Yulyeong

I haven’t been to Korean BBQ in a good number of years, though I’ve passed by it enough, watched the restaurants around it close and change, and remind myself why I’d probably never go back. But, with all that’s happened, it’s remained firmly rooted in this gastropolis waiting. Waiting for my inevitable return. Why do I speak so somberly? Why did I haphazardly promise myself never to go back? It certainly wasn’t because the place is bad. No, no. It is, as are most recollections of my pabulum past, full of nostalgic discomfort. Discomfort at the fact that I cannot recapture my past no matter how desperately I try, or have tried for that matter. Korean BBQ was the coveted Korean kitchen of my dear brother who almost always voted for it when he- not we- wanted to get Korean. To him, its lackluster appearance only spoke volumes of its legitimacy. To him, the rudeness of the help was invigorating; and the voice of the mother in the kitchen like a lullaby. Here, I learned, and to this day romanticize, that for a place to be good it has to be a little scary. And all these allegedly scary things became, like a butterfly’s dream, the paradise of my mind. But that was years ago, and I won’t do that to you today.

Korean BBQ’s father may be the most beleaguered cook I’ve ever come to know publically. For it was in his shop where my dear brother and I would go not thirty minutes before closing, be welcomed happily, and then ignored as soon as the clock struck nine. We took it as latent, aloof rudeness. Still, my dear brother always wanted to go at the same time. Classes finished when they finished, and I was a sucker. So, needless to say, I was almost always irritated.

That all changed today, because although I wouldn’t put it past papa BBQ to shoo me out at closing, I came with all the time in the world to eat (and hours before). That, and he seemed to do a good job of absolving himself of any guilt he may have incurred when I curmudgeonly chose to eat everything on the menu that had been crossed out, but which he happily came back and apologized for, asking me to choose something else. He blushed, I didn’t. He made suggestions, I asked for pallock remembering the days I could get a whole fish on a sizzling plate, and he suggested Korean pancakes instead. Memories.

The menu isn’t as workable as it used to be. I say this lamenting the loss of pallock. And the little seafood options that are left are a little wobbly. There is a squid fried rice which seems somewhat adventurous, but anything else seems reserved to the fishy flavor of a seafood broth and tiny little shrimp. Aside from that, the menu is riddled with familiar Korean fare, all of which I’ve had many times in the past- those familiar flavours of beef, pork, garlic, and chili. There are favourites: bibimbap, pork bone soup, udong noodles. This time I tried to get away from the classically popular, though I think that’s difficult in a food context. Always. Regardless, I took to something hearty, yet simple: a potato pancake with seafood (tiny shrimp); quite classic. And an otherwise mysterious dumpling soup, which I imagined as slices of rice cake in a spicy Kimchi broth.

I waited sentimentally, listening to the soft laughter of Korean BBQ’s mother as she made my pancake in the kitchen. The sea-foam walls, plastic flowers and old paper clippings taped to the wall and glorifying Koren BBQ’s heyday were a testament to the rootedness of Korean BBQ’s food and how it was as strong as its barley tea. My favourite of all places. Its intense roasted flavor was enough to make me forget I was drinking tea. Yes, even if the place has boiling grains down to a complacent art where the family just simply does what it’s done almost automatically for years, I don’t know it any better anywhere else than this.

A plate sized pancake (good enough as an appetizer for two) was placed in front of me, cut in slices and accompanied by a dark dipping sauce. The lack of egg in the humble batter of flour deserted it of all airiness and left it heavy and glutinous. If left alone, I’d have not enjoyed myself, but the dipping sauce washed the pancake of all that glutinous gunk. Its Fermented salt and vinegar flavor made my toes curl. I Loved it; either that or my thyroid was acting up.

My soup was a disheartening spectacle, but only because it wasn’t like I had dreamed. Placed in front of me was a bowl of dumplings immersed in a strong odorous seafood broth, but delicate enough on the palette, sprinkled with strips of seaweed paper. And to make the simple even more so it was dotted with pieces of scrambled egg. The more it soaked in itself, the richer it became. The dumplings, I concluded, were made by hand, tearing them open and finding pork mingling with translucent pieces of some kind of starchy noodle. And if they weren’t, they certainly tasted that way, the pork not tasting processed in the least, but earthy and savoury.

But I’ve been keeping the best from you, dear readers. The champions of Korean BBQ, indeed any Korean spot: the side dishes. Korean BBQ’s side dishes are my most loved: bean sprouts with a nutty roasted note, crisp and refreshing; Kimchi that’s calm and quenching with a hint of heat; an ambiguous fish sliced thinly and flavoured sweetly with a little spice; and potatoes, sweet and starchy, slathered in soy sauce and Korean cornstarch. They were dishes I could never forget, and with my meal a sobering reminder of why I came back.

Korean BBQ

(519) 568-7111

265 King Street East,

Kitchener, ON N2G 4N4

Cash and debit

Tues-Sat: 12-9

Sun-Mon: Closed

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Good for What Ails Some

It’s the kind of place people blow into to cure what ails them. Where meatheads regale the girls they take out for breakfast with stories about the worst hangovers of their lives. It’s the kind of place a young family comes to solidify some notion of kinship, community, safety, never expecting to hear someone swear like a sailor in the breakfast crowd. There are others: friends, the young, the old, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat. They all have their own reasons for coming. And of course, they all have a common reason for coming too, that being the food.

After regaling the locals with my own interest in the place, I was told it wasn’t as good as it used to be. That supple yearning for a sentimental past, it follows us everywhere, whether in fashion or food, whether on the barn exterior or log cabin interior of the place. Whether using carriage wheels for chandeliers or pitchforks for coat hangers (kind of clever, I know). So it goes. It’s what places do. Where would the business of food be if nothing mythologized the restaurant? Nothing would give me more joy than knowing that out there there are places that value the food alone. But alas, dear eaters, all of our outings to food locations must be imbued with culinary identity, the business must be appeased that way or cease to exist at all.

The Cedar Barn plays the part well. Known for its breakfast, known even more for its country bumpkin dining pretense, it’s a place where you can come and have a love affair with breakfast that you may or may not regret, depending on your standards.

The menu certainly made mince meat of any mirage the space may have created. It was a food slum. It had everything, a Smörgåsbord board of breakfast, lunch, and dinner- of pizza themed stuffs, chicken fingers, steaks, perch battered, of all seemingly urbane and out place things, in panko breadcrumbs. These were only a few of the things that made me raise an eyebrow at the good sized menu. I was less judgmental when it came to considering what was offered for breakfast. All a comfortable choice of options for a suspicious fee that had me ordering two separate plates: two pancakes for an easy 4 dollars and 15 cents, and a breakfast plate of eggs, toast, hash browns and sausage for a price so low my otherwise miserly mind, maybe for the first time in a long time, forgot about it.

Now, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that in every hashhouse, breakfast is a thought provoking paradigmatic process. We order a choice on the menu and the wait staff, provided it has the finesse, guides us through the syntagm that is our order. We order eggs, they ask: how cooked? We order toast, they say: how burnt? What kind of bread? The Cedar Barn is no exception. Now, the only struggle that comes from ordering might be in the volume one’s forced to speak at because The Barn is a loud place, especially on a late Sunday morning. So, if you don’t speak with a little fervency, there’s a chance you ask for onions on your hash browns and instead get green peppers. So again, a heads up. Speak up, or wait a long while before you replace any creamers, coffee, or even cutlery.

My pancakes taught me a valuable lesson too. Don’t be so quick to judge. The enormous portion made me question where I had eaten in the past and made me conclude that such a cheap price was made for a small quantity. Quality is another story. The pancakes had everything I could have reasonably expected. Dense in volume, but fluffy in appearance. Sweetly flavoured and cooked through. I tolerated the dry caliber of the things because I knew the point was to absorb every ounce of syrup I poured over them. Still, I would have preferred fluffy and dry, because when it comes to making something that’s dense also moist, it takes a steady mind to eat. Food goes down thick and gluey. Either way, went down it did.

The customary nature of my second dish made it hard to get excited. I did my best to exalt it to some position of good eating, like asking for dark rye bread instead of white, demanding the fabled farmer’s sausage (a specialty of the house, I was told), but eggs and bacon and the like are never a surprising device of gastronomica- not for breakfast. It’s comfort food, tried, tested, and true. If a place can’t cook eggs, even the humblest eaters deny the cook the slightest of nods. It’s a harsh thing to say my food could have used some salt, because the Barn does this with, I assume, good reason, and that is to appease all taste buds. On the other hand, it is easy to take such an act as a lack of confidence in a place’s own food, but I’ll leave it at that. My hash browns had enough bite, but weren’t nearly as well done as I would have liked them to be. If I learned anything from The Cedar Barn however, it was that the cooks in the kitchen, at least at breakfast, were only extensions of every customer’s hands, because it is up to us to tell them exactly how we like it. That may be the place’s one redeeming quality. It certainly wasn’t the sausage, a saltless banger boiled first and then grilled second to save time and pull the culinary wool over diners’ eyes. Does it work? Not in the slightest. The meat, a dull grey, was drained of all savoury flavour and tasted unbearably off.

I could have easily filled my stomach, especially with the inexpensive portions, only the food couldn’t keep me interested long enough. Then again, it was only breakfast.

The Cedar Barn

(519) 664-2569

1217 Lobsinger Rd
Waterloo, ON N2J 4G8

Open early, e’ry day.

Any payment

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大城小事

SOGO cuisine is my Othering culinary fantasy. Please, let me explain.

I’ve grown up lamenting the hard fact that I could never have a life like the characters in my coveted Hong Kong romantic comedies. My particular favourites were the ones about food. Drink Drank Drunk comes to mind. Literally translated as One Thousand Cups, Not Drunk, or, more correctly, Not Drunk After One Thousand Cups. It was the story of a young woman who, notoriously, could not get drunk no matter how much she drank. One night, she finds a poor drunkard, another Hong Kong native, crying in the streets wondering why no one in Hong Kong eats French food, wondering how he’s supposed to live, a social culinary pariah, because he couldn’t get into college and decided on a career as- well- a French chef. Needless to say, the two fall in love and open a quaint sixteen seater in the streets of HK, making pretzels, having awkward moments, not really selling French food, and so on, and so forth.

It was the kind of restaurant that caught my eye in the movie. Something I thought so impractical and impossible in these parts: the trattoria. The real trattoria. My family owns a supposed trattoria. But in my eyes, it’s a restaurant. Yeah, in some small towns in Europe they may exist, a lone chef sleeping in his own restaurant making new dishes almost every day, needing no one else except the company of his own hands. The same goes for, I imagine, Hong Kong, where food is so frequent and cooks so specialized that they all open their own little holes and have their own little dishes. A normalcy, I imagine. But not here. Until today. Today when I found myself stumbling through the neighborhood of a comrade who had moved away. The streets always made me feel a little less lonely when I missed him, but today I found a place that made me miss him even more. A place that could have very well been our hangout, which, up until he up and left, was reserved for a coffee shop run by a mainland Chinese woman that knew us well before she owned the place and made us, with the help of her young daughters, tea for whatever cash we had on us.

I once learned from an old Italian cook that the best restaurant was at home. Whether SOGO cuisine lives rightly by this belief is beyond me, but I took its Chinese name of 美食美客or ‘good food for beautiful guests’ as an apt sign that whoever cooked for me cared. The space certainly made me believe it, anyway. Because SOGO cuisine was my dream come true. It possessed that homey local charm. No more than two months old, it decorated itself with knickknacks, warm colours, a rococo patterned ceiling, white and ‘au so courant’ tables and chairs that seated a mere six guests, and a small, single person kitchen separated by a counter. If it made me think of anything, it made me think of that part of Shanghai that took its urban character from a more nostalgic Europe. Don’t know what I mean? Maybe you should watch more movies.

I might be romanticizing SOGO cuisine a bit too much though, because although it has a single woman manning a kitchen, the food comes and goes pretty quickly, the seating is a mere accommodation to the odd person (yours truly) who decides to eat in. Not to say that people shouldn’t; they should. But receiving my orders in takeout containers even after saying I’d be sitting in made me realize that SOGO treats itself as a place that is almost of the fast food persuasion. Well, I say this, dear readers. It shouldn’t! Sure, the space is small. Sure, it offers only canned drinks and bottles of water. Sure, it’s someone running a restaurant out of her home, but its food deserves more respect than that! It’s a small, cheap menu of curries, noodles, rice, steamed buns, and crepes, but it is welcomed. Its dishes cater to an assumed customer, because at first glance the menu confuses you with Japanese dishes, but if you ask nicely, and come boldly, you can have some rare and spectacular Chinese dishes.

Surprised by my candor, SOGO’s matron offered me a Chinese crepe. Fixed with sesame seeds, spring onions, coriander, a nameless sauce resembling Hoisin, and spice, the crepe was fricasseed and folded over a hot crispy wanton. Unconventional from the crepes we’re used to eating here, it was more egg than crepe, but I couldn’t complain about it in the least. Especially not for 3.50. I went a step further asking for a steamed meat bun having eyed the dough rising in a muffin tin on the counter, and she humbly obliged. However, before I went to my seat, I eyed the cook’s own teapot and asked if she wouldn’t mind giving me some of her tea: a deep oolong. Surprised, she poured some into a plastic cup and handed it to me.

I was astounded by my steamed bun. Another unconventional manifestation of a foodstuff I had eaten for years now. The light and airy bun was cut lengthwise and stuffed with minced pork flavoured with green pepper, coriander, vinegar, sugar, and garlic. Needless to say, I had never had a steamed bun reinterpreted this way. It wasn’t dull with a small portion of meat on the inside of a dull chewy dough, but assembled like a pull pork sandwich, more meat than bun, but perfectly balanced. The crispiness of the outer layer fought well against the moist slivers of pork buffered against soft airy bread. It was another great find for 3.50. I commended the cook. To her, it was nothing; to me, it was everything.

Lastly, I did something very unorthodox. I ordered the menu’s fried udon noodles. Now, I’ve been on a crusade against udon for quite some time now, believing it to be a foodstuff glorified more than it should be. Sometimes in a soup, sometimes as Shanghai noodles, but I can’t particularly say its chewy, elastic character is ever done well. Usually, the noodles are a chore to eat. This time, however, it wasn’t so bad. Fried in another nameless, yet savoury and sweet sauce, my noodles, accompanied with crisp vegetables and fish balls, were fried until soft. No chewy noodle eclipsed the other ingredients with starch here. The textures were well received and the chopped cabbage in the dish added a nice fermented feature to something that otherwise embellished a familiar malt flavor.

12 dollars later, I had stuffed my face. For me, SOGO Cuisine was a miracle, or a symptom of something happening in a suburb that I hope manages to stick around. It wouldn’t be the first place in the same neighborhood that tried to be a single person operation. If I’m potentially sad about anything it may be that it has to compromise a lot of its potential for consumer palettes, but so long as the cook is willing, one can still have access to some pretty incredible dishes. That said, my dear eaters, I implore you to eat as much and as often as you can at SOGO cuisine, before it’s otherwise too late.

SOGO Cuisine

(519) 888-6789

UNIT B11

619 Wild Ginger Ave

Waterloo, ON N2V 2XI

Mon-Sat 10am- 830 pm.

Sun: closed

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