Kevin K.
Yelp
Now, suppose you are married to a Chinese girl born in South Korea - her cultural identity swings more towards the Han river than the Pearl. She spends more time watching Korean drama on her phone than you'll ever spend on Netflix, and when you come home, it's likely the scent of her galbitang on the stove, and not your mom's Cantonese mushroom chicken feet soup. What's for dinner at home? Sometimes it's something completely unexpected in an otherwise Chinese-American household (like New England boiled supper or Tunisian chickpea soup), or maybe it's something ordinary, like fettuccine with store-bought pesto. Sometimes my Honker upbringing calls for a bowl of Hong Kong diner style macaroni soup. But more times than not the missus will hold sway in the kitchen, and you need banchan (Korean style side dishes) for the seollongtang (a fairly comforting, if not slightly bland beef bone-and-meat broth typically consumed during wintertime). So, where do you go for banchan?
Well, if you dated a Korean girl, the answer is...her umma, halmeoni or emoni (that's mom, grandma or auntie, respectively), and they are usually good for that. Suppose if they are on the wrong side of the world? So where do you go for your kimchi, the acorn/bean jelly, the spicy squids, the seaweed salad or the spicy little dried anchovies? Up until recently? It was Jinga, the banchan purveyor at every H-Mart out there. Their wares are...acceptable, but there are no guesses to their freshness along with a fairly expensive pricetag. I mean, you could try Janchi Janchi, which is next to GumGangSan closer to downtown Flushing, but eeeh, the food was even more "meh", more pricey, and hell, I heard that the owner is...not very nice.
Well, you could come here instead. 162nd street, right next to ParkSanal Babs (they specialize in bowls of deeply flavored beef and bone soup), there is a curious catering store that sells banchan. When you walk in you get the usual ricecakes (theok) that are either plain or have mugwort added to it for color and fragrance. Then you have the ones sandwiched with azuki, kabocha jam and dusted with sweet bean powder - good stuff. They tend to be rather gummy in your typical H-Mart packages, but here, they are fairly soft and supple. You have the fridge cases full of various pickled and preserved Korean specialties - for example, garlic ramps marinated in a spicy garlic soy dressing, or raw octopus completely slathered in spicy chili pepper sauce. Maybe there are deep fried nori (seaweed) with a thin tempera batter, or perhaps various forms of omelette. They have jars upon jars of kimchis, various vegetables salted, seasoned and fermented. There's the traditional cabbages, the spring onions, the daikon radishes, and of course, the stuff containing, oh, raw oysters. When served in small side dishes in a household it's immensely tasty. The stuff sold in Hansol seems to taste fresher than their H-Mart Jinga counterparts, and the pricing is slightly better (about 5%). Also, unlike their little stand behind the fish section at HanYang, it feels cleaner at this location.
So yeah, sometimes when the missus needs to pick up banchan, we'll skip Murray Hill plaza and come here instead. She'll almost always end up with some rice cakes and at least one banchan.
