A Memorable Night of Korean Company and Cuisine

Last night, our Korean neighbor, the very one we feted recently at TC Choy, a restaurant run by a Malaysian Chinese, returned the favor, and treated us to a sumptuous Korean dinner.

Now, this is the very first time we have been to a Korean restaurant (well, nobody in my family remembers ever being to one, including before we came to US. I thought I would like to dispute that but my effort was hampered by a lack of hard evidence and also that I’m outnumbered.)

The restaurant, Sa Ri One Restaurant, is along W Cypress St. It is a single one story building by itself and the inside is quite compactly laid out, meaning it’s quite cramped by US standards. We filed through a narrow passage way with a somewhat translucent cloth curtain separating it from the patron seating area to the right and entered a separate room. Cool, all to ourselves.

The wall is adorned with paintings of flowers and scenery. This one is a popular painting displaying cranes roosting amidst the pine trees forests. This is also a setting favored by Chinese painters as a crane is a symbol of longevity, so is old pine tree with the convoluted branches of stability and robustness.

Our host explained that Sa Ri One is the name of a town in North Korea near Pyongyang. But I did not pursue further as to whether the name means anything nor did I ask for its name in Chinese characters. And yes, my host knows Chinese characters too, even though she pronounces them differently from Mandarin. For example, written using Chinese characters, Pyongyang literally means flat/level plain/stratum.

Obviously our host with her entourage (daughter and son) has been here many times and so it seemed natural to defer our ordering decisions to her (the menu has the name of the dish in Korean, Romanized, I mean, with English descriptions of the contents).

I scanned through the menu, and had my eyes fixed on what appears to be the only vegetarian dish: tofu with vege soap. At first our host tried to talk me out of it, thinking perhaps that I needed to ingest something more meaty because of my physical bulk. But I insisted, and was vindicated, from my own perspective. However, it did taste like (definitely looked like) the famous Thai Tomyam soup, one which I’m familiar with, having come from the same region. That it was served over a kind of portable hot plate helped preserve the soup’s pungent taste even till the end of the dinner.

My wife ordered a chicken rice concoction topped with a fried egg and served in a stone bowl. It was too big a portion for her and I, as in numerous occasions, was called in to be the great finisher. My S and D each ordered BBQ beef and BBQ chicken, respectively. The chicken dish was spicy and the beef was not, according to the feedback I received from my two children.

A special feature of Korean cuisine is the side dishes. They comprise the famous Kimchi, a pickled cabbage, on the bottom right of the image, bean sprouts, fish cakes (bottom center), and some others that I could not name nor did I try (a complete description/critique of the side dishes and several entrees offered in this particular restaurant is available here, which I found out later after our very first culinary foray into Korean cuisine).

Like all good things, the dinner must and did end, but not until after we had stayed on to engage in a variety of life-probing questions like how my S was doing at UF, the expenses and dorm life. Tales of our (mine and the host’s) Ds’ college application were also exchanged.

Then group photos were taken for remembrance, one inside and one outside. To balance out, the two photographers was permitted to appear once while the others got “shot” twice. I did notice one thing strange though. In the photo taken inside, the bodies/heads of those by the two flanks leaned inward like trying to form a kind of group huddle.

On the other hand, all appeared erect on the one taken outside, but the flash may have reduced the lighted signage of the restaurant at the back to a bright blob.

All in all, the dinner was marked by great company, great food, and great setting. And our very first visit to a Korean restaurant was exactly that, a pleasant surprise.

So is this happy doodle on the Google search page. I especially think it's cute because one of my children, who shall not be named, is also into knitting. I can't wait to find out what he/she has in store for me as far as his/her handiwork goes.