Weirdest Restaurant Ever


Weirdest Restaurant Ever

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Written by Matt Landau

Thursday, March 02 2006

When you look at Restaurant Bar Korea House from the outside, it looks like a normal restaurant. The closer you get to sitting down and dining there, the further that feeling gets from the truth. From the street, the sign is dimly lit and dying—flickering and making buzzing sounds like the vacant sign at a rundown motel. Korean, Chinese, and Japanese Foods it says.

The area outside the main entrance to Restaurant Bar Korea House is astroturf and it reads very similar to the green on a putt-putt course. The main door is a large heavy wooden thing with medieval looking locks and bars—each of which were open the night I went. Rebecca opened it and we thought we were in the wrong place: two teenage Asian boys sitting at a table playing some sort of handheld Nintendo in a dimly lit family room-looking place—a green canister of Pringles on the counter. I looked around desperately for any sign of a restaurant, when a small lady walked out from the back and welcomed us in. At this point, I still wasn't sure I was in the right place. Laulau, is this a restaurant or your home?

She made a scooty gesture with her hand and waved us to a table in the back. Now, the tables at Restaurant Bar Korea House are hilarious. Each is wooden with an industrial sized portable gas burner centerpiece. A plastic gas tube runs from each burner, through a perfectly drilled hole in the table where it coils up on the ground below, like a garden hose. The other end then runs suspiciously out, through the dining room floor, and into a gas source on the wall—above which is a sign that says no smoking in three languages. Each table is equipped with the same rig. The main room at Restaurant Bar Korea House reminded me of Mrs. Kruegel's 9th grade science lab.

Around each table were chairs that looked like they had been donated by the nearest convention center: plain, metal, and minimal cushage. Beside my table were two traditional Korean masks with long locks of fake hair. There was a large framed photo of floundering Koi on some remote Asian shore. And a Toyota Racing calendar with a photo of their latest speed machine: "Maximum Breaking Power" it said. The wall-to-wall carpeting was throw-up brown.

I was handed a duo of menus. One was only pictures, no words. Beside the photo of each complicated dish was a number scribbled in blue marker—some of the numbers had been scratched off. The second menu was like the legend. Descriptions and numbers which coordinated to their photo counterparts. It was really pretty funny. Especially because some of the numbers were out of order or erased. Ordering my meal was like a scavenger hunt!

When I figured out what I wanted, I ordered. Then little old lady then brought me four small donut-sized ramekins of pickled vegetables (a Korean favorite). She put them down very gingerly—almost so softly I couldn't hear it. I had a great, obviously homemade kim chi (a pickled cabbage chock full of chili and garlic) as well as sweet pickled turnip. I envisioned large jars of pickling veggies like human organs marinating in fomaldehyde. This place was totally Bill Nye.

For entrees, the Korean-style sushi was very good: warm beads of sesame-scented sushi rice bundled up with crisp, taught seaweed and crunchy veggies. The stir-fried shrimp were really good too—although some chili escaped down Rebecca's wind pipe (if that's possible I don't know—that's just the way she described it). Overall, the meal was bizarre. I asked the second waitress what they used the large burners for...

“You have your meal cooked?" she said in English--but in this weird inflection--I didn't know if she was asking a question or making a statement.

“I have my meal cooked?” I half-questioned.

“Yes. Here” she insured me pointing at the burner.

"Oh. Si"

From the ensuing conversation in Spanish (which neither of us spoke well) I concluded that with every order, you have the option of having your food prepared tableside. Table top stir frying or not, Restaurant Bar Korea House is hilarious. It's so weird it's almost like a joke. If that's what they're going for...I'll buy it.

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