NEW "Korean Chinese" restaurant in Fort Lee (big dog pls read)
Yun Kyung Chinese Restaurant, 1645 Lemoine Ave., Ft. Lee NJ, 201-592-9554
I found this restaurant next to the "Poultry Place" chicken take-out / catering business, its been open for two weeks. When I asked the hostess as to what genre of Chinese food it was, i.e. Hong Kong or Taiwanese, she replied "Korean-style". This took me aback because I had never heard of Korean Chinese food before -- I mean you're one or the other, right?
Well, I guess not -- its not Korean barbeque, its not what we saw at Bo, and its not the typical Hong Kong style you get in Fort Lee or in Flushing either. The menu has none of the dishes you would normally recognize -- lots of noodle soups, hot pots and saute'/stir fried stuff, lots of emphasis on beef and seafood (no surprise). The place is expensive, most of the dinner entrees are between 15 and 25, and they has a "special" priced fixed area for groups between $180-$350.00, I didnt bother to ask for details.
From the lunch menu, which was more reasonable, I ordered chicken and garlic sauce and an order of fried dumplings. Sounds pedestrian, but what I got was anything but.
The chicken was lightly battered and deep fried (more like general tso but less batter), which was wallowing in a sauce of finely chopped carrots, peas, and a TON of garlic. The liquid part of the sauce was very light, although sweet and very spicy, and chili peppers where everywhere. The chicken was crunchy, moist and yummy. It was accompanied by a sticky white fried rice, which had peas, corn, carrots and chopped up crab stick in it.
The fried dumplings were not what you would get at a hong-kong dim sum joint -- these were large thin skinned korean mandoo, deep fried and filled with finely ground pork, scallion and chopped bean thread noodles.
The accompanying side dish was chopped raw white onions and yellow pickled things which I believe were radishes like those used in sushi.
I want to go back to this place for dinner -- if anyone is looking for an unusual korean experience, in the absence of Bo I suggest you guys give this place a try.
Jason Perlow
Apr 05, 2000 01:46PM
"if anyone is looking for an unusual korean experience, in the absence of Bo I suggest you guys give this place a try"
bo's pull for me - and hazarding a guess, for a lot of folk around here - was maria's cooking. if she's cooking breakfast, boiling corn, whatever. pretentious as this might sound, maria's cooking is an expression of soul, just as transporting as any art can be.
thats why 'unusual korean' ain't got nuttin to do wid it. and why the suggestion sounds faintly derisive...
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Hey, Howler
Nobody loved Bo more than me (and I sure hope your words don't read pretentious, cuz that'd mean my paens to the place must've read SUPER pretentious!), but I think you're wrong to take offense. I don't think Jason meant it derisively at all. Though I agree that no "substitution" for Maria is possible. She was unique. Sigh.
Jason: Korean/Chinese is a "real" thing. Others here know much more than I do about it (Sietsema's especially "up" on it, if I recall correctly, and Jonathan Gold can probably name every dish), but it can be a delicious blend of the two cuisines. I always forget if it's from ethnic Koreans in China or vice versa. What I do know is you want to eat the really long udon-like noodles.
I once tipped Robert to a place called "Sunrise" on Broadway in Elmhurst Queens right near Captain King. it's an old fashioned coffee shop that does this cuisine. Most of what I had there was mediocre except the splendid homemade noodles (so long they slice 'em with a scissor at your table). I think Robert found other dishes there. I'm not sure whether we encapsulated that Voice review...maybe try our search engine (plug in "sunrise broadway korean").
ciao
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I didn't mean it derisively -- what I meant was "this is different from anything you have likely seen, go and try this"
As to Bo -- Rachel and I went there once, I thought Maria was a very nice person and her food was very good. That being said, it was not the kind of place that would make me drive 50 miles from NJ and go across two bridges just so I could have her food (only Jim and a few others on this board are that insane). If it had stayed open we definitely would have gone back when we were in the area to visit my family, as I'm from that part of NY. If I had currently lived in Queens I probably would have gone there a lot more.
That being said, I suggest we stop harping on Bo and get on with the Chowhounding.
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Bo was passionately extolled by virtually every food critic in town. Every one of the many people I brought there, everyone I ever sent there (who reported back), and nearly everyone reporting on these boards went nuts over the place. Only you and I think one other poster was ever blase about it. Which is certainly your right. And I'd even have expected as much; I find my taste rarely agrees with yours.
I sure as heck don't understand why you've chosen to lash out at me on this one, when I was actually defending you. I may be wrong (sometimes or often), but I'm certainly not "insane" because my opinion on this doesn't match yours. I don't think you're "insane" because your opinion doesn't match all of ours.
ciao
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Ok. This is why I hate electronic forums. You totally
lose all sense of context and meaning, and the slightest adjective causes a flame war.
I did not mean LITERALLY "insane". If you had heard me say it verbally it wouldn't have sounded like that!
I meant like, you're insane about food the way an audio nut is insane about his stereo system or I'm insane about computers. As in a fun and eccentric kind
of way.
I didn't mean you should be locked up and put in a
stright jacket. I did not mean to lash out, I was joking.
Get it?
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"Get it?"
ok, got it
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Jason-
I may be hallucinating this (i.e, I may be insane, it's catching evidently) but I recall that there was an enlightening discussion some time back about Korean tastes in Chinese food. Wonki's name stands out in my mind as primary contributor to the thread. Worth a look.
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I had take-out lunch from there last week (and actually had the same chicken dish you had). It was quite good and definitely diferent. It seems much more of a Chinese restaurant with Korean influences (I picture a Chinese chef cooking with a Korean chef behind him yelling "more garlic, more red pepper!").
Ft. Lee has such a huge Korean population, I am waiting for the local pizza place to start selling a kimchi pie!(mmmmmmmmm)
Can't wait to go back, the noodles with black been sauce looked great.
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Jason,
There was a thread around October of 1999 including me and Wonki where we discussed Korean Chinese food. As to Jim's wondering whether its Korean Chinese or Chinese Korean food, well, consider this. You can't find this food being eaten by non-Korean Chinese. But you can see this food being eaten by non-Chinese Koreans. This is starting to sound like an LSAT question. In any case, this type of food is very popular in Korea.
Incidentally, Yeon Kyung, is also the name of a quiet famous restaurant here. The chinese restaurants here divide into the low-brow quick lunch type places and high-brow banquet dinner types of places. The latter can have dishes ranging up to $80+ and usually its these types of places where you order the set menus.
The jjambong that someone mentioned in a message in this thread should be quite good. The noodles should be somewhere between al dente and "too soggy." Soup noodles should be a bit more wet than pasta. The broth is the key though. It shouldn't be just "spicy." You should taste a substantial underpinning in the broth of meat and seafood together. Any decent jjambong place in Korea will keep the recipe for its broth and the know-how behind its noodles a closely guarded secret (like the places in Tampopo).
Michael Yu
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"consider this. You can't find this food being eaten by non-Korean Chinese. But you can see this food being eaten by non-Chinese Koreans"
Michael, I just survived a four hour flight through gale force winds and rain after eating about a million tacos and tamales in El Paso. I somehow managed to maintain my composure throughout, but trying to puzzle out this one (at 2am, just got home) has me in a cold sweat (might just be a flashback)
Hopefully the answer will come to me if I try again in the morning!
ciao
ps--good to see you working through the other boards.
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To bring the discussion back from the detour through Bo .
I checked out Yeun Kyung (their English transliteration) after reading Michael Yus original post hoping for a nostalgia blast. What I discovered was a more refined version of the comfort food I remembered from a year spent in Taegu, Korea defending you all against godless atheistic communism.
Back then at least (1970) Koreans tended to eat home cooking at home, so "Korean" restaurants specialized in fancy dishes like bulgogi and kalbi that werent frequently made at home and were (by Korean standards) expensive. There were noodle shops, of course, where you could get good ramyun but for cheap eats the choice was pretty much limited to "Chinese". Thanks to friends in the Peace Corps I mastered a limited number of dishes I could order. (If there were menus in these places, I dont remember them.) I sifted through my memory banks as I drove to Yeun Kyung.
Korean Chinese is like chop suey here. In other words it has gone through a process of acculturation and so is not "pure" or "authentic." Unlike chop suey, however, Korean Chinese cooking is pretty darned good. And my guess is it is just as distinct a cuisine as Taiwanese-Chinese or Cantonese.
Ive only had a chance to sample a few dishes at Yeun Kyung so far but they are quite good. The mandoo (fried dumplings) were crisp, not at all greasy and succulent. But good mandoo (or gyoza at Japanese establishments) are pretty easy to come by these days.
Kan-cha-jang-myun ($6.50), which the menu translates as "Noodles with Soy Bean Sauce and Meat" was a real blast from the past, although not as "funky" as I remember it from Korea. I suppose its the Korean equivalent of spaghetti with marinara sauce the basic, super-cheap item at any Korean-Chinese restaurant. Yeun Kyung uses delicate green noodles and serves the sauce on the side. Its a dark, soulful affair with plenty of coarsely chopped onions. The meat (beef one assumes) is not evident; perhaps they use a meat extract. The taste is surprisingly delicate. Another noodle dish I remember is Cha-jang-myun ($5.95), which is on the menu as "Noodles with Seafoods & Vegetables." Ill try that soon.
One of my favorite dishes from back in Korea was Chap-chae ($12.50) and Yeun Kyungs version is terrific. Youll find it on the menu under "Others" listed as "Sauteed Beef and Vegetables with Chinese Vermicelli." You can order it mild or spicy, but the spicy version I had is not really very spicy at all. The sauce is light on the beef and heavy on julienned vegetables (heart-healthy!!) and very good indeed, wonderfully oily and slightly sweet. My wife was instantly smitten.
By the way, the little onion and radish nibbles that arrive as soon as you sit down are accompanied by a thick dark soy bean paste for dipping. I cant remember the name of it, but it is a prime ingredient in a lot of Korean and Korean-Chinese cooking. Its yummy. The kim-chee that was served on my second visit was also quite good.
Obviously Ive got a lot more sampling to do, but on the basis of two visits I can recommend the place to anyone insane enough to cross a bridge to Fort Lee for a good meal. (And for avid hikers who live in upper Manhattan, its walkable!)
Im no expert on Korean cuisine so maybe a bona-fide Korean will weigh in on this and provide us with the definitive reading on Yeun Kyung and Korean-Chinese.
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Great posting, thanks for typing it all out! I've alerted Wonki and Michael, our Korean experts...
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Kelly and Jim,
The sad thing is, your two Korean food consultants, Wonki and I, are both very far from Fort Lee. Kelly, I am closer to K2 than Fort Lee, and I assume because you were in Taegu you know what K2 is.
In any case, here is my 2 cents worth, or twenty won worth. Yeun Kyung seems to be a pretty good place. Ironically, the trend in some parts of Seoul these days is the rapid and to me unwelcome development of pseudo-nouveau Chinese food. Chinese food in dainty portions at exorbitant prices. It all started because this one place started serving decent non-Korean chinese food... 10 bucks for a bowl of hot and sour soup? Please...
Those holes in the wall you remember from Taegu are the mainstays of Chinese-Korean food. But they are not only good for noodles. They also serve up some nice main dishes that you are supposed to order and split with your dinner party. These "main dishes" are referred to as "yori" and the noodles/rice/soup dishes are supposed to be eaten afterwards and referred to as "shiksa". Walk into Yeun Kyung next time, order two main dishes for a party of four and then tell your waiter that you'll order shiksa later. S/he should be pretty impressed with that.
Some good representative yoris: tangsooyook. Sweet and sour pork. The pork is deep fried and comes in a honey like sauce. If its too sweet, its not good. No cherries or pineapples please. My favorite is Nanjawansoo. Small pork patties in a brown sauce, usually comes with mushrooms, bokchoi. Give me that and a bowl of rice and I am a happy man. Another dish is kkanpoonggi, garlic chicken. The chicken is deep fried and comes in a spicy garlic sauce (spicy to "chinese" standards). After all that grease, you will naturally crave some soup or starch. You seem pretty familiar with the chajangmyun. Try the bokeumbap (fried rice) or jjambong (spicy seafood soup and noodles), or even ghis myun. Ghis myun is thin noodles in chicken broth. It sounds simple, but this dish tells you how well the cooks prepare their broth. I always thought, the way a restaurant prepares their broth tells volumes about how the rest of the food is made. If you smell cubes or bouillion, run out of there without paying...
Michael Yu
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Michael--I'd rather have your ultra-long-distance two cents than most other people's local twenty bucks!
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Michael, if you're closer to K2 air base than Fort Lee, you must be in Seoul.
As it turns out, my wife and I returned to Yeun Kyung (where we now get a knowing smile from the very attractive hostess) on Friday night for dinner. I specially wanted to try out some of the other dishes whose names I remembered from Korea.
One of them was tangsooyook, which at Yeun Kyung is sweet and sour beef, not pork. (They don't seem to serve pork at all -- Kosher Korean?) It was definitely reminiscent of what I had in Korea but sweeter, with bits of peach (!) and even a date (!!). So I guess you'd say it's pretty non-authentic. But I guess most mi-guks would find it very tasty (as did I).
I also wanted to try the kkanpoonggi (fried chicken in garlic sauce), which if memory serves you mentioned in the original post. It was FABULOUS!
We also tried the bokeumbap (which I had transliterated as pogunbap in my notes), which had been one of the mainstays of my diet in Korean. I found it the least "Korean" of the things I tried there. It's fairly "fancy" what with the teeny tiny shrimp in it and all, but rather bland. Still it was a nice foil to the yori (as I now know to call them).
I noticed the ordering pattern you described and asked the waiter what the tables around us were having. I'll definitely put your tip to use next time. Now I wonder if they serve makli?
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Hard to get that beverage around here.
Then again, recalling a crazy bike ride
after a pot of it... maybe its safer
for us all.
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A very good mokkoli is available at Cho Dang Gol. Comes in a beautiful big bowl with a ladle and small matching bowls from which to drink it. A nice presentation and festive for a group.
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