Salad days
Cham Korean Bistro’s seasonal melon salad is one of the city’s top summer treats
By Dan O'Heron 07/29/2010
While Cham Korean Bistro is building its reach by making use of all the latest social networking tools, the only hand-held devices you’ll need once you get there are chopsticks or knives, forks and spoons.
On my first visit recently, I was impressed at once by a seasonal melon salad. Honeydew-like in flavor, but less cloying, this melon has a coarser texture that makes slices audibly crisp, providing a delicious addition to the peppery arugula, delicate mizuna leaves (used in fine French restaurants for expensive gourmet salad mixes) and succulent romaine it’s mixed with.
Pebbled with snow peas and misted with a sour dressing made from the aromatic rind of lemony-lime yuzu citrus, the Cham melon salad ($5 large, $3 small) is sweetened with dollops of nutty, pumpkin-like kabocha squash balls, making this dish one of the top summer treats in town.
The summer salad belies the notion that all Korean food is hot and spicy. Another dish — beef bulgogi served with glass noodles — is also very tasty without rasping the tongue. In this offering, thin strips of beef, first long-marinated and then barbecued, are served with translucent noodles in a metal pot of simmering broth ($12).
Noodle dishes are a mainstay at this year-old restaurant. Try the spicy bibim noodles, with assorted seasonable vegetables, spicy fruit sauce, crispy rice and boiled egg, all for $7. Or there’s sautéed sweet potato noodles and rice, featuring kale with a hint of Korean mustard sauce, for $8.50. Sesame soy sauce noodles, including seaweed pickles, seasonal veggies, a boiled egg and soy sauce for dipping, are also $7.
(Caution and consent: Difficult-to-manage, cellophane-like noodle threads will slip and slide off your chopsticks like a school of moray eels. In fetching the elusive strands, it’s OK to bob and slurp and look around to see if anyone is watching, though they probably are not.)
Before dining at Cham, I’d always subscribed to New York Times food writer Mark Bittman’s characterization of Korean food as “Japanese food with guts.” This was evidenced in the snap and tang of my $6 a la carte spicy barbecued pork platter over ravels of sweet onions.
All the barbecue here — whether meat, chicken, fish, tofu or veggie — is done on a gas-fired grill, sans wood and charcoal. Manager Jerry Kang indicated that Cham favors gas-fire because of its “precision and consistency,” mainly because charcoal grilling requires more attention and lots of luck to maintain quality control.
The smack and tang of heat from this pork made me cry out for a chaser like ice-cold, coconut-creamy Thai ice tea. But a minty agave/lemonade ($2.50) sufficed to cool off my palate.
More than from spicy pork, Bittman’s “guts” definition must have derived from eating kimchi — that dark, forbidding combination of fermented cabbage, garlic, chilies and multiple options of veggies, herbs and salted goodness. At Cham, they serve only one recipe of kimchi.
Expecting typical Korean taste sensations from tingle to whiplash, I got perfect vibes from Cham’s kimchi au gratin bibimbap. Cooked and served in a sizzling cast-iron frying pan, it contained a mixture of impudent kimchi and fried rice, clingy with melted mozzarella. Somewhat ironically, kimchi shares a reputation similar to cheese: Both are fermented, produce a serious aroma and are deemed by some Americans to be an acquired taste that can become addictive in a short time.
A stimulating aftertaste and a good feeling remains long after the meal is eaten — especially given the $8 price tag for the generously portioned pan.
For folks with an appetite, there’s the Chambination, a choice of meat, fish or tofu with a small salad and rice, for $11. And there’s Korean stew, containing generous portions of short ribs and served with a small salad ($12).
Customers from across the street at LA Fitness, who Kang says are always coming in for barbecued chicken and brown rice, appreciate Cham’s concern for their health. The sleek, blond wood-furnished restaurant uses no processed sugars, no corn syrup and no MSG.
Serving food without MSG is not remarkable. What is remarkable is the taste and salubrity of a dish like the Ssam garden platter — a choice of meat, plus cilantro, pickled radish, onions and noodles wrapped in butter lettuce, a seasonal green like mizuna or a sesame leaf.
But, I had to ask: If kimchi is a varietal staple at every Korean meal from Seoul to South LA, why only one dish?
“Others are evolving,” says Kang, indicating he wants them to be a perfect match for Cham’s contemporary “good-tasting and good-for-you” Korean cuisine, which, he boasts, “is organic and as local as possible.”
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