BBQgeek

Hae Won Dae - Restaurant Review

Restaurant Review:  Hae Woon Dae Korean BBQ

Location: 5805 Buford Hwy., Doraville, GA 30340

Verdict:  Strange and New B-Q

    The thought of producing my first restaurant review for the blogosphere filled my stomach with dread and caused my nether-bits to shrink up inside my body as if dipped into a freezing cold vat of Russian vodka.  So much seemed to hang in the balance, since no other Southern cuisine has been reviewed more extensively.  I could see it before me "Succulent pulled pork...blah, blah, blah....macaroni and cheese..blah, blah, blah."  There was no Zing - no Zip - no Ha-cha-cha.  How the hell am I supposed to make my voice heard in the midst of such a din?  And lo and behold, I awoke one morning to find the answer to my quandry laying on my kitchen counter.

    As pathetic as it sounds, I look forward to every Thursday because it brings with it the only reason I waste $100 a year subscribing to one of the worst excuses for a newspaper ever created, the Atlanta Journal Constitution.  The Food and Drink section of the AJC is home to John Kessler and Meredith Ford, and over the years they have become my culinary sherpas in Atlanta.  I count on them to point me in the direction of food that will transcend the endless miasma of corporate chain restaurants in which I have chosen to live.  Kessler's weekly column focused on a hilarious trip in which he had taken a van-load of soccer moms to Atlanta's international food nexus - Buford Highway.  Amongst the restaurants the group visited was one that stood out - Hae Woon Dae Korean BBQ.  I had my starting point.  Korean BBQ promised to be everything that traditional Southern BBQ was not.  Strange, new, and unfamiliar.

      Pulling into the parking lot of Hae Woon Dae, I was immediately struck by the choice of options that lay before me.  I could opt for the Korean BBQ - or I could elect to titillate my senses in an altogether different manner at not one, but two, strip joints.  If the strip joints were a little too up-close-and-personal in nature, I also had the option of visiting perhaps the last remaining porno theatre in all of Atlanta.   Tempting options in each their own way, but I decided to remain focused upon my original destination,  Korean BBQ, - Strippers be damned (for the moment, at least).

     Entering Hae Woon Dae initially felt like many of my previous experiences with Asian restaurants.  The decor seemed stock - nothing outstanding - just lots of Asian style wind-dings and ornamentations strewn about the room.  This all ground to a screeching halt when our server momentarily stepped away while seating us at our two-top table to flick a switch on an adjacent wall.  I could instantly hear the familiar whirr of a commercial exhaust fan situated directly above our table.  OK.  Please fasten your seatbelts and return your tray tables to the upright position.  We are preparing for take-off.

    Looking upon our table, one immediate incongruity was immediately noticable.  There was a small (12-14 inches in diameter) grill in the middle of our table.  Hot Damn.  This might just be fun.  After perusing the disorientingly unfamiliar menu, quizzing the server, and placing our order (beef short rib, pork, and squid), a small but robust Latin man arrived at our table with a bucket of hot coals.  Hot Damn Squared.   Within mere seconds of the arrival of the hot coals, our server returned with a tray full of small dishes each containing completely unfamiliar contents (food, I think?).  It was with a small measure of courage that my dining companion and I freed our chopsticks from their napkin cocoon and began to dig in.

    Eleven small white bowls sat in front of us.  I looked at my friend and he looked back.  Who would be the first to jump in?  We both focused on what appeared to be a familar looking substance.  We deducted, based soley on visual appearance, that we were looking at pineapple in some sort of red (chili?) sauce.  Simultaneously, we both took a bite.  Pineapple?  Nope. Not even close.  It's always an interesting experience when the eyes tell you one thing and the mouth tells you another.  Our mouths were telling us, very clearly, that this is NOT pineapple.   Guess again, Gringo.

      We waited until our server returned and asked her for the twenty five cent tour of the dishes that lay in front of us.  She informed us that the mystery dish that we had failed so miserably in guessing was turnip.  Turnip?  What kind of BBQ is this?  The remainder of the dishes were as follows:  broccoli with spicy chili sauce, korean pickled cucumber, seaweed, kimchi, turnip, fried green onion, bean sprouts, potato salad, steamed rice, raw garlic and jalapeno pepper, and finally a reconstituted fish paste concoction.  Oh, and I forgot the twelfth dish - a giant plate of lettuce leaves.  Again, I had to think, "What kind of BBQ is this?"

     Then came the Meat.  Glory, glory.  We began with beef short rib, raw and carefully stripped from the bone in long, thin segments.  With a hiss the beef hit the grill and I was confronted with the first reality of having a grill built into your table - Smoke.  Acrid smoke in your face.  I happened to have chosen the seat on the lee side of the exhaust draft and I was getting a face full.  I didn't let it diminish my excitement, however.  Within just a few short minutes the short rib was cooked and our server was patiently explaining that we were to take the large lettuce leaves and fashion a sort of soft taco from the meat and the various vegetables laid out in front of us.  The standard presentation seemed to be meat, starch (rice), and whatever your stomach desired.  I began with meat, starch, fried green onions, and bean sprouts.  The first bite proved to be surprisingly pleasant.  A new frontier, I thought.  And we pushed on....

      Pork was batting second that day.  Quizzing the server, I learned that we were having thinly sliced pork butt marinated in "Korean sauce".   The Korean equivalent of BBQ sauce, Korean sauce seems to be a mixture of chili sauce, tomato product, and a bunch of stuff I can't deduce.  I'll tell you this.  It was mildly spicy and not overt in its taste, but it was omnipresent.  All of our meat that day was soaked in this liquid, and I wish it wasn't.  Just like I don't trust a BBQ joint that sauces my pork before they serve it to me, I suspected there might be something to hide here.  I prefer a restaurant that serves its meat au natural and allows me the option to sauce as I deem fit.  Having said that, I liked the pork better than the beef - but that's no surprise really.  I'm a barbeque freak and barbeque is Pork.    The pork proved to be quite neutral and allowed me to focus on the garnishes.  My favorite presentation included lettuce, rice, and green onion.  Simplicity.

Feeling daring, our final course was to be squid.   I was more than a little fearful as I watched our server prepare the squid.  After years of eating calamari, I had become a little too distanced from what squid looked like it its natural state.  I had forgotten that squid were not little concentric circles.  In fact, they are quite large little buggers.   Our server cut the squid lengthwise into roughly inch long sections from stem to stern.  Watching these pieces hit the grill, I decided I would avoid the tentacles and focus on the more begnin looking head portions of squid.  I decided to abort the taco presentation and just take a swing at the meat.  Rubbery was my first thought.  Tire-like.  I worked my way through a few different pieces of the squid and discovered they were not all like the first bite.  Some bits were quite delicious and tender.    The tentacles were exactly as I expected.  Chewy to the extreme.   After our meal, I consulted with a few chef friends and learned that squid is one of those meats that is just quite unforgiving.  One minute too long on the fire and you move from good to awful.  In our case, I think we went a minute or two too long.

Having finished the squid, I realized that I was a little new at this food reviewing thing and had indulged too much in the early courses, leaving nothing for the grand finale.  As our server brought our check, I felt my distended belly and cursed my gluttony.  I'm not sure how the Kessler's of the world manage to eat their way through the menu and still manage to walk out the door.   I look forward to refining my techinque.

      

And So It Begins...

     Obsession is a term with which I've grown quite comfortable.  Most think of the word in the pejorative sense.  Me?  I see it as an compliment - an asset of character.  The object of my obsession for several years now has been cooking - specifically, cooking BBQ.

Barbeque is woven into the fabric of my being.  I grew up eating pulled pork sandwiches served on soft, white hamburger buns and chased with a ice-cold, hand squeezed Limeade at Bill's Barbecue on Broad street Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Old South.    Bill's barbecue sandwiches were served in their pristine state, without sauce, and topped with a layer of delicious cole slaw.  They came wrapped in parchment paper, secured to the sandwich by a single toothpick driven into the center of the top bun like Camelot's Sword in the Stone.  Their was something approaching pure magic in pulling out the toothpick and releasing the sandwich from it's crinkly cradle of white paper and taking that first, succlent mouthful of tender pork, kissed with smoke and offset by the tang of cole slaw.  If you cared to, you could doctor up your sandwich with a traditional North Carolina style vinegar sauce.    In my entire adult life, I've never managed to replicate that experience.  But I've been chasing that high ever since, like a heroin addict trying to get back to that first prick of the needle.  I've never considered it before just now, but I'm certain that is what drives my barbeque obsession today.

I no longer reside in Richmond.  I'm now a proud resident of the capital of the New South - Atlanta, GA.  We've got plenty of barbeque down here;  some of it even approaches good.  Unquestionably, it's not the same barbeque I grew up on.  Barbeque is rarely served without sauce down here.  The sauces that are served around these parts are inevitably tomato-based, sweet concoctions - resembling in no way the vinegar based sauces of my childhood.  I've come to appreciate the Georgian way of barbeque and love it in some strange way.  But I cling to the idea that truly great barbeque doesn't require sauce.  It proudly stands alone - a testament to the power of Smoke.

My obsession has driven me in several seemingly disparate directions.  I've taken classes and studied classical French cooking techniques.   I compete with a successful local competition barbeque team.  I currently apprentice at a French inspired, "creative American" restaurant - all of this in search of what I've come to think may be the Holy Grail of barbeque.   Foolish as it may seem ,  I believe that the marraige of classical culinary technique and traditional barbeque methods could lead to the evolution of the craft of  Barbeque.  At their core, classical culinary dogma and barbeque share a profound respect for preserving and enhancing the essence of the product being cooked - be it pork, beef, rabbit, or fois gras.   Somewhere in the middle of these two seemingly different diciplines is a virgin territory; an unexplored nouvelle cuisine I lovingly nicknamed Frou-B- Q.

Frou B- Q aims to take the perfection of a properly smoked piece of protein and enhance it with familiar, but jacked up, side dishes, sauces, or whatever.  Instead of serving cole slaw that resembles mayonaise soup, imagine a slaw of green apples and fennel tossed in apple cider vinegar complementing the pulled pork.  Or, continuing with the mayonaise example, instead of serving potato salad that has a yellowish pigment only found only in the most bold of Van Gogh paintings, imagine serving smoke roasted fingerling potatoes mixed with dry cured bacon, chives, and a buttermilk dressing along with your oak smoked tri-tip.

Frou Frou Q is not limited to side dishes.  It is more of an ethos that allows for the exploration of the enhancement of traditional barbeque, as long as the enhancement doesn't take barbeque too far away from its roots to the point where it becomes strange, deviant, or unfamiliar.  To my mind, this allows room for unconventional dry rubs, inventive cooking methods informed by science, or anything else your mind can conjure.

So, I've taken to the Internet to enlist the help of the legion of cooks, foodies, and barbeque fanatics lurking out there in the pursuit of  my dream.  My hope is to create a community of devoted, like-minded individuals from around the globe who share a love of barbeque and are interested in exploring the  possibile elevation of the craft.  It may be a fool's quest, but it's one that is close to my heart; it's my obsession and my passion.  Join me if you dare.