It’s only in the last few years that restaurateurs have awakened to the versatility of Korean food and its potential in the mainstream market. But few here have successfully manipulated it without whitewashing its power and pungency or exaggerating its subtleties. (It isn’t all about the chile, garlic, and Lactobacilli.)
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At this small Lincoln Park spot with a hip-hop soundtrack, Pete and Irene Jeon make no secret of their debt to the godfather of Korean-Mex street food, Roy Choi of LA’s Kogi BBQ food-truck fleet. But the siblings are also the scions of BK and Sunni Jeon, who own the big, bustling, (mostly) Korean Senoya buffet in Niles—precisely the sort of aggressively unhip and perfectly unintimidating place I recommend to people who want to introduce themselves to Korean food.
The most unlikely experiment, kimchi-and-pork-belly fries, is also the least successful: a soggy mess of underfried spuds slathered in cheese, sour cream, and kimchi, with minuscule scraps of meat. This Korean poutine should never have been allowed out of the lab. Yet sometimes when the Jeons go more orthodox, you wonder why they bothered. The pork dumplings, supposedly from a century-old family recipe, are mushy inside, with a stiff, understeamed wrapping. A basic rib-eye bi bim bop is available in a dolsot, the classic stone pot, which is supposed to be hot enough to cook the yolk of this rice salad’s fried-egg top hat. But mine was missing the requisite layer of crispy rice nurungi scorched on the bottom, and without that there’s really no reason to order it this way rather than stick with a porcelain bowl.
