This restaurant is sandwiched at the cusp of Sunnyside between a AYCE Korean BBQ restaurant and a newly opened Sonic fast food joint. The menu looks pretty traditional Korean, and it’s always nice to try these types of restaurants in different neighborhoods. This one is rarely as busy as its next door neighbors, but I had some expectations of how this would turn out. When we arrived at 5:30 PM on a Friday evening, we were the only patrons in the restaurant. So how was it?

Ambiance

The decor feels very new age Korean like. They have these private rooms that seem like you can reserve if desired.

The service itself was very speedy and attentive.

Food

The bohae (black raspberry wine) is really good and light. It has a distinct sweetness to it, but it’s really smooth and quite complimentary with our meal.

This is the banchan which is just an arrangement of complimentary Korean side dishes. These included kimchi, bean sprouts, pickled radish, pickled cucumbers, and potato salad. All of this was pretty good and original. They offer additional complimentary refills of the sides if you want.

They also gave one of the egg souffles and of course this tasted pretty good as well.

My partner ordered the mushroom tofu and galbi combination ($33). The galbi was deliciously marinated, tender, and charred perfectly. It only came with 6 pieces which is probably enough for 1 person, but it’s barely enough to share between 2.

They also gave rice in a hot metal bowl. The rice is a little sticky, and it does become crispy the longer you leave it in there. They give you a separate bowl, so that you can scoop out the rice into it. If you’d like, they can pour some tea into the rice to break the crispy pieces away from the bowl. This is very similar to BCD Tofu, and it was pretty good.

I ordered the kimchi pork tofu medium spicy ($15), and it tasted pretty flavorful. It’s definitely not the best tofu broth I’ve had, but it does remind me a lot of BCD Tofu. They also ask if you’d like to break a raw egg into it. The broth is peppery, but with a lot of flavor in it from the spices and the kimchi. My only criticism is that the kimchi is not fermented as much as other places, such as Dotory (now closed unfortunately).

Final Verdict

This is a very welcomed Korean restaurant around the Long Island City and Sunnyside area. The tofu is actually legit, and it has fantastic flavors. We would love to come back and try other things as well in the near future.

Yelp Jabs

After looking over the menu we ordered the army stew which sounds better in Korean. Who would’ve thought that translating it to English was that.

I thought this was amusing. This elitist isn’t aware that the “stew” with noodles and spam is called “army stew” in just about every Korean restaurant in the metropolitan coastal cities. The back story for this is that this is what the soldiers ate in the army when they were short of fresh protein. The soup contains a lot of processed meats from U.S. military bases.