Jungsik Bar; Some Thoughts on Fine Dining

A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I sat at a dimly lit bar sipping cherry beer, enjoying it so much that we began plotting other places we wanted to go and have a little drink soon. We practically jinxed each other when Jungsik Bar flew out of our mouths at the same time.

I haven’t been to Jung Sik Dang, yet. To be honest, for most of my adulthood (or at least, since I had the financial option of going to restaurants like Jung Sik Dang), I’ve maintained a kind of working class snobbery about high-end dining. Get enough cherry beer in me, in fact, and I could probably still manage to unfurl a decent rant on the subject. Nine times out of ten, I’ll still go for the home-cooked, the backwoods shithole or the street stall. But I have spent a lot of time with high-end restaurant chefs over the past few months (and I mean a lot of time — 10-12 hours in the back of the company van; sweaty, high-stepping treks through summer fields; scrambles up sides of mountains; and many, many humble meals).

Talking with them has helped me open my mind a bit — they don’t cook ridiculous food for ridiculous people to maintain a status divide. They don’t condescend the bowl of salad made from weeds a 75-year-old woman just plucked from the side of the road (if it tastes good — and it did). They love food. They taste things ordinary people (rich or poor) do not, and they know how to translate that for others. And yes, I think it’s a bum deal that their food is something only a certain kind of person will have the privilege of tasting in their lifetime, but it’s also a bum deal that some people will never have the opportunity to travel or own a home or receive proper medical care, or any number of other things.

I don’t know why the food thing hits me harder. I think part of it is just pride. Cooking is the one thing I’ve always felt the working class had up on everyone else. Historically, everyone else may have eaten the food, but who has always created it?

Last year when we (B, B’s brother and I) went to Kobe, though, mostly because of the boys, we got the notion to go in big for some proper Kobe beef. That meal honestly changed my life. I knew the importance of ingredients. I got the significance of technique. I still believe that the grandmothers of the world hold the true culinary world by the balls. But there is another side to things.

Yim Jungsik is the prince of new Korean cuisine. His Seoul restaurant, which opened in 2009, was named No. 10 on San Pellegrino’s Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants list this year, and his New York City follow-up is Michelin-starred (two). He claims he got into cooking while serving his mandatory army term, when he was assigned to cooking duty. B also swaggers about his army kitchen stationing on each and every one of the rare occasions he ambles into the kitchen to fry a sausage or an egg.

Things could have been different.

I was eager to check out the new bar that opened on the first floor of the Cheongdam restaurant, in mid-July, mostly because of the descriptions I’d read of drinks at his NYC restaurant (cocktails rimmed with crushed gim?), but unfortunately the new bar only does wine and liquor.

I’ve already said I’m not really a drinks person. I can appreciate a good drink, but it’s not my thing. I don’t know a whole lot about wine, but the liquor prices were pushing it for me, in terms of drink, so I pretty much pointed at the menu at random with full faith that whatever showed up would probably be lovely. The Zalto glasses the wine was served in felt like holding nothing. The wine was nice, but it’s going to take a bit longer for me to come around to high-level wine. I’ll drink any old swill, to be honest (not the case for beer, I’d like to point out — I have my limits). If you do love wine though, the bar’s extensive wine menu is bound to work for you.

So, no fusion cocktails. That left us with the food menu. I didn’t have any doubts about Jungsik’s food — I’ve heard too many rapturous comments from too many people I trust — people who don’t make rapturous comments. I found a few reviews in Korean that went to great lengths (literally, they were long — thousands of words) to pan it after it got the No. 10 rating. Everybody’s gotta be unique.

What I find interesting about the extensive wine list at this point in time is how hot the issue of Korean fine dining pairings is right now. I’ve read at least three articles in the last month bemoaning a lack of Korean traditional alcohol that doesn’t breach the 14% alcohol barrier, interrupting the flavor of the food rather than enhancing it, or hand-wringing over how it is impossible to find a good wine that won’t be drowned out by the intense flavors of Korean food. One of the harshest critiques I read of Jung Sik Dang, actually, was about the pairings. Part of me wonders if the new bar isn’t a somewhat purposeful venture into those shark-infested waters. I read an interview with Yim once in which he was asked that annoying question: Can what you’re doing really be called Korean food? It’s a question that doesn’t merit an answer, and Yim handled it perfectly by answering “no.” If Koreans don’t want to claim him, I’m sure New Yorkers would be happy to.

The bar is gorgeous inside, with a large circular bar seating area surrounded by a number of fairly private booths. The weather was fantastic, though, so we only saw the interior while passing through — we sat out on the small terrace instead, where the tables are well spaced and comfortable.

We ordered the mushrooms, which came topped with a Parmesan crisp and was great, in the sense that I love both mushrooms and Parmesan. It was good also in the sense of what it avoided, meaning the mushrooms were still warm and firm and had not been seasoned to the point of overpowering the mushrooms’ natural flavors. It was alright. It was good.

The crispy pork, though. It was the Kobe beef all over again. I think if I set myself one life goal and it was to someday cook pork that was that crispy on top and that tender and juicy inside, I’d be setting myself up for failure. And that, to me, is what brings a fine dining venue up to snuff — menu items I know I could never in a million years make myself, not even with the assistance of 100 grandmothers. Like the Kobe beef, not one drop of the ingredient’s essential essence had been squandered or railroaded. It was, to phrase it bizarrely, the porkiest pork I’ve ever eaten. It was served with onions pickled in soy sauce, and I waffled back and forth between preferring the two flavors combined and wanting to taste that pure porky goodness in its isolated form. Which, to me, is a good sign. How often is it that how you will experience each bite of something becomes a conscious concern?

After the pork, the man who I assume was the head waiter brought over the chocolate box. I chose the whiskey chocolate and the doenjang (fermented soybean paste) macaron. The head waiter (if that’s what he was) kept cringing every time we called it a doenjang macaron and tried to explain how it was subtly different. No need. We were sold the moment we realized what it was.

So, I also don’t really like macarons. They are often way too sweet without enough substance to back them up, for me. I don’t eat vanilla ice cream, I don’t drink Coke and I don’t eat macarons.

Doenjang, though. Come on.

It worked, too. They were not salty the way salted caramel or chocolate is — it wasn’t a high contrast of flavors. It was a subtle balancing, instead, and it worked.

We did the best we could with the photos out on the dark veranda. The place was pretty quiet for a Saturday night, so if you’re looking for a place to wreck your bank account, but only mildly and with something that you won’t regret, give it a shot. I think it is also a good way to decide if a full meal at the restaurant would be worth it for you or not, which is part of the reason why I wanted to go to the bar first. For me, I think it would definitely be worth it, and I plan to return soon for the real deal.

Jungsik Bar is alternatively called Bar Jungsik in English. I’ve seen it spelled, by the bar itself, both 정식바 and 정식빠. The address is Gangnam-gu, Seolleung-ro 158gil 11 (서울 강남구 선릉로158길 11). Walk straight out of Apgujeong Rodeo Station exit no.4 and turn left onto Seolleung-ro 158gil. Walk up the hill until you see Jung Sik Dang on your left. The bar is on the first floor.