When we lived in New York we treated ourselves to perfectly balanced Hot and Sour Soup and the crispy Green Beans at Fortune House whenever we happened to be in Brooklyn Heights. To this day we haven’t found another Chinese restaurant that can touch those two dishes.
When I moved to New York, good Mexican and Thai food eluded me. Oh how I longed for a succulent lengua burrito from Mariela’s with red sauce and radishes or crab-fried rice and tom yom kun from Ocha’s.
After our move back to Los Angeles, try as we might, we couldn’t find a decent Jamaican joint, at least not one that was affordable. And good pizza and bagels – what more can be said on the matter that hasn’t already? Forget about it, that’s how you deal with the loss.
That brings us to Ohio. What do we miss here?
Let’s just say, I’ve never lived further from a Korean store, and yet eaten as much Korean food as I have since I moved here. If you can’t buy it because it doesn’t exist or you can’t afford it, you make it yourself.
Good Korean food like um-ma makes can’t be found here – no MSG-free kimchi made of every sort of green known to man, undaegoo jorim with sweet squash and long strips of green and yellow onion saturated with spicy sauce, naengmyun for those especially hot days, heuk yumso-tawng with the rainbow of seasonings and fresh greens that you throw into a boiling hotpot , or Mom’s famous loaded japche, chock full of individually seasoned beef, onion, carrots, spinach, and fish cake on potato noodles. If you don’t want to spend several days boiling beef bones for milky white sul-lung tang, drop into Han Bat . Korean-influenced Chinese noodle dishes like ccha-jangmyun and cchamppong, a perfect fusion of two cultures, if you ask me. Perhaps the food is a metaphor, but I miss it, yes I do.
