Primary flavors

I’m always grateful to restaurants that give me something to
nibble on while I’m mulling over the menu. Sodam
Korean in Henrietta, like all Korean restaurants, offers you a full meal while
you think about what to order for dinner — an assortment of small dishes known
as banchan. These tasty offerings, which walk the line
between condiment and snack food depending on your inclination and degree of
restraint, are like a box of culinary crayons. Even before your meal comes, the
table is covered with dishes full of primary colors and flavors lovingly
prepared by chef and owner KwangchulKo: vibrant red, fiery kimchi;
deep green, briny seaweed salad; icy white, crunchy bean sprouts; half moons of
pickled cucumber dressed with garlic and chili paste; a generous square of
sliced tofu, finished with soy, chili, and scallion. Each of these dishes
presents elemental flavors and textures – sweet, sour, salty, spicy, silky
smooth, and toothsomely crunchy. In combination, remarkable things happen.

Of course, in order to tinker with the flavors and textures
of your food, you first have to find the restaurant – and that can be something
of a trick. Like a speakeasy, Sodam is almost hidden
at the far end of a converted warehouse in the Genesee Regional Market. Even
the sign above the entrance is little help: it still reads “Korean House,” the
name that passed with the restaurant when the current owners purchased it five
years ago. The only place you’ll find the name Sodam
– which means “cheerful” or “delicious” in Korean – is on a sign behind the
restaurant’s tinted front door.

In stark contrast to the cinderblock, industrial exterior, Sodam’s dining room is warmly lit and comfortably
furnished, hushed even when the restaurant is full to bursting with people
lining up for tables at the door. Within minutes, your waitress will bring you
your first round of banchan (you can ask for seconds
of your favorites, so don’t feel shy about digging in), and your meal is off to
a pleasant start.

An order of shumai($3.95)
is a nice supplement to your banchan, and a good
illustration of the sort of games that you can play with your food at Sodam. Alone, these are very tasty dumplings, deep-fried
rather than steamed, filled with ground shrimp and a bit of crab roe — the
essence of saltiness in a crunchy shell. Pick up a bit of kimchi
and add a blast of fire and a bit of sourness that brings the briny taste of
the shrimp surging forward. Take up some seaweed and all you’ll notice is the
texture of the shrimp and the crunch of the wonton skin.

For those looking for a more substantial appetizer, the pah-jeon – a crispy pancake made of rice flour into which
scallions and other vegetables have been mixed – is a good bet ($5.95; with kimchi, $6.95; with seafood, $9.95). Crunchy outside,
creamy within, and served still sizzling from the pan, it tastes fresh, its
crunch entirely satisfying, and its flavors neutral enough that with the
appropriate combination of banchan you can make it
anything you want. I’m partial to alternating a dip in the accompanying
teriyaki sauce with bits of kimchi and cooling bites
of cucumber. 

Noodles and soup make up the backbone of Korean
cuisine, and both chef Ko’s soups and stews are built
on a delicious homemade white stock that simmers all day long, waiting to be
doled out one or two ladles-full at a time. Into this stock he slides fat
handmade rice noodles, slices of beef, beaten egg, and strips of nori to make kargooksu ($8.95).
The same soup with delectably chewy discs of rice-stick and dumplings stuffed
with beef becomes duk-mandu-gook
($9.95).

But the best use of this stock is when Ko pours it over a bowl full of braised beef shortribs and thick glass noodles and then enriches it with
a roasted red-pepper powder akin to smoked paprika or chipotle powder –
incandescent red with a bit of heat, but not nearly as much as you would
expect. This kalbi-tang ($10.95) is served with a set
of kitchen shears on the side. Diners jab the scissors into the broth and snip
the fork-tender beef from the bones, spreading bits beefy goodness through the
spicy soup, and making the mammoth shortribs into
something that can be tackled with a spoon and a pair of chopsticks.

As red as this soup is, it is presents a practically blank
canvas. The broth is flavorful with a good balance of sweetness and a nice
round mouthfeel, and the ingredients are all
perfectly cooked. But it all needs something – and fortunately there are
ingredients to help you perfect your meal in easy reach.  Grab some kimchi
for extra heat, some cucumber for extra crunch and garlic, and then toss in the
bean sprouts and a bit more seaweed and a good soup becomes a thing of beauty –
something that can only be described as soul-satisfying and healing.

While the soup will heal you, Ko’s pork bulgogi ($9.95)
may well make you believe in a deity again. Those familiar with Korean food know
about bulgogi, traditional Korean barbecue in which
meat and veggies are cooked on a cast-iron platter and brought to the table
preceded by the hissing sound of a hundred angry snakes and trailing clouds of
billowing steam. Chef Ko’s
pork bulgogi is stunning: spicy enough to make even
the most dedicated chili-head happy, but so flavorful that those with tamer
tastes will brave the burn just to taste its peanutty
goodness a second time. Peanuts, pork, and spice are natural allies, but there
are no nuts at all in the dish. Chef Ko
thickens his sauce with a toasted rice flour that lends a sweet nuttiness to
the final product. Keep the cucumber and sprouts handy: you’ll need them to cut
the burn. And the mouth-confusing contrast between burning hot and ice cold
will keep you enthralled long after you are too full to do anything but pick at
the remains.

This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2010.