The decor was nice and spacious with lots of dark wood accents. I figured the place would be a bit more crowded since it was a new place but there were very few people inside. I guess maybe because it was a hot Monday night? In any case the one kind of cheesy thing they did when they seated us was that they said "Hey if you check on Facebook or Foursquare you can spin the wheel (yes, they had a giant wheel in the front of the restaurant) to win some cool prizes!" Um, ok. Honestly that kind of detracted from the slight mid-up scale experience. I expect that at a county fair not at a New York City restaurant. The concept here is Korean tapas food as well as all natural, organic, grass fed, hormone free, farm to table food (that's from their website). That is a lot of trendy, hip buzz words crammed into one sentence. It's a bit of overkill and they could have probably sufficed with just 1 or 2 of those words because I didn't really feel like I was eating some healthy super food. In any case, there are a ton of options on the menu and I liked that it's broken down into easy to understand categories such as chicken, greens, seafood, meat, rice, pancake, noodles, and rolls since Korean food can be tricky to figure out for those who don't eat it as much. We ordered the scallion and chive pancake ($16), the chicken galbi pot ($13), the pork pot ($13), and the mixed rice in cast iron plate ($16). It didn't sound like a ton of food but we ended up being pretty full by the end. My one small pet peeve about the meal was that we didn't get all the yummy sides that you usually get to start a Korean meal like kimchi, bean sprouts, or cold spinach. That's one of the best parts of eating at Korean places.
Luckily the food came out pretty quickly and since we were sharing they all came out at once. The pancake had a nice taste to it with the chive, scallion and mushroom layered in the middle and it wasn't too oily to eat with your hands. I probably would have liked it to be a bit crispier on the outsides but it wasn't really a huge issue. The rice in cast iron plate was essentially a bimbimbop - it consisted of thin slices of yummy bulgogi, kimchi, greens, crunchy rice, and a sunny side egg on top. It didn't have as many veggies as a typical bimbimbop does but it was still a great dish. The chicken and pork pot were very similar as they were both marinated in a spicy Korean sauce and served with a variety of greens. The pork one had a bit more heat to it and there was a bit too much sauce on both dishes as it was a bit hard to actually see the meat (we had to taste the dishes to figure out which was which because we couldn't tell just from looking at it). Neither of these dishes come with rice, so definitely order at least a few sides of rice to go with them. While all the dishes looked a bit small because they were tapas size, they are much bigger than your Spanish tapas sized dishes and we rolled out of there pretty full. All in all, it was a nice take on Korean food without straying too far from the classic flavors. The prices are a little high for tapas style food but it's worth a shot if you're in the Flatiron District and looking for something a bit different for the usual.
Photo Credit: Yelp
Korean
traditional sweet soy marinated thin riyeye roll, caramelized kimchi,
farmer’s greens, rice, sunny side up egg - See more at:
http://www.barnjoo.com/bar-and-restaurant/korean-tapas/#sthash.9sFWKdVE.dpuf
Korean
traditional sweet soy marinated thin riyeye roll, caramelized kimchi,
farmer’s greens, rice, sunny side up egg - See more at:
http://www.barnjoo.com/bar-and-restaurant/korean-tapas/#sthash.9sFWKdVE.dpu
Korean
traditional sweet soy marinated thin riyeye roll, caramelized kimchi,
farmer’s greens, rice, sunny side up egg - See more at:
http://www.barnjoo.com/bar-and-restaurant/korean-tapas/#sthash.9sFWKdVE.dpuf
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