Don Day: Korean food in Oakland

[uncle ovipositor]

I went there Monday night with a friend and have been thinking about it ever since, so I thought I'd share in the hopes of spreading that virus. Since I didn't see anything else posted about it or a thread in which it would fit, I figured I'd start a new thread.

To wit:

14th and Webster. If you've driven around downtown Oakland you've probably noticed this place because it has a magnificent portrait of a pig on the side, along with a bunch of Korean script. The sign is brilliant and memorable and anyone who's ever zipped past there has seen it. The motif of that graffic repeats throughout the interior of the restaurant, in interesting and clever ways.

Turns out "Don" means pig in Korean, so the name is Pig Day. All of the items on the menu are pork (except at lunch when they're trying to cast a wider net and have some chicken, as well as what they refer to as barbecue burritos - odd for a Korean place, but if it keeps them open I'm all for it). I went there for dinner with a friend and it was the first time I've had exciting Korean food (something I've never enjoyed in the past). They had appetizer dishes out to start with, as is customary in civilized countries, here including 2 different types of kim chee and some picked bamboo shoots (quite good, but nothing you haven't had before). The real mind benders were: picked hot peppers with 1/2" smelts (unreal good), and fish cakes that were entirely unlike fish or cakes. The smelts I cannot begin to describe, but I could eat a bowl full of them twice and beg for more. The fish cakes... this is going to sound really terrible, but they had the texture and appearance of slightly thick, soggy tortilla chips. They weren't salty like bacalao, and weren't overly fishy, and soaking in a sauce that included vinegar and chilis and some other mystery components. Very tasty - enough so that I was eagerly eating soggy nachos.

For mains we had pork with korean leeks, which came with a dipping sauce of leeks, wasabi, soy, and mystery components (great), and squid and pork cooked table side and slathered in what we were calling crack sauce. Why crack sauce? Because it was so addictive that, in spite of getting exponentially spicier as the dish cooked down, you couldn't stop eating it, even knowing full well that it was doing severe irreversible damage to you physically. I was almost crying by the end and couldn't stop eating it. They had a twee portable gas burner and heavy cast-iron wok, and threw in a bunch of onions, peppers, squash, gigantic squid tentacles, and pork that looked for all the world like 3/4" thick slabs of bacon. This was all cooked down in the crack sauce and we each had a bowl of rice to eat with it. It was, in a single dish, the perfect combination of sweet, spicy, and savory, with incidental vegetables. More importantly, it was, for me, the perfect yin/yang of fear/desire, body/mind, good/evil, and any other dualities you want to tack on. Your brain desires it, it endangers your life. I'm sure it wouldn't be hot enough for some people, but to my taste buds it did just fine.

We left red and sweaty and fearing the next morning. Incredibly good stuff. The caveat, though: it was $54 (cash only) for the two of us. Not that expensive, but a little more than I think most people would expect to pay at a hole-in-the wall.