Gama

[banquo]

We heard about this relatively new place on St. Marks and tried it out a couple night's ago. My quick verdict is that Gama makes for a great option for Korean food downtown. In my opinion, it's roughly on a par with the places on 32nd St. Definitely not better, but perfectly respectable.

FYI: they don't have table top BBQ, but do serve kal bi and bulgoki.; also, we didn't order this, but we saw a sign advertising a whole (deep fried) chicken + a pitcher of beer for $20. The special sounds like the perfect 2am meal for someone, like me, who loves the way Koreans handle fried chicken.

The front of the restaurant is a bar. We sat there for about 10 minutes, and it seemed nice enough. Perhaps it would make a good place for a couple of drinks. They had a very nice watermelon/soju drink if you like that sort of thing. The music struck me as too loud to hang out for too long.

At any rate, the back space and restaurant proper is quite agreeable. It's spacious and the tables are far apart. Because of the room's size, it never got loud. The walls are decorated with han bok. It wasn't very busy when we started eating (7:30pm), but it filled up nicely by 10pm. And at least for now, there does not seem to be any sort of wait for a table. Nice!

We ordered:

dak dori tang (spicy chicken stew)

duk boki (rice cake in spicy sauce)

Dae Gu Jo Rim (codfish in spicy sauce)

To my taste, the food tends towards the sweet, so even though all 3 dishes are titled spicy, I thought the first two, and especially the duk boki were very sweet. But this is not unusual--the food at Kunjip, for example, tends that direction as well. The chicken stew, although sweet, also had a deep spicy dimension. This is the kind of warm your soul food that's great for our cold Spring weather. I like the stews at Yang Pyung Seoul (on 33rd) better, but this was perfectly respectable. The dish I would recommend most is the codfish. Silky fish and balanced sauce. Although we ate family style, this would make a great entree for one. The pan chan are respectable, not 1st rate, but not bad either.

The service was friendly and efficient.

The menu is quite large, so we look forward to sampling more of it in the future. They have some seafood that looked interesting, e.g. sea squirts and sea snails.