I have a secret that I have kept for all of my adult life and I am now going to admit it, I have never eaten kimchee.
Growing up on delicious smelling, sugar and salt infused food always kept me from going near anything healthy or smelly food. Honestly, that might not have been such a bad upbringing as now I can fully appreciate the complexities of food and not take them for granted, for instance kimchee.
I met up with @steemitjp, David, the other night to talk about both of our businesses and the NFT space. David has started a new analytics consulting company in Tokyo called AIX, https://www.aixinc.io/en. While I told him about projects I'm involved in, https://zettaseek.com, a Cardano NFT specific search engine.
After our meeting David suggested we go eat at a Korean restaurant he likes. Instantly kimchee came to mind and I was hesitant because I didn't want to be goaded into trying it, but I relented. Enter Hanguru Korean restaurant.
I'm going to jump straight into the food from here partly because I forgot to take pictures of the interior & exterior, partly because we're already several paragraphs in and still no food so let's go!
First up was the kimchee.
Oh boy, way to stick it to me with the biggest hurdle to get over I thought. I quickly took a big swig of beer and gabbed a chunk of napa cabbage. I looked at David, smelled it, then laughed. There was no dirty socks smell to this kimchee. So I took a big bite. WTF? It was delicious, spicy cabbage with some additional vegetables. David explained this was freshly made kimchee. It hadn't had a lot of time to ferment and so it didn't have the usual aroma. It didn't have any strange flavor, just spicy vegetables. Suddenly my stress level disappeared and I could relax.
Next up was Korean fried chicken, half plain, half covered in sauce.
I first tried the plain karage. It was incredibly light. The batter was very thin, almost like a tempura. The chicken inside was delicious too, but the light batter was a treat.
Next up was the saucy karage. The flavor was reminiscent of a BBQ sauce between a Texas & North Carolina sauce. It was a bit fruity and made me feel at home.
There were also these "mocha fries" with saucy karage that were delicious. Lightly fried, covered in BBQ sauce and chewy.
Next up was the negi(long green onions) seafood pizza. I love negi so I wasn't at all worried whether or not I would like this dish. I was pleasantly surprised how delicious it was though. There is no cheese, but it is covered in a fried tempura batter. Calamari & shrimp covered the top. Add in a dipping sauce, my wife says is anchovy, which improved an already good flavor of the pizza. This was another home run dish, 4 out of 4 so far!
The last dish was a Korean style char-she pork with kimchee, cucumber, carrots and an array of smaller toppings & miso paste.
David quickly made me one with cucumber.
This I must say was not a fit for my palate. The flavor of the cucumber clashed with the rest of the ingredients and was almost overwhelming. So, I made another one without cucumber and it was great. The pork was very lightly flavored and went well with the kimchee & miso.
Those were the 5 main dishes we ordered and for me all five were excellent. I would definitely order all of them again. This was only a small sample of the dishes available here though so I told my wife I'd be happy to take her there and try some more. She loves Korean food. David told me though, this is just normal dinning. The really good place are just north of Shinjuku in a small area called Shin Okubo which we call Korean town. We agreed next time to head over there and I thanked him for taking me to Hanguru.
Hanguru is located 2 stops from Shinjuku near Hatagaya station on the Keio line at 〒151-0072 Tokyo, Shibuya City, Hatagaya, 2 Chome−9−20 2F. It's not cheap, but not expensive, especially considering how good the food was. For both of us plus 3 beers each dinner cost about $80 total. They don't have a website, but you can find their location & information on Pinmapple.com.
