I have a great love and appreciation for Korean food, so much so that Borami, Lisa and I actually decided to forgo free lunch at Lisa's new company (nice Internet company perk!) and go down the street and pay for food. The crowd at Mandoo at 1pm was still crazy but they move quite fast there, so we sat down without much of a wait.
The menu is overwhelming because I wanted to literally eat everything. I couldn't make up my mind between bimbimbap, Japchae, Udon, or ramen. I must have changed my mind a dozen times. But first things first and we settled on sharing the pork mandoo ($11 for 10 pieces) and the kimchee mandoo ($11.50 for 10 pieces) to start. Then we all opted to get the bulgogi dolsot bimbimbap ($16). The pork mandoos came out first and they were piping hot. As you walk into the restaurant, you see a bunch of cute old Korean ladies hand making all the dumplings, so you know for sure that it's homemade and fresh. The pork mandoos (they're basically dumplings) were juicy and quite tasty. I liked how the skin wasn't too thick or chewy. 10 dumplings between the 3 of us was actually quite a lot of food and then I realized that we were getting another round of dumplings AND our main meal - all for lunch. After we finished our pork dumplings things started to go a bit down hill with the service (although I will acknowledge that it was incredibly chaotic in there). They only brought out 1 bimbimbap which confused us because we all ordered one and then our kimchee dumplings never arrived. So we had to flag down our waiter and ask to re-confirm our order. Finally after a few minutes, everything else arrived at once. I immediately dove into the dumplings because our bimbimbap was 1,000 degrees and I needed it to cool off for a bit. The kimchee dumplings were quite tasty as well - excellent thin skin with a spicy kimchee filling. Although comparing the two dumplings, I still prefer a nice juicy pork dumping over any other kind of dumpling. As for the bimbimbap, we actually should have just split that 1 order among the 3 of us because the individual order was huge. It was still piping hot after letting it cool down and no matter how much I was eating it, I never felt like I was making a dent in the bowl. The ingredients were great with the sizzling hot rice, hot sauce, marinated beef and vegetables but I was really missing the fried egg that usually goes with this dish. I'm not sure why the cold version gets an egg and the hot one does not (maybe because they think it'll be overcooked with the hot sizzling rice?) but I did miss that part of the dish. I eventually had to stop eating because I was so full and ended taking home what seemed like the entire bowl of rice.
Overall, I'm super jealous that Lisa gets to work near such a great ethnic part of the city. Korean food is not only delicious but it's super flavorful and our meal was actually quite affordable considering how much food we really ate. I would definitely come back here in a heart beat and try out some of their noodle dishes and the baby mandoos instead. Total bill: $25/pp with tax and tip
Photo Credit: Yelp
1 comment:
The dumplings in that pic look somewhat obscene.
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