Review: Hangook Kwan in Creve Coeur

Over the years, when people have asked the Guru if he cooked, the standard – and 95 percent correct – response has been. "I'm a specialist. I don't cook. I eat."

That concept came under attack recently at Hangook Kwan, a friendly, interesting, Korean restaurant whose menu has many excellent dishes. It's tucked away in the northeast corner of a strip mall at Olive and Fee Fee. I was slightly surprised when my table had a large hole, about a foot in diameter, in its middle. There was an aluminum lid on top, and when I removed it, there was a cooking grill, slightly below table level. There were rectangular compartments flanking it: One held a small propane tank, the other housed the controls for the grill.

Darn clever, I thought, and then wondered if my cooking skills were about to be tested. Well, they were, but the need was so basic even the Guru could handle it. In other words, all I had to do was put thinly sliced meat and vegetables on the grill. Let them cook a few minutes and observe the done-ness. Remove and eat. Simple enough, even for a Guru.

Hangook Kwan seems to act as a sort of social club for the Korean community. It has an almost-exclusively Asian clientele, racks of Korean-language newspapers for reading and customers, composed of dating couples, family groups, students or fellow-workers, who chat, or seriously discuss, in their native languages. Or they watch the big-screen television, lined up so that about half the room can see it clearly while the other half can ignore it, just as clearly.

In my experience, Korean cooking has relationships with most Asian cuisine. Lots of vegetables, garlic, rice, rice noodles, dumplings of various types, grilled or fried whole fish, much soy sauce. Like the Japanese sukiyaki, there is some tabletop, or tableside, cooking, but while sukiyaki is cooked in meat juices, spices and vegetables, Korean Bul Go Ki, or Bul Go Gi, involves strips of meat on a grill, giving it more of the aspect of barbecue. I've seen Korean cookers shaped like rounded pyramids, so that meat juices, and fat, run down to a trough below. Hangook Kwan's table-insert cookers also keep the meat and vegetables on a grill above the flame.

In a presentation similar to the "sambals," or many small side dishes holding many delicious things, there are dishes with sauces for dipping; rice; the ubiquitous kim chi (or chee), a very peppery pickled cabbage (or radishes, or turnips); very tiny preserved fish, much like anchovies with glistening eyes and a glorious flavor of fish and salt; the odd presence of American potato salad; jellied tofu; unjellied tofu, a tangy and delicious soy-ginger paste, lettuce leaves for wrapping the meat after cooking and other unfamiliar, but intriguing, tastes and textures.

And the little dishes do pile up. On one visit, a party of four counted some two dozen of them, filled with tasty delights

Small dishes also hold slices of garlic and of jalapeño peppers. They're to be grilled, and the browner the garlic, the sweeter the flavor. The peppers can be eaten raw, but like the garlic, cooking calms the heat.

Two appetizers struck my eyes, and my taste buds. Steamed dumplings, dome-shaped, arrive as a trio, each slightly larger than half a baseball. They're white and soft, and while they look as though they would be doughy, but they're surprisingly light (probably from their rice flour beginnings) and filled with a little meat, cabbage and various other vegetables, slightly on the tangy side, with a soy-vinegar sauce for dipping. These are not the so-called Shanghai soup dumplings, whose skin is harder and which are filled with tasty liquid and meat. An order is a large appetizer for two people, and can satisfy three or four of smaller appetites.

The other winning appetizer is a scallion pancake, an appetizer common to Asian cuisine. Both Chinese and Vietnamese chefs make the scallion pancake in their own styles, but that at Hangook Kwan was lighter and, in my opinion, better. The pancake, like an omelet, is large and round, cut into wedge-shaped pieces, and the lightly cooked green onions, along with bits of pork, shrimp, squid and other tasty things, were delicious. On the first visit, the pancake was extremely tasty, but rather greasy, but as the old song goes, "pancake is lovelier the second time around," when it was dry, with crisp edges. A delicious dish.

Main courses involve those to be cooked at tableside (or mid-table) and those that come from the kitchen, with the latter piping hot and in a pleasing presentation. Spicing can be had as desired, and the servers, even those with some language problems, responded properly.

A whole-fish special on one visit was a mackerel, one of the Guru's favorites because it tastes like fish, and not chicken or tofu. A light batter and quick frying kept it tender and sweet, and it was highly successful.

A cod-based stew was quite peppery, and included chunks of cod (some with bones, so be careful) and a few vegetables, in a rich stock, but I'd have liked more vegetables, as a real stew should have. Kim chi stew, with pieces of pork, is fiery, but the Guru liked it.

A hot item on fancy New York menus these days is pork belly, which basically is uncured bacon, sliced into strips or chunks. Hangook Kwan brings it out to put on the grill, like its Bul Go Gi, and it's very tasty, and more like roast pork than bacon because it lacks the flavor of the cure. A plate of the strips, nicely arranged, comes to the table along with a pair of scissors. Maybe the scissors are for Westerners, but they certainly are handy when it comes to cutting the strips of meat into pieces a St. Louisan can handle with chopsticks. Again, a delicious dish with some of the condiments like the tofu or, giving it a St. Louis barbecue flair, the potato salad.

The menu also shows Kal Bi, or short ribs, which looked superb on the table of a nearby diner, and when the menu reads Dak Bul Go Gi, it means chicken instead of beef. Another Korean classic is Bi Bim Bop, a braised beef and vegetable dish in the Asian style, served over rice and under an egg cooked sunny side up.

Tea was the drink of choice, though beer and soda are available, but there's a shortage of desserts. We got a rather blank look when we asked, but our server then disappeared into the kitchen and returned a few minutes later with a platter of cantaloupe and maraschino cherries, nicely displayed and a fine ending.