Gooldaegee, Annandale, Va

I'm learning that one difference between being older and being young, when it comes to my taste in restaurants, is that now I go to restaurants for the food. When I was younger, I went for the decor, the "right" kind of people, the coolness factor and especially the high number of unapproachable girls.



I bring this up because I went to Gooldaegee, a Korean grill house in Annandale, VA, on July 12 with my family and a son belonging to my wife's friend. The name Gooldaegee is probaby better broken up and spelled as Gool Daejee, which can be loosely translated as honey pig or oinking pig. You guessed it, they have a lot of pork on the menu.



Any how, I did a Google search to see if they had a web site. They did not, but I clicked on to one of those sites where people can give their reviews of restaurants they've visited. At this particular review web site, everyone posting a comment seemed at least 20 years younger than I am. Let me set the record straight and say that I believe that the opinions of young people should be heard. Let me also insist that their opinions should be on point. The great majority of comments of the 20-something-year old critics of this restaurant centered around the customers or non-eating experience (obnoxious teens, obnoxious middle-aged men, obnoxious surroundings, obnoxious wait for a table, etc.). Now, I am not known for putting up with bad service or long waits, but in the case of this restaurant the criticisms of the young are, well, naive. If there is only a single restaurant/store/bar/whatever of its kind in the immediate area you live in, and if the lines are long and if everybody goes there because that establishment is the only one of its kind within within reasonable driving distance, just go and eat and get over trying to be cool.



Gooldaegee's concept by itself isn't new. Go to Korea and this kind of restaurant is everywhere. Go to any large U.S. metropolitan area, then a Gooldaegee-like place is there or is coming soon. The concept is simply a place where the entire emphasis on grilling meat on your table. Yes, the number of Korean restaurants where you grill meat at your table is huge, but at Gooldaegee the meat is its basic emphasis.



Our meal was simple, but before I get to that I should mention that this restaurant shifted the economics of soju, the vodka-like drink favored by Koreans. Soju is cheap to make. In Korea, it probably costs $3 retail for about a pint-sized bottle. In the Washington, DC, area soju used to sell for at least $15 a bottle. Then Gooldaegee came along and fixed its price of soju at just under $10. The local Koreans began flocking to the restaurant to guzzle soju with their meal, and this forced other eating establishments to match the $10 price. Competition is a wonderful thing for the consumer.

Our meal consisted of marinated beef short ribs, sliced pork belly and sliced pork, all grilled at the table on a grilling pan. The pork belly came last, as that was grilled with a large segment of napa kimchi that the waitress scissored up on the grill. The restaurant was hot, smoky and loud, but the food was good and the soju was cheap. The cost for the four of us, including 2 bottles of soju, was about $100.

Epilogue. I went there more recently and ordered the spicy beef intestine. When the dish comes out to the table, they don't disguise the fact that I ordered what I ordered: it looked like intestines on the plate. On the grill the casing started to bloat from the heat. Eventually the waitress cut it up into bite-sized pieces. Soon after we started eating it off the grill, rice was added to the remaining juices/marinade to make intestine stir-fry. Very tasty, but spicy.

Woo Lae Oak, Tysons Corner

Tonight my family had Chicken Out carryout. Maybe I'll write about Chicken Out sometime, but most of you know this place.

Last night we went to Woo Lae Oak, a chain of about 6 or 7 restaurants (the last time I looked), serving Korean food. The first restaurant opened in Korea, I think, but I really don't know. More interesting to me is the rumor that I heard when there were only 3 or 4 Woo Lae Oaks -- that the owner opened a different restaurant for his wife and girlfriends to keep them all happy and busy. This is only a rumor, and something I only heard twice from people who have no connections to the restaurant, the original owner, managers or anyone connected to the restaurant, so don't take my word for it.

I've eaten at three Woo Lae Oaks, L.A., Arlington (VA) and Tysons Corner (VA). I might have eaten at the Seoul, Korea, location, but I can't remember.

The one constant seems to be that their kalbi (cubes of beef rib cooked on a grill at your table) is very good. The Tysons location experimented with Asian fusion food when they first opened, but that bad idea stopped quickly. As a friend of mine once said at another fusion place while eating not-so-satisfying fusionized ramen noodles, "[Asians] spent thousands of years perfecting this dish, so why mess around with it?"

I don't have much other to say about Tysons Woo Lae Oak, except that its spicy cod fish stew was pretty good. But most real Korean food, and the cod fish stew is real, takes time for the typical Western tastebud to get used to. Once you develop a taste for it, though, you will miss it if you don't get enough of it. My son, for instance, started salivating at the mere mention of kimchi (spicy pickled cabbage) since he was about two.

Kountry Kitchen, Kauai, Hawaii

I haven't been to Kauai in several years, but the Kountry Kitchen still pops into my thoughts from time to time. A friend of mine told me to check it out, and so my wife and I looked up this restaurant the first or second time we went to Kauai. I don't know if they still serve the kimchi omellette that we tried, but I hope they do. It was just an interesting surprise that we had to taste. It was good, in a different way.