Good Korean?ro;”but not where you'd expect it.
Stand on the sidewalk of 32nd St. between 5th and 6th Aves. at about 9:30 on almost any non-summer weeknight and you'll witness a culinary curiosity. All at once, a few thousand people will show up, marching almost in step, from the west. This will be a chunk of the crowd from Madison Square Garden, walking away from that evening's Rangers or Knicks game (there's a main exit at 32nd and 7th). Many of these people will have gone to the event straight from work. They'll be looking to eat now. On the south side of the block are nothing but Korean restaurants, and on the north?more Korean restaurants, end-to-end. All of these establishments specialize in red-blooded American sports spectators' overall favorite food: grilled beef. But damn near no one in that festive Garden crowd will make a right-angle turn into one of them.
All it'd take to alter this recurring scenario is one Korean restaurateur smelling the opportunity. He could pipe one of the vents from his table barbecues out onto the sidewalk and let those fans smell the meat. They'd be sucked in almost against their wills. That would be something to see, but it will not happen. Koreatown markets to Korean-Americans, and the strategy doesn't translate. If you don't believe it, stop in sometime at Jin Go Ge, the 24-hour Korean buffet/cafeteria on the 32nd St. strip. Its offerings are reliably decent, while the Korean electro-pop blasted in there is, to Western ears, downright cruel.
The family-friendly barbecue places, though, are more than pleasurable once you can navigate the menus. I'd been favoring 2001 "Best of Manhattan" choice Kang Suh for its organic briquettes, sushi bar, better-than-average soups and a book of offered dishes that features some stellar food photography. You need those pictures, because Kang Suh's service is no-nonsense practically to the point of no-English.
Or, rather, you did before last month, when 36-92 opened. This new Korean barbecue restaurant has the Empire State Building between it and the rest of the pack?it's up on 36th St., just west of 5th Ave. That fits, because the difference in dining experiences is also separated by something huge. You get royal treatment at 36-92.
Prices are comparable to those of Koreatown's main drag, even though the meat and sauces are of significantly higher quality. The additions of a server who can describe exactly what is meant by "bean plate curd stew" and "sour (soju cocktails)" makes it a clear winner. Never mind Korean barbecue's appeal to primal instincts: here it is in all its spicy, soulful, affordable glory, with all the benefits of fine dining added on. 36-92's bilingual staff must have been rigorously trained to come off as they do?always deferential yet always in control. Despite the lack of sushi, real charcoal and food photos at 36-92, I won't be back to Kang Suh any time soon.
We started with haemul pajun ($8), which is your basic plate-sized scallion-seafood pancake. It was bright yellow, very greasy and difficult to eat, yet undeniably delicious. The pancake had that perfectly chewy fried-food consistency. Its scallions seemed fresh-picked, and the count of fresh shrimp and calamari was generous.
A sense of journalistic duty compelled me to try yook hwe ($8)?shredded raw beef with sesame oil and raw egg yolk. Of course I was afraid, but I needn't have been, and now you don't have to be. The meat, cut into strips the size and thickness of fortune-cookie paper, arrives piled on a bed of sliced sweet pear, topped by the yolk, with oil on the side. It's quite cold. Before I mixed in the egg and oil it felt almost like ice crystals against the teeth. Blended together, the dish was much closer to the steak tartare cousin that one might expect?with toasted sesame and kimchi (red-peppered crunchy vegetables are the free condiments at every Korean restaurant) in place of mustard and pickles.
The dining room at 36-92 feels authentically Asian-chic without going too far. Its furniture matches the giant stainless-steel exhaust fans that table-barbecue restaurants require: every table is a massive steel slab on legs like industrial plumbing. You enter the restaurant through a curtain of transparent yellow, plastic vertical blinds, recalling Greg Brady's attic pad crossed with a car wash. There's another such curtain on the dimly lit dining room's mirrored back wall, creating an underwater effect. It'd be a little cold, if not for the caring service and a gleefully bright orange fire sunk into every occupied table's center.
So far I've tried 36-92's marinated boneless short ribs ($19) and sirloin ($19) barbecue entrees. In both cases the meat looked great even before it hit the grill. The server assumes it's her job to turn the meat and move it to a cool area when it's done, unless you tell her otherwise; I recommend trusting her expertise. The pieces of meat in a Korean barbecue meal are about triple bite-size, and you're supposed to eat them wrapped in a crisp lettuce leaf. 36-92 also provides some thin-sliced disks of sweet radish to put in your wraps. Other standbys include a salty bean paste that works like a steak sauce. Usually, by the main event of a Korean meal, there are so many flavored sauces on the table you can make your barbecue-watered mouth not know what hit it. This is decidedly the case at 36-92, where servers are quick to refill your red-hot condiment dishes, and where tables are big enough that starter sauces can stick around for another round of action.
Besides barbecue, 36-92 offers a broad selection of bibimbaps (all $10)?rice dishes with veggies and either meat or seafood in an oversized bowl. Here, those bowls are always hot stoneware pots, which singe the bottom layer of sticky rice just enough to make it crunchy. I recommend ketnip bulgogi dolsot bibimbap, which has barbecued beef and sesame leaves. Mix it up and the bowlful imparts the fragrance of steamed scallion and sweet vinegar, surprisingly delicate.
The restaurant serves beer and small bottles of rice wine and cold sake for $13-$15. Come with a healthy appetite because you get a lot of free extras?kimchi and variations, green salad with extraordinary ginger dressing, miso broth flavored with enoki mushrooms?and everything's good.
I'm always a little suspicious of upscale New York Mexican food. And I take it as a point of pride that I almost never laud two restaurants in the same column. So please take seriously what I say about Alma. If you've heard of it, you probably heard it was good. But how often do you find yourself near Columbia and DeGraw? Seriously, though, Alma should be on your list of destination restaurants.
It's in that part of Cobble Hill on the other side of the BQE. Real estate brokers call it "West Cobble Hill," possibly because that sounds better than "The Walk-a-Mile-for-Groceries Part of White Brooklyn."
The dining room is a long, narrow, second-floor Brooklyn space, but something about the decor makes you believe you're about to make a connection with the menu's featured region: mountainous Oaxaca. There's sculptural wood furniture, soft lighting, splashes of color here and there, nothing spectacular?yet it comes off rarefied, lived-in and clean. From Alma's back windows the floodlit loading docks of the Brooklyn Heights waterfront are visible, and still the effect is not ruined. Downstairs is an equally beautiful woody bar?nearly empty when I visited?and the roof deck was recently reopened, offering a view of the Manhattan skyline.
The house salsas are excellent. The red looks like just a cup of chopped tomatoes, but the taste is a bouquet of ripe ingredients. The green is thick and gives a delayed burn. Alma's drinks menu is mostly tequilas and imported "artisanal mescals." I had a margarita made with a tequila our waitress recommended, Chinaca Silver. It was earthier than Patron's Silver, which in a margarita goes for the same $9. The night we visited, there was also sweet sangria for $6 a glass.
The soup of the day was tomato with chickpeas, smoked jalapenos, nopalitos (cactus stems) and a sprinkle of white cheese ($7). It had a nice balance, from smoky to savory, suggesting desert life stewed out of its prickles. The tamale of the day was chicken mole ($6). Unfolding its husk wrapper was like opening a gift. Alma's mole sauce merged with creamy cornmeal to make a thoroughly inspiring Mexican chocolate gravy?maybe the best mole sauce to be had in New York.
Five of Alma's main courses are "From the Grill": skirt steak, chicken breast, marinated shrimp, marinated veggies and chipotle sirloin. All except the steak come with different homemade salsas and just-baked corn tortillas. We tried the shrimp ($15). They tasted of garlic, lime and precision-timed char, with the consistency of hot popcorn. The cucumber/mango salsa, pickled red onions and chipotle roast garlic on the side were perfect complements.
Pato cacahuate?medallions of duck breast with roasted peanut and tomato sauce ($18)?was also a smash. The side this time was mashed sweet potato topped with a split jalapeno, stuffed with ground roasted peanuts. The meat, like the shrimp, seemed to have been pulled off the flame seconds after it'd been cooked through, and brought to the table within the minute. Peanut and tomato made for a thickly sweet-and-pungent sauce. This is a thoroughly New World duck dish. It seemed odd at first, but a few bites later it was hard to believe the bird could fit better in another setting.