SIGN AT ABC SEAFOOD

After having been totally spoiled from my years in Tampa with access to China Yuan, one of the first questions I asked upon moving to St. Pete was, Where’s your most authentic Chinese restaurant. At that time, an extremely authentic St. Pete Chinese restaurant (Lucky Star) was still out of business after its kitchen had burned and I had no idea where to go. There are the usual Chinese take-out places, which are fun, but not authentic, and there are a few of the dreaded Florida-style Chinese buffets. But was there any authentic Chinese restaurant?

Fortunately there was: ABC Chinese Seafood Restaurant (2705 54th Ave. N. #3; 727-522-1888). As is often the case with culinary gems, its location and outward appearance is deceiving. Nestled in a long, strip-mall just west of I-275 with a tattoo parlor its next-door neighbor, you’d be more than likely to give the ABC a pass if you didn’t know it is extremely authentic.

Like the China Yuan, all its seafood is still live, swimming in tanks, for you to choose. The roast ducks hang by the kitchen. It’s filled with huge round tables with large lazy-susans in the middle for extended families to sit around, sharing dishes. The numerous times I’ve been there every dish has been perfect. My favorites are the spicy eggplant with tofu and the honey walnut shrimp, but their selections are much wider than that: more than a dozen different selections from each of the following categories: appetizers, soups, lobster & crabs, oysters & clams, frog & conch, seafood (shrimp, scallop & calamari), and various fish; plus, casseroles, poultry, beef & pork entrees, tofu & vegetables, and various rice and noodle dishes. It’s an enormous menu.

The authentic Chinese restaurant I’d mentioned earlier than had burned, Lucky Star, has reopened in a new location (4175 66th St. N., St Petersburg, FL 33709; 727-381-8888‎). I’ll be reporting on it soon. It’s as good as ever. Now that it’s open again St. Pete has two first rate, A++, authentic Hong Kong-Cantonese style restaurants. I recommend them both to you very highly. When you try the ABC Seafood, try to arrive a little early to enjoy nosing around the other shops. There are several of interest.

BUNS FROM JOANS ANN BAKERY

Joans Ann Bakery (2705 54th Ave. N. #14, St. Petersburg, FL 33714; 727-525-0632), just a few doors down from the ABC, has freshly made selections. I picked up a mung bean bun and a savory ham and corn bun (pictured here). If you’ve never had mung bean paste, it’s difficult to describe. It’s both sweet and savory at the same time. One quickly develops an addiction to it.

The ABC is only open in the evenings, but the Jung-Il Oriental Food & Gift (2705 54th Ave. N. #10, St Petersburg, FL 33714; 727-528-9010), another of its neighbors in the strip mall, is a Korean grocery and deli lunchery. The last time I was there it was advertising lunch specials of bibimbab, bulgogi (a dish I’ve written about before here and here), and hot fried squid.

It’s nice to know where you can get good Korean food. St. Pete has many excellent Thai restaurants and the two excellent Chinese restaurants mentioned here, but–other than the Jung-Il–I’ve yet to find a good Korean restaurant in St. Pete (Tampa has several). Authentic St. Pete Japanese restaurants also hard to find (I’m not counting sushi places, of which there are several, or Japanese steak houses).

The Jung-Il also has a quite respectable offering of Asian groceries including some that even the larger stores don’t carry, such as a wide assortment of Furikake, various mixtures of seasoned seaweed & sesame seeds used to flavor rice and to coat seared meat and fish. I made its acquaintance when living in Hawaii and it’s become a standard item among my spices right next to the garlic and ginger.

So, head up to 54th Ave. N., soon. You’ll enjoy your experience in this taste of authenticity of St. Pete’s small, but wonderful Asian community.

click here for larger image
STRIP MALL WITH ABC SEAFOOD, JOANS ANN BAKERY, S& C WEST INDIAN FOOD,AND JUNG-IL ORIENTAL FOOD & GIFT STORE

NOTE: I’ve upgraded the Index page (one of the tabs underneath the banner) to include a listing of all posts by major category as well as the reverse chronological order listing. I’ve also added my favorite restaurant listings, grouped by type, in a Restaurants page. For now, that page is just St. Pete, but I’ll eventually expand it to include Tampa. Where a restaurant has a corresponding Inkwatu article, I’ve given a link to that article from the Restaurant page.

Sa Ri One

In an earlier post on Atlanta’s Seoul Gardens Korean Japanese Restaurant, I talked about bulgogi, Korean barbeque.

A restaurant in Tampa that I’ve gone to ever since it opened is Sa Ri One Korean Bulgogi Restaurant (3940 W. Cypress St., Tampa, FL 33606; 813-874-2911). It’s a little pricey, but not so much at lunchtime which is when I usually go. It’s an excellent restaurant with really good food that I’ve introduced many friends to over the years. I don’t get back as often as I’d like since moving to St. Pete, but when on the Tampa side, if possible, I try to contrive to be in Sa Ri One’s neighborhood around lunch.

Please give it a try. It’s small, intimate, family owned and operated, and they’ve always been very helpful if there was something I didn’t understand or a side dish I couldn’t figure out. Although bento box lunches are Japanese, not Korean, at lunchtime, they have all their dishes available bento style, with a little of this, a little of that, plus the traditional Korean side dishes (banchan). It’s the best deal price-wise.

Kamja Jeon

I usually get the chicken bulgogi, but one day, I was feeling sort of “off my feed,” a bit out of sorts and not terribly hungry. The waiter suggested I try their potato pancake, kamja jeon. It was a good call: light, nourishing without being filling, very fragrant, very tasty. I suppose one large very thin pancake could be split—as a side dish or appetizer—by two people, but it was just right as the main fare for me, alone. I was also in a “vegetarian” frame of mind that day (I’m not always) and the waiter assured me it was vegetarian. Here’s another recipe for Korean potato pancakes at Skindleshanks blog.

I suppose one reason the kamja jeon had such a “comfort food” effect on me was that our family often had potato pancakes when I was a child (rural preacher’s families often only had potatoes and onions in their larder in those days). Nothing better than a potato pancake on a cold Saturday morning, topped off with apple butter!

Potato pancakes are, of course, a comfort food for just about every culture that grows potatoes. Jewish Latkes, Swedish Rarakor, German Kartoffelpuffer! Indian, Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian cuisines also have their own style of potato pancakes. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were true for many other cultures.

Hilton’s Experiment

Earlier this year, I tried making the Bobby Flay recipe, Blue Corn Crab Cakes
with Mango-Green Onion Relish, for a friend and myself. They tasted great, but somehow I didn’t get all the relative proportions of ingredients correct because, they completely fell apart. They looked horrible but they tasted great!

Well…writing about the potato pancakes at Sa Ri One made me terrifically hungry for potato pancakes. Alas, no pancakes in this home, nor have there been for decades, other than the occasional sweet potato. But, I happened to have some leftover brown rice in the fridge. So, I climbed on the Internet and started searching for rice pancakes. There are such things–mainly Thai is what I found–but every recipe I found had sugar in it. I was in the mood for “savory,” not “sweet.”

I decided to try the recipe for Korean potato pancakes from a food blog with a very nifty niche, Pancakes at Dawn, but substituting leftover brown rice for the leftover potatoes. The results were just like my failed crab cakes. They completely fell apart, but…they tasted great (snapshot immediately below).

I suspect there’s more starch in potatoes than in rice and that would hold the ingredients together better. I’m going to buy some potatoes and try the Pancakes at Dawn recipe again. I suspect they’ll turn out great if I follow the recipe.

This post, the one before it, and the next one, all concern three Asian culinary treats I recently explored in Atlanta with my son who lives there. The last post mentioned kimchi and banchan. Those, of course, were a part of our meal at Atlanta’s Seoul Gardens Korean & Japanese Restaurant (5938 Buford Hwy NE, Doraville, GA 30340-1332; 770-452-0123).

We’d been to another restaurant in this same building ages ago, long before it was a Korean restaurant. At that time, it was a typical suburban Friday’s inspired fern bar. The Seoul Gardens owners who bought the building transformed it into a quiet respite from Atlanta’s traffic. The privacy provided by the booths create an intimate atmosphere. But the open, at-table barbeque grills enliven the ambiance. A very inviting place. As my son might say, “A good place to take a date.”

This was our second time eating at Seoul Garden and we both had the same dish again: Bulgogi. I’d become addicted to bulgogi at the Sa Ri One in Tampa (discussed much farther down the page), so I’d been anxious to compare the dish with how it’s prepared at Seoul Gardens. They were obviously made from entirely different recipes. The two versions were so dissimilar, I would never guess they were named the same. The Tampa Sa Ri One version has a heavier sauce and is a lot spicier. The Atlanta Seoul Gardens version has no sauce, but is sweet, and had obviously been marinated much longer. I love both versions! I truthfully don’t know enough to compare either version to how it might be authentically made in Korea.

It should be no surprise that the recipes for bulgogi available on the Internet are as varied as my two experiences with it; however, they all seem to share a few basic ingredients: soy sauce, sugar, sesame oil, garlic, pepper and onions. Plus, one unusual key ingredient to be revealed shortly!

A few, representative recipe links:

• http://mylittlecyberspot.aminus3.com/image/2005-04-04.html
• http://www.recipezaar.com/157213
• http://www.bigoven.com/160319-Bulgogi-recipe.html
• and countless others!

maangchi.com is a vast website about Korean food that simply must not be missed. It’s the definitive source of information about, and photos of, Korean food. She also has a blog. Here are a couple other Korean food blogs I subscribe to: Seoul Eats, whose author I quote a little later, and Food Korea. You might also enjoy this interesting article of observations on the Do’s and Don’t’s of eating Korean barbeque.

When I lived in Honolulu, a friend introduced me to the whole at-table barbeque thing. The number of Korean barbeques in Honolulu is staggering. Check out this list at Chowbaby. My favorite one in Honolulu had, as does Seoul Garden in Atlanta, at-table grills: shallow wok shaped grills set into holes in the centers of the tables. Sometimes these grills are heated by gas (as it was in my Honolulu favorite), sometimes, electricity. At Seoul Garden, the meat is brought to the table for you to grill yourself. At the Honolulu one, the meats were available in a long buffet of various raw meats, from which you chose the meat to take to your table to grill. A buffet of raw meats is a little intimidating, even to a guilty carnivore such as myself. (All due respects and acknowledgments for that expression, “guilty carnivore,” the title of one of my favorite, non-Korean-food blogs: Guilty Carnivore. It’s such an inspired title, it sums up my own food attitudes: I would love to be a vegetarian but just can’t, for whatever reason.)

The experience of getting to cook your own meat at your own table is a lot of fun. One bit of clarification. Bulgogi is a Korean barbeque, but not all Korean barbeques are bulgogi! (For a further discussion of syllogisms, see Aristotle). See this Wikipedia page for a full discussion of Korean barbeque. Further, the times I’ve had bulgogi it was served as an already cooked entree. The at-table barbeque meals I’ve had were all non-marinated meat Korean barbeques. Bulgogi is definitely a marinade in all recipes I’ve seen.

I asked Daniel Gray of Seoul Eats for clarification of this. Here is what he wrote: “Bulgogi is a marinated thinly sliced beef that’s grilled. It is a form of Korean BBQ. Essentially anything on the grill is BBQ. As for spelling, EVERYTHING is misspelled in Korea. The Korean name “Lee” is really pronounced “Eee” but people spell it like, “Rhee, Ree, Yee, etc.” I’ve seen bulgogi spelled “pulgogi” here. [Daniel is in Korea teaching English as a second language.] Real bulgogi is meat marinated with Asian pear, soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, and a little wine. It’s all about the Asian Pear.”

To my knowledge, there is no sit-down Korean restaurant in St. Petersburg, but there are at least 5 on the Tampa side of the bay. My absolute favorite at which I’ve eaten many times is Sa Ri One Korean Restaurant (3940 W. Cypress St., Tampa, FL 33607;813-874-2911). I’ve also eaten at Coreawon (926 East Fowler Ave., Tampa, FL 33612; 813-866-8262), but since I tend to favor smaller, cozier, family owned and operated places, I prefer Sa Ri One.

I’ve eaten several times at Matoi Sushi (602 N. Dale Mabry Highway, Tampa, FL 33609;813-871-3233). Although the name stresses sushi, they have a rather large number of Korean dishes, all good. There are two other restaurants I have yet to try but intend to soon. The first is Rice Restaurant & Lounge (7525 West Hillsborough Ave., Tampa, FL 33615-4103; 813-889-7766), which has the at-table barbeques. A very web savvy restaurant, they publish PDFs of their menus and even provide an off-site link with excellent information about Korean cuisine.

The other Tampa restaurant I have yet to try is Soul of Korea (7612 N. 56th St., Tampa, FL 33617; 813-989-9030‎). I’m also trying to track down a restaurant out on Waters where a Korean friend took me and a visiting educator from Korea for a lunar new year’s dinner (with the traditional new year’s soup). It was packed and I was the only non-Korean eating there. (A sure sign the food is good.) If I can ever relocate this place, I’ll report on it…after I finish having some more of that spectacular soup! If you know the name of this restaurant or even if it’s still in existence, please comment!

St. Petersburg does have Dong A Market (2600 30th Ave. N., Saint Petersburg, FL 33713; 727-321-3300), which carries some packaged Korean meals. I haven’t yet tried Dong A.

One parting, additional comment about Atlanta’s Seoul Gardens: their fried rice is simply—without exaggeration—the best I’ve ever had in my life. I can’t explain it. The flavor is elusive and multi-layered. I had no idea such a simple dish could be so good. I have a new quest: discovering other restaurants with fried rice as good as that at Atlanta’s Seoul Gardens.

Please take just a second and click on this link: Super H Mart. Thanks! Neat, huh? That’s the main page for a Korean grocery store chain that I truly, truly wish had a branch in Tampabay. Now, if you haven’t already done so, return to that link and in the upper right hand corner, click on the word, “English” and explore the site a bit. [Patiently waiting while Leroy Anderson’s “Syncopated Clock” plays in the background...can’t remember how it goes? Sure you do: listen to a sample of it HERE.] I hope you enjoyed your exploration of the Super H Mart website; I certainly enjoyed exploring a bricks-and-mortar store of theirs when, recently, I visited my son, who lives in Atlanta.

My son shares my enthusiasm for things Asian, including Asian food. We spent one whole day together trooping around part of the city, checking out different international markets and restaurants. I don’t know if he shares my enthusiasm for durian—the fruit pictured above near the entrance to Super H Mart. I absolutely adore durian in every form, including milkshakes. The only problem is, its smell is so foul (!) that there are signs all over hotels in Asia prohibiting taking any to your room! Even when just having a durian milkshake in a restaurant, other nearby customers glare at you and, when you order it, the waiter always asks, “Are you sure?!”

The Super H Mart has a food court that, as you can see, is extensive. What you can’t see so easily is that all of the foods are Korean cuisine. Even Korean restaurants—which, sadly, are few in Tampabay (although there are a couple to be covered in the future)—never offer as wide a selection of dishes as this food court. One could eat there daily for a month and not repeat a choice. All the foods are freshly, and continuously, prepared.

Even though my son and I limited our adventures to just a small section of Atlanta near his home, we still didn’t even begin to scratch the surface. Atlanta is definitely a cosmopolitan city. Although the U.S. Census Bureau gives the Asian population of the city of Atlanta as only 1.9%, judging from the number of commercial establishments, it seems much larger. That may be because there is a relatively large number of foreign born citizens in Atlanta (6.6% of the population) who, perhaps, have an intense interest in preserving–duplicating even–the familiar resources of their original homelands.

Whatever the reason, Atlanta’s diverse population is very much in evidence, especially when it comes to food. For that reason, today’s post, and the next two, are going to cover three gems from Atlanta’s bounty of wonderful ethnic culinary treasures.

Pictured above are live (very much alive) crabs that one may choose, take home alive, and boil alive for supper. Live seafood is not at all unusual in Asian markets. Nor, for that matter, unusual in Asian restaurants. At China Yuan over in Tampa—to be covered in a coming post—you can ask for the live, swimming eel of your choice to be prepared for your dinner. Of course, live lobsters are commonplace in even non-Asian seafood restaurants. Buying and boiling live crustaceans was a common event along the Gulf Coast of Mississippi when I was a youth. It still is in certain parts of the coast and over in Louisiana.

Although there is a world-wide shortage of rice, there is certainly no shortage of rice steamers at the Super H Mart. I think it may be time to replace my own soon…wonder if there’s an under-the-counter model to conserve countertop space!

This sweet, wonderful woman agreed, happily, to pose for us and to be pictured in my blog. She was selling an assortment of fresh, sweet sticky rice cakes. If you ever have the chance to try sticky rice, please do yourself a favor and buy extra. You’re more likely to see it advertised as mochi (the Japanese word for it) than as hangul (the Korean word) or even “sticky rice.” Asian desserts are excruciatingly SWEET! Mochi is no exception. I enjoyed it far too often while living in Hawaii where it is much too readily available to us carb addicts.

Hey…what do you expect?! It’s a Korean supermarket. That’s an entire wall of kimchi! Kimchi is fermented and highly seasoned cabbage. Wonderful stuff. (Do take into consideration that that opinion is from someone who likes to drink sauerkraut juice!) Kimchi is just one of the many vegetable side dishes (usually at least 6) that are served with all Korean meals. These dishes are called banchan. Banchan is THE primary reason I enjoy eating at Korean restaurants. (Talk about getting your fiber!) Coming soon will be more on my ethnic culinary adventures in Atlanta with my son, including an outstanding Korean restaurant there…and lots of kimchi!