Mirror of Korea, St. Paul or It's All One Meal, Man

Menu sampled:
Bul Go Gi (sliced beef marinated in chef’s sauce)
Go Dung U Gui (salted mackerel)
Soon dae Gook (Korean pork sausage & blood cake w/tripe and veggies)
Kim Chee Chi Gae (spicy kim chee stew w/pork, tofu and veggies)
Dahk Bok Uhm (hot & spicy stir fry w/chicken and assorted veggies)
Man Du Twee Gim (fried Korean dumplings)
Bin Dae Thuck (traditional Korean fried vegetable pancakes)

Drew:
Food is experiential. Take a second and think of a memorable meal. More than likely the circumstances surrounding the meal were as important as the food itself.

“My favorite dessert was that thing with strawberries we ate on our honeymoon on the terrace watching the sunset…”

“I’ve never had a steak as good as that night my friends came over and we opened the good wine.”

“To this day, I can’t smell zucchini without getting nauseous, due to that one drunken night at the frat house.”

“The taste of cabbage reminds me of being molested by Uncle Jerry.”

If you accept this premise, I recommend Mirror of Korea (MoK). Take someone you’re just beginning to date. It’s the perfect test. If they can’t enjoy the adventure of the pungent, putrescence of kim chee with tofu (#36), or the slightly anal-flavored blood cake & tripe (#30), then dump them right then and there. Why? Two reasons. First, you’ll dodge being trapped in a relationship with a closed-minded, incurious, bigot who won’t be accepting enough to understand when you eventually develop a late-life predilection for having your taint tickled by egg whisks. Second, you’ll sidestep marriage to an inevitably corpulent creature that associates food with love, and therefore tries to orally fill the gaping hole daddy made by drinking scotch in his underwear while watching Mexican wrestling and hitting on your friends.

I don’t eat a lot of Korean food, so I can’t tell you whether it was good by comparison. However, the tastes and smells were new (yet ancient), challenging, and enlivening. I recommend MoK for those who are intolerant of mundane foodstuffs and lactose. (3 tines)

Vin:
I know more about the clitoris than I do Korean food. That is not saying much. So it was with trepidation that I walked into Mirror of Korea. I normally would have done some research prior, but the WTF gang had only selected this as back-up once we arrived at our first place after closing. Mirror fit the criteria for the type of restaurant that we are looking for, having been around for 20 years and family owned, so why not. That brings to mind a larger question: How do you review a place when you have nothing to compare it against? If you've never had kim chee, and someone brings you deep-fried boxer briefs with guacamole, can you even make a worthwhile comment until you have a range of expectation? To me, the enjoyment of this entire WTF endeavor has been the adventure of getting out and trying something new and local. Jump in, order items that make a place famous and a few that you would never try alone, see what you like, and then write about it. At some places, and this one heads the list, it is more about the experience of trying something new than subtlety.

By far the greatest moment of the night was when the entrees arrived. We ordered liberally, and then it all came. By God, it was sensory anarchy. The frothing Kim Chee stews, with a whole mackerel, the reds and browns, and the smell of it all in front of me. This engendered no Pavlovian salavating. None of these foods was anything a white boy thought possible. All together it smelled like a marinated cat that had been boiled with a pair of old running shoes. The last thing I wanted to do was eat what was in front of me; my stomach and taste buds were in revolt, wishing for anything with the flavors from the homeland of Robbinsdale. Clearly, it was time to dig in. I was glad I did. The individual dishes were all a delight with one exception–and that is because I have a texture weakness. The mackerel was a little salty, but pleasing. The marinated beef was fantastic as well as was the chicken stir-fry; these two clearly were favorites with the university down the street. I also found myself going back for seconds on the spicy kim chee stew. The sour taste was wonderful, warming and it grew on you. About the only thing I didn't enjoy was the pork sausage stew with blood cakes. Actually, the broth in this stew was the best of the night. The tripe and blood cakes hit that texture that I find difficult to stomach: soft and chewy. I'd rather eat bugs before tripe (along with lutefisk, my two least favorite foods). I needed a whole Hite beer to get that tiny serving down.

Throw this all in with some helpful servers and endearing owners who came to check on the odd table eating blood cakes, and I'd go back to Mirror of Korea. It was a worthy choice for review; my reaction to that steaming and frothing table of food was worth it alone, especially after finding out how flawed those first impressions were. I don't know if I'd go as far as to crave this next week, but this is worth another visit. 2 out of 4 tines.

Curtis:
In the midst of another painfully long and cold winter, I was eager to head out to a relatively hidden restaurant in St. Paul for some steaming Pho, maybe a Banh Mi and Goi Cuon. Add to that a lot of booze, maybe some basement cockfighting, I was up for anything. After pulling into the nondescript parking lot and navigating to what is supposed to be the entrance in the back of a warehouse-type building, we find out they decided to shut down at 8:00 p.m. Really? Now I'm certain there's something delightfully sinister going on in there. Oh well, we'll save it for another review. Backup plan initiated, over to Mirror of Korea we go.

We arrived hungry, thirsty, and cold - but in good spirits. Our waiter could sense our hunger, or more likely, he was ready to end his work night and start his own weekend. Regardless, he was quick, attentive and extremely helpful. As usual, we tried to order a good mix of the menu, trying to include several meats along with a mix recommended by the staff. I should mention right away every single item that came to our plate seemed like it was completely fresh and just made. Nothing seemed like it was sitting around all night waiting for final prep.

For the appetizers, I thought the Bin Dac Thuck (traditional vegetable pancakes) were outstanding, quite a bit better than the Korean dumplings. The pancakes were crisp and hot on the outside, and soft and savory on the inside. I’m pretty fanatical about Asian dumplings, and those served here were only average.

So, on to the blood cake and tripe. At this point in the program I could pull out the phony Anthony Bourdain shtick about how modern American diners don’t know what they’ve been missing since giving up all the delights of feasting on each and every part of the carcass. Sometimes there’s a reason for that. Some parts taste better than other parts. Some parts don’t smell like they’ve been stored under Satan's scrotum for hundreds of years. As with most things in life, nothing is black and white, there’s a big gray area where most of the planet resides. The same can be said for the Soon Dae Gook (pork sausage and blood cake w/tripe and veggies). The tripe was good, a little chewy but pleasantly deep and earthy, a great complement to the bold broth it was served with. The blood cake threw me off a little bit, I was expecting blood sausage and figured it was a typo or some sort of misnomer. Actually it was soft and chewy, like cake. Bloody cake.

For me, the highlight of the meal was Go Dung U Gui (salted mackerel). The skin on the mackerel was extra crisp and salty, with a tender, flavorful flesh inside. Outstanding for loudly gnawing on with some ice cold Hite Korean lager on the side.

All in all, this was a very enjoyable, satisfying meal on another brutally cold winter night. Unfortunately, nothing made me say to myself “OMFG! Where have you been all my life!? I have to come here and eat (insert dish) every week until I die!” I will, however, definitely return for the pancakes, mackerel and beer.

Three out of four tines.

Trick:
Korea has always been something of a riddle to me. In Seoul you'll find international video game champions who rake in $300,000 a year because they were born with fast-twitch carpal flexors, but go 100 miles north and you'll find Dear Leader's heroic farmer cadres surviving by recycling latrine waste for fertilizer. There's also that peculiar language. If it's not related to Chinese and not related to Japanese, then where does it come from and why does the written text resemble the logograms of the alien language in V? And is it true that even in premodern times Korean people were always East Asia's tallest?

Though anthropologists, linguists, and historians have tried, I don't know that anyone will ever explain these mysteries definitively. But after my visit to Mirror of Korea, I've decided that someone had better explore the possibility of a link to Central Europe. For at least in culinary terms, the Korea I experienced for those two hours is where the steppe meets Szczecin, where Manchuria meets Malopolska. What was the Man Du Twee Gim, after all, if it wasn't a slightly tart version of peirogi? Like Polish dumplings, thy were pan-fried and stuffed with meat and light seasoning, but the vinegary soy dipping sauce made them even more delicious (and an even better accompaniment to beer).

The Go Dung U Gui took the Central European resemblances in a different direction. This mackerel dish was served simply and straight up for the fish lover: uncut, unfilleted, lightly grilled, and unadorned except for a kim chee side. It was how you might eat the day's catch along the Baltic coast. The kim chee was your sauerkraut, and the light salting was supposed to prepare your palate for the meat dishes, which were to be the heart of the meal.

The meat dishes more than matched this prelim. The sliced marinated beef with lettuce wraps (Bul Go Gi), a Korean mainstay, was served medium-well and still sizzling, which contrasted nicely with the crisp coldness of the lettuce. (Do you remember the McDonald's McDLT? You know, one side was hot, and the other side was cold. Well, it was that tasty.) The hot and spicy chicken stir-fry (Dahk Bok Uhm) was also a highlight, and unexpectedly so. You can get a hot and spicy chicken/pork/beef in any Asian restaurant, and no matter if it's Chinese, Vietnamese, or Thai, the dish is almost always drowning in a salty, MSG-laden gravy that makes the meat and veggies a soggy afterthought. But Mirror of Korea did it a little differently. Tipping the hat to their Magyar-Slovak cousins, they concocted a sauce that combined Hoisin flavors with a subtle paprika-like quality. It was interesting and unusual, and unlike most Minnesotans, I mean that in a good way.

The only Central European parallel that didn't work out very well was our decision, on a lark, to try the pork sausage and blood cake with tripe. Since I love Hungarian blood sausage, I figured this would be one of those disgusting-sounding dishes that is actually delicious (a la fried liver or bone marrow on toast). But, no, it was just disgusting. The problem is that this wasn't just cooked blood over a filler, like blood sausage. As the menu said, it was blood cake. That's a lot of blood, especially when it's coagulated. Combined with the glandular consistency of tripe, it was a little like eating the flu.

But don't let the blood cake turn you off. Steer clear of it and order everything else. Mirror of Korea is a wonderful Twin Cities original. I give it 3 of 4 tines.