Address: 7388 Yonge Street
Type of Meal: Dinner
Mentioning Korean barbeque in Toronto brings up images of all you can eat restaurants where diners cram around a small table and cook thinly sliced meat on a cast iron plate. The quality of the meat is usually subpar but the prices are cheap and food is plentiful. Sariwon is where you can go to experience authentic Korean barbeque cooking in a comfortable environment.
Located in a retail plaza on the bottom of condo
buildings, the location is surprisingly large with tons of tables and several
tucked away in separate rooms. Tables
are spaced a comfortable distance away from each other so you don’t feel like
you’re spying on you’re the cooking skills of your neighbours.
Sariwon serves an extensive menu with Korean non-barbeque
dishes (pork bone soup, bibimbap, etc.) as well as a couple of pages dedicated
to Chinese cuisine. However, you get a
sense to stay away from all these as everyone who comes generally gets their
barbeque mains. To be fair, it appears
this is what they do best as the goon man doo (dumplings) ($6.95) we ordered to
begin was pretty disappointing – tasteless pork filling wrapped in thin oily deep-fried
dough. It needed something more - vegetables
to add some texture, sauce to give it some flavour, really anything to make it
taste less like store bought frozen dumplings.
Before the mains arrived, two complimentary appetizers came
first - salad with a homemade orange dressing and a vegetable omelette pancake. Nothing that blows your mind but of course appreciated. I particularly liked that their pancake wasn’t
too doughy and had a fair amount of vegetables sprinkled throughout.
Next came a boiling bowl of deonjang jjigae (soybean
paste tofu soup) filled with cubes of tofu, slivers of vegetables, button
mushrooms and pieces of octopus. I could
have just eaten that with a bowl of rice.
The savoury soup had just a hint of spice from the chilies in it and
with the plethora of ingredients really became a hearty stew.
Deonjang jjigae
Finally our mains arrived, which required a trolley to serve with the abundance of banchan (small side dishes to share) that came with it. In total, we received eight dishes (not all pictured) including:
- Napa cabbage kimchi
- Cucumber kimchi
- Some sort of pickled vegetable (radish or coyote vegetable) in a jalapeño brine
- Spicy blanched bean sprouts tossed in sesame oil
- Julienned fish pancakes mixed in a sweet and sour vinaigrette
- Oyster sauce (?) stir fried peanuts
- Julienned raw potato salad
- Stir fried dried shrimp in a sweet soy sauce
With the exception of the dried shrimp, I liked them
all. I appreciated that the kimchi was
not too fermented so the vegetables retained their crispness. The various flavours and acidity of the
dishes went well with the heaviness of the meat.
For the barbeque meats, we ordered sam kyub sal (pork
belly) ($18.95) and yang yum kalbi (marinated beef short ribs) ($26.95). The pork belly wasn’t what I expected; arriving
like strips of bacon except being tasteless given it hadn’t been smoked or
salted. It was bland and after cooking
tasted like grilled boiled pork so I wouldn’t order again. The kalbi was much better, tender and
marinated so that it was flavourful but not overpoweringly sweet. Additionally, it was cut to a good thickness –
not too thin that it overcooked easily but also not so thick that you felt you
had to gnaw at it.
A basket of crisp romaine lettuce and a green onion soy
vinaigrette salad accompanied the meats so that you could wrap them like ssam. Each person also received a dish of sweet
bean paste of peppered sesame oil to add more flavour if required. I really enjoyed the bean paste and finished
every drop of it.
Small bowls of soojong gwa (chilled ginger-cinnamon tea) finished off our meal. The pieces of crushed ice floating in the sweet liquid were perfect after sitting beside the heat of the grill.
Overall mark - 7.5 out of 10
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Gastro World's Grading System
- Anything under 5 - I really disliked and will never go back
- 6 - decent restaurant but I likely won't return
- 7 - decent restaurant and I will likely return
- 8 - great restaurant that I'd be happy to recommend
- 9 - fantastic restaurant that I would love to visit regularly and highly recommend
- 10 - absolute perfection!
