Plus: Fourteen Chicago-area Korean restaurants]
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Close to 7 PM Sue Chong, a small, fit Korean woman, unlocks the door and apologizes for having forgotten to open it. One large party moves straight to the back and starts rearranging the chairs and couches to form a circle. A couple of people sprawl comfortably on the floor in the middle of it, as if this dark bar with its standard Chicago tavern paraphernalia—Ditka plaque, sailing ship made out of snipped Old Style cans, bottle of Malort—were their dorm room. Others take over tables or gravitate to the South Park pinball machine. The one place almost no one sits is the bar itself—which is just as well, because Chong’s too busy cooking to fetch you a beer or a shot. Try to interrupt her and she’ll chase you out of the kitchen.
Some 40 minutes later she calls out the kitchen door, and the patrons reassemble into another loose line. Almost a dozen different dishes are piled in metal trays on the stove and counter, from green beans coated in spicy kochujang (Korean chile pepper paste) to fried tofu dumplings to a tart, garlicky salad of shredded wakame seaweed. In a few minutes everyone’s washing down this vegan feast with $2.50 PBRs.
Every Thursday Chong starts work in her kitchen at five in the morning and works straight through the day—though she claims she takes a half-hour break around 5 PM to drink a cup of tea and relax. The food’s homey—simple dishes made from scratch with fresh ingredients. Chong’s veggie burger, which isn’t on the buffet line but is a standby the rest of the week, is actually fairly inspired. She makes it out of tofu, tempeh, oatmeal, and kimchi, and while it doesn’t taste much like a burger—”veggie crab cake” might be closer—it’s spicy, hearty, and robust, topped with avocado or, sometimes, cucumber.
