1499 S. King St.
Honolulu HI 96814
947-9444
Chinese food as served in Korea can be divided into three different cuisines (at the very least). At the highest price level is the chunghwa jeongshik, which consists mostly of rare delicacies such as sea cucumber, abalone, and pine mushrooms served (usually) in bland, gloppy, cornstarch-laden sauce that seems to be a parody of Hong Kong-style banquet dining. At the lowest level, you have ramyeon and the like, which is really a Sino-Japanese carryover from the colonial days. In the middle, you have what most Korean people think of as "Chinese food": Northern-Chinese influenced, Koreanized cuisine consisting of noodle dishes such as cchajangmyeon and cchamppong, as well as simple dishes of fried meats or seafood in spicy and / or sweet sauces.
The usual history is that this last style of cuisine arose in Seoul during the early to mid part of the 20th century among hwagyo, Chinese (or in some cases Korean-Chinese) immigrants from the border regions between China and Northern Korea, as well as from Shandong Province. Given their background, they brought with the an array of flour-based dishes that were soon adopted for Korean tastes and ingredients. Cchajangmyeon is the prototypical "sauced noodle" dish, made with fermented bean sauce, while cchamppong is the prototypical "soup noodle" dish. Other popular Sino-Korean dishes include kkamppunggi, fried chicken served with a spicy garlic sauce, nanja wanseu, fried meatballs served in similar spicy sauce, and rajogi, a somewhat softer dish of boneless chicken. All these dishes are typically named in transliterated Mandarin rather than Korean pronounciation of Chinese characters, which accounts for the copious double consonants (now that I've further transliterated it into English, that is).
Ondong Restaurant (Andong Banjeom to its Korean customers) is a typical Sino-Korean restaurant along the lines of thousands of others in Korea and throughout the areas where the Korean diaspora has settled. Like most Korean-run Chinese restaurants in the U.S., it offers a full line of Sino-American standards such as sweet sour pork, beef broccoli, etc., but if your're interested something different, go directly to the parts of the menu that say "House Special" and "Cookery List". You'll know it's Korean-run if the first thing they offer you are little plates of raw onion with black bean sauce, as well as pickled radish and cabbage kimchee.
We always order cchajangmyeon when we go there, since the kids love it, like Korean kids everywhere. In fact, I think they actually did a poll that showed that cchajangmyeon is the #1 most popular food of all among Korean kids, playing the same role as pizza or hamburgers in the U.S., and curry rice or tonkatsu in Japan. Better make sure they aren't headed to any public gathering after the meal, though. While Northern Chinese cchajangmyeon tends to be brown, and based upon soybean paste, Korean cchajangmyeon is based upon black bean paste, and will turn the front and sleeves of your kid's clothes pitch black as they dig into it (though it does come out in the wash).
At Andong, the cchajangmyeon noodles and sauce come in separate bowls so that you can mix it together yourself; I guess it gives you a better view of the ingredients before you mix them up.
The black bean paste has been combined with soy sauce, beef broth, malt syrup, and cornstarch, which in turn have been combined with stir-fried chopped beef and seafood with onions, garlic, small chunks of radish, etc. Good cchajangmyeon noodles are supposed slightly chewy - not because al dente, but because they've been kneaded to the point there the gluten holds up under boiling. Somehow, small slivers of cucumber are the standard garnish in restaurants everywhere.
Once you mix things up, the noodles start to look pretty scary, but the sauce is addictive, with an very high savoriness level provided by the large amount of fermented black beans (and sometime enhanced with MSG) offset by the sweetness provided by the malt syrup. It goes down very easy, and it's not hard to bolt it down very quickly if you're not paying attention.
Not so for cchamppong, the other of the two pillars of Sino-Korean cuisine. I must confess I have no idea what Northern Chinese chhamppong is like. However, I can say that that Korean chhamppong is nothing the Nagasaki champon, another adapted version of the original. The Nagasaki version is made from a pork bone broth, while the Korean version is made from a seafood broth made red-hot by generous amounts of Korean chili. The broth is usually so spicy it'd difficult to do more than sip small amounts of it at a time from your plastic spoon, held in your left hand, while you manage the noodles with your chopsticks in your right hand.
The "chunks" inside the broth include a lot of stuff - cabbage, onion, green onion, tree ear fungus, carrot, chili pods, squid, tiny shrimp, and octopus, in addition to the chewy noodles. Like cchajangmyeon, cchamppong can either be thought of as a full meal, or as the finale to a more substantial meal including separate entrees. In the latter case, the cchajangmyeon and cchamppong play the role of starch in the meal, and plain rice is rarely eaten along with them (unless it is used to soak up the extra sauce that remains after all the cchajangmyeon noodles are gone).
As in Sino-American and Sino-Indian cuisine, the Sino-Korean cuisine is heavily populated by entrees based on battered, deep-fried chunks of something in thick sauce, even though such kinds of foods are pretty much absent in traditional Chinese cooking, whatever the reason. I don't know why this is, I guess deep-frying tends to make just about any kind of food accessible to the outsider. One thing that can be said in favor of Sino-Korean fried-and-sauced foods are that they usually not as candy-sweet as the kind you find in Sino-American menus. Even the Sino-Korean version of sweet-sour pork, tangsuyuk, is typically higher on the sour than sweet, and lacks the garish red food coloring of the Sino-American version.
We decided to order kkamppung ojingeo, or fried squid served in spicy garlic sauce. Here is it is, particularly crisp and with minimum cornstarch, just as it ought to be. It's interesting that mid-range Chinese cuisine in Korea tends to be much more restrained with the use of cornstarch than high-end cuisine, but that's just the way things are:
If you're not into deep-fried food or noodles but want to explore the Sino-Korean culinary universe, one very representative dish is buchu japchae, stir-fried Chinese chives and beef, which are typically served with small steamed buns. You can also order wang mandu, larger version of these buns, filled with a very Korean mixture of ground beef, bean thread noodles, and onions.
Ondong / Andong is located on King Street at Kaheka, close to the Ke`eaumoku area that passes for K-Town in Honolulu. There are two other Sino-Korean places in close proximity; I'll try to review them at some point when I get around to it. The best way to find parking is to enter via Kaheka, going into the parking lot that the restaurant shares with Plumeria Barbershop (sponsor of unintentionally funny commercials on the Korean radio stations) and the Honolulu Futon Company. It's validated parking during the day, but free at night. The entrance is on the opposite side of the parking lot, but you can get in directly by cutting through the narrow, hallway-shaped kitchen. The chefs are used to it so the more or less go about their business, but make sure you don't knock over bowls of marinating pork or get splattered by hot oil in the process.
