I had Korean Barbeque for the first time yesterday in the Federal Way, Washington restaurant, Palace Korean Grill. Korean barbeque is expensive in Seattle--I guess that plates of meat cost upwards of $20 a pop--but in Federal Way, you can get cheap barbeque, with an all-you-can-eat barbeque meal going for $15.99 per person.
At Palace, there is a small grill at every table, with a fan above it to blow away the smoke. They also offer a charcoal grill variety to give the meat a signature Korean, smoky taste. The restaurant is simple, with a lot of booths, clean lines and dark colors with the huge silver fans serving a utilitarian and decorative function.
Korean barbeque consists of various types of meat, generally beef, along with many small side dishes. The meat types are quite varied. We started with beef tongue, which was particularly delicious. It crisped up on the barbeque grill and then we dipped it the thin-sliced meat into a soy-based sauce. The dipping sauces made the meat that much better; along with the soy sauce, there was an oil-based peanut sauce and a thick and creamy soybean sauce. Other types of meat offered at Palace are beef intestine, a kind of thick Korean bacon, shrimp and an on-the-bone cut of beef marinated in Korean barbeque sauce.
The side dishes are what really made the meal. Traditional Korean table settings feature cooked rice as the centerpiece with the Banchan (side dishes) arranged in order of recipe, ingredients, colors and temperatures for the best balance. Some standouts at Palace were jjigae, a stew with soybean paste, green beans, squash and tofu, saengchae, a fresh salad with vinegar soy sauce, red paper paste and mustand, jeotggal, salt-fermented anchovies, and jagajji, pickled radish. The meal was also served with cold kimchi, cabbage and green onion pickled in a spicy red sauce, that we put on the grill and ate with the meat.
Federal Way is a big Korean immigrant town, so our menu and the restaurant’s sign—along with grocery stores, salons and the sign over the toilet in a Korean coffeeshop that I think warned against flushing too much TP—are bilingual in Korean and English. Our waitress at the restaurant, too, spoke almost entirely Korean to a Korean-American friend—I caught the words “potato salad” and “tea” only—as well.
For some reason, this kind of atmosphere seems more authentic than other types of Asian food, even in Seattle. Chinese food, for example, is nothing like what you’d find in China in most of the restaurants. True, I’m no expert on authenticity in Korean cuisine, but somehow with the majority of people in this part of town speaking Korean, it seems like the restaurants, shops and salons were created specifically for Korean immigrants, rather than to please Americans. Also, since Korean immigration was later than Chinese, perhaps some of the stigma towards Asian-Americans had dissipated and allowed Korean immigrants to be more authentic to their real culinary heritage when they came to the U.S. and set up shop.
To some extent, the International District in Seattle serves this same function, but because of the mix of Asian ethnicities there—unlike in this part of Federal Way, which is primarily Korean—as well as it becoming such a huge tourist attraction, Federal Way’s isolation seems to keep it more “pure” somehow.
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