invited us in (without a reservation ) around 11:50, which doesn't always happen.
The lunch was everything that our dinner the previous night had not been: elegant atmosphere, great tableside service, and an incredible attention to detail (the dishes were prepared with a lot of individual effort). We were seated separate from a sole diner (but in a communal table). A self-service water carafe was immediately brought over and continuously refilled as we drank. We had come for the lunch menu, split into two groups: 1. bibimbap menu (stone bowl mixed rice plus a small dish of a classic korean meat dish) for 27€; 2. degustation menu (appetizer, main tableside barbeque dish, dessert) for 45€.
My nephew chose from the bibimbap menu: beef tartare bibimbap with a side of chicken bulgogi. It came with a fermented bean soup. The raw beef was thinly sliced ribeye (the same used for beef bulgogi), and it was a large amount. I would have thought that the beef would have been partially cooked by the stone bowl, but that wasn't the case. The meal also came with a decent amount of chicken (dok) bulgogi as the 2nd entree. If an extra bowl of rice had been ordered, this would have been enough food for two people. I got to sample a bite before he tore into it, and found it to be good, though I wish the bowl had been a lot hotter. One thing to impress was the knife work...everything had been chopped so finely and evenly..and bibimbap is all about the various vegetable ingredients mixed with the crispy rice.
Japchae was my choice for app, and the glass noodle dish was excellent. Not too oily, with the same knife work: the egg had been separated into yolk and white and had been chopped so finely, that at first glance, I thought the white was imitation crab. They did not have the soy-braised kalbi, so ended up getting the grilled lamb firstribs. This brought on the full bbq experience, with the meat being carved and grilled tableside by the server. The ventilation was excellent, didn't smell barbeque at all. Dessert was Daeboreum, a rice ice cream, with cereal chips, pear mousse, and soy crumble. Dessert in Korean meals is usually simpler, usually cut up fruit. So this was different, surprising, and delicious.
Both meals came with set of 4 individual banchans and a communal bowl of kimchi (which was definitely aged strongly). One banchan was very finely shredded potato. Another was individually presented cucumber slices...even the banchan seemed to be individually prepped into each small dish. The kimchi gives good info that a kimchi stew or kimchi fried rice here would be really good. The personalization is crazy here...as if you asked for 2 slices of cucumber instead of 3, they would probably accommodate.
The restaurant used the most elegant (and heavy) metal dishware I've ever seen at a Korean restaurant. They even had a display of it in the front, with a price if you wanted to take a set home. The service was aloof, but very attentive and accurate. But what impressed me the most was the ingredient prep. Both bibimbap and japchae can be amazing when the multitude of ingredients is processed so finely, to create a different blended taste, greater than the sum of its ingredients. That for me, is elevated cooking and something I will seek out.