New Korean Experience

It's not that I don't eat Korean food all of the time, but my friends and I tried this new Korean restaurant at Bethany Shopping Center in Ellicott City. Please forgive me because I do not have the name or exact address of the restaurant. All I can do to point you in the right direction, should you choose to go, is that the restaurant is underneath Miroc Jo.

The first thing you have to appreciate about this place is their very expensive menus =P Their menu was more extensive than I expected. They had various casseroles, jigaes, typical dishes such as galbi (short rib beef), bulgogi (marinated slices of beef that is typically stir-fried) tonkatsu (pork cutlet) etc. Their tonkatsu was so fun to look at! My friend sitting across from me ordered the tonkatsu, and I picked off from his plate. He had a huge cut of meat, loads of rice, slaw salad with thousand island dressing, and french fries! French fries! That was the most important part of his meal. I have to say I was glad to have sat across from him, har har har.

The next thing I noticed was the ambiance of the place. It reminded me of being at a street vendor sit-down place. It was so cozy. The servers could not speak English very well, but were able to communicate very easily through various pointing at the menu and body language. I give the service thumbs up. I liked how we could pay for our meals separately without the hassle of giving our credit cards all at the same time. Each diner can go to the cashier separately to pay.

This restaurant makes their own banchan (side dishes to accentuate your dining experience), so everything tasted rather fresh. And they had an assortment of banchan, not just your everyday kimchi and radish.

I only took a picture of my own meal since everyone else had dug into theirs and it wasn't quite as pretty anymore. I ordered Kimchi Jigae, a stew with kimchi, thin slices of pork, tofu blocks, and dukk (rice cake).

Overall, this place was good. The atmosphere was very homey. While the food was delicious, beware of the MSG overload. I am sensitive to MSG, but push my way through meals because it's hard to find places that do not serve their food without the much needed seasoning. But after this meal, I had a difficult time fighting off sleep and a threatening headache.

If even just for a new environment, I recommend this place. There are other Korean restaurants that I can review and recommend in the Howard County/Baltimore area. But I hope you try out new places and you can recommend to me =)