Doctored with Pepper
Never have I wanted to like a restaurant more. Inter Korea House has all the signs of greatness — a name that sounds like a connecting airline flight, a location out in BFE (get on Hull Street and keep driving), a 10-table dining room staffed by non-communicative servers and frequented by Koreans slurping buckwheat noodles like it was their last supper. This was gonna be good.
I’m charmed by the restaurant’s interior, which resembles a middle-class dining room during the Nixon administration: paintings of cherry blossoms peep above a lacquered room divider, lots of gold, a little black, and cute ceiling sconces circa 1970. If this place was in the Fan, it would be ironic, but deep on the Southside, it’s nostalgic.
I order Pork Tang Su Yuk, $10.99, from the placemat menu and the waiter drops off banchan (complimentary assortment of small plates) to whet the appetite. At Inter Korea House the banchan consists of huge hunks of raw white onion, a few pickled radishes, and — this is saying something — bland kimchee. Kimchee, which should taste like fermenting fish and garlic, is the Korean answer to salsa. You can pile it on anything, eat it by itself or serve it on the side. They erect museums to kimchee in Korea. Just not this kinchee.
On another visit, the Pork tang su yuk, $10.99, an Americanized dish of breaded and fried pork with mushrooms, is served in a sticky sauce akin to caramelized karo syrup. The dish is unbelievably awful, the meat tough and chewy, the sauce fitting for pancakes, not pork. The dish includes a side of shredded cabbage in a creamy French dressing. The only good thing I can say about this dish is that the salad matches the paint in the dining room.
O–jing uh bok geum, $12.99, or red pepper squid with julienned zucchini, shallots, hot & spicy sauce and rice noodles, is indeed hot — dirty hot — it isn’t too spicy, just loaded with so much funky red pepper that the dish tastes like insanely hot dirt. It proves to be the best dish I’ll order.
Jun gab ok, $36.99, one of the most expensive entrees on the menu, is not fresh tasting. It is a soy-sauced, sudsy-soupy serving of abalone, sea cucumber, cuttlefish and vegetables. When abalone is fresh, there is no matching its oceanic flavor, which is sort of like a cross between raw West Coast oysters and scallop sashimi. When abalone is bad, it tastes like rotten belly button. Guess which one this dish tasted like?
I really didn’t care about the lack of service at this place. I don’t expect a song and dance if the food is good, or even a refill of water, or more of the soju (Korean rocket fuel) I was drinking to get through dish after awful dish. I wanted to love this place, make it my secret spot, and I thought, maybe I didn’t order the right dishes. I noticed that almost every table had a dish of ja jang myun, $6.99, chewy, fat noodles topped with pork and vegetables in a black bean sauce. The table next to me tells me it is the specialty of the house.
I want to order the dish, but can’t get my waiter’s attention. The couple at the adjacent table leaves. I steal a spoonful of their leftover ja jang myun and bite into gelatinous beans and pork and gummy noodles. I spit the food in my napkin as the waiter comes over to ask what I’m doing, scolding me for eating someone else’s leftovers. It was the most we’d spoken all night.
10827 Hull Street Road
(804) 745-1147
What’s in the Stars:
0—don’t go
*-average
** above average
*** very good
**** excellent dining experience
Imagine learning to process caviar in Russia after a childhood of Cup-a-Soup. Needless to say, Varmit Pickeral was inspired. Thus began 20 years of restaurant gypsy-hood, beginning with Varmit’s first job as a dishwasher in an institutional kitchen and then trying out most any job Varmit could get in the hospitality industry, including; NC BBQ pit line-cook, cheese steward at Artisanal in Manhattan, grape picker, and specialty buyer for Balducci’s Food Lover’s Market in Northern Virginia.
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