Oiji has been written up in several "Best of" lists for 2015, so it has been on my radar screen to try in 2016. So when Neel reached out to me about it, I was definitely down to try it asap. Now that it's gotten so much buzz, it's become one of those restaurants that only has absurdly early or late openings on Opentable (or no openings at all) but we were lucky to get a resie on a Friday for 6pm (or so we thought). I got there exactly at 6pm but turns out our reservation was for the following week! Opps. But luckily, the bar has open seating and I've always preferred sitting at the bar anyways, so it was a win-win. The bar is cozy with 6 seats but it's great because you can actually chat with the adorable bartender/waiter about the menu and not feel overwhelmed. The menu is sharable plates and he recommended anywhere between 4-6 dishes - we ended up with 5, so he was pretty spot on. We started with the honey butter chips ($6) which is a small side of potato chips drenched in honey butter. It's sticky, sweet and has that very addictive salty and sweet combination. The bartender actually told us this is their only dessert item on the menu, but I wouldn't characterize this as dessert at all. If you want true dessert, you're not going to get it here. For our entrees, we got the beef tartare ($18), fried chicken ($15), pork belly ($18) and the mackerel ($14).
Neel and I have started this trend of trying places with beef tartare because we're both obsessed with it (or at least the one at Wildair). This one was also pretty damn good too - really simple raw beef cubes with ramp aioli, pickled mustard seeds, and a sous vide egg yolk. Clean and simple tasting dish that doesn't even make you realize you're eating raw meat. Next, was my favorite dish of the night, the fried chicken. Holy shit - this is the kind of dish that makes me want to come back here by myself, sit at the bar and order 3 of theses to shove in my face. It's not like your typical Korean fried chicken, it's thinly sliced chicken with a very lightly battered outside. If you've ever had sliced drunk white wine chicken from a Chinese grocery store, it's like this but with a fried skin. It's served with a delicious spicy soy vinaigrette that I was dunking my chicken into but you could honestly eat it without it because it's that delicious. This dish is what put me over the 4 forks rating - Do yourself a favor and order more than 1. Next we had the pork belly with kimchi - also a very enjoyable dish. I was very very similar to the dish I had a Her Name is Han - just on a smaller level and it had more of a slow cooked/stew feel to it. As for the mackerel - I'm usually not a huge mackerel fan unless it's at a very fancy Japanese place because it can have a very strong fishy taste that even I don't always like. But I was surprised at how much I liked the one here. It's a very large and tender yet firm piece of mackerel smoked and served with a cute pine needle brush for you to layer on a citrus soy dressing. It was really quite unique and if mackerel was always this good, I would order it more frequently. At this point, we wanted to split 1 more dish and landed on the dumplings. I mean, how can you go to a Korean place and not get dumplings? These were steamed and then sitting in a broth - there were 4 fairly large sized dumplings in there and it was the right way to end the night.
While I do love a good K-town outing, coming to Oiji for Korean food was a more calming experience for me. There's no Korean BBQ or crazy grills but the essence and core of all the food is still traditional Korean with a modern twist to it. If you're looking for a slightly more refined experience without the crazy K-town feel, definitely head down to the East Village. Total bill: $87/pp with tax, tip and drinks
Photo Credit: Yelp
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