Kimchi is the star of a Korean meal for 10 in Palisades Park

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Palisades Park has the biggest concentration of Korean restaurants in North Jersey, from soft-tofu and barbecue houses to restaurants specializing in hand-made noodles.

Editor's note: This branch of Gam Mee Ok closed, but the stylish original still thrives in Fort Lee.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

I put together a group of 10 to check out Gam Mee Ok in Palisades Park, a branch of the popular, 24-hour restaurant in Fort Lee with a unique kimchi service.

The stylish restaurant, hidden away on the second floor of a building on Broad Avenue, opened without fanfare early this year. 

The original Gam Mee Ok (pronounced GAM-yo) is in Manhattan.

A server brings cabbage and radish kimchis to the table in what looks like a small vase, cuts the long pieces of cabbage with a scissor and places them in a dish, adding more red-pepper sauce from a metal tea pot.

The cabbage kimchi, in particular, combines a pleasant sweetness with the usual spicy notes, adding an unusual accent to the meal.

The restaurant doesn't serve the variety of free side dishes found at most other Korean places, but does put out cabbage leaves and hot green peppers.

During our meal, we also got shredded radish kimchi and bowls of the restaurant's signature beef-bone soup, a bland, milky white broth you season with salt and chopped scallions from containers on the table.

Dumplings, kalbi

Other members of the group tried a variety of dishes from the open kitchen, including steamed pork-and-vegetable dumplings ($7.95) and barbecued kalbi or short ribs ($16.95), which they ate out of hand or wrapped in the tender cabbage leaves, instead of the usual red-leaf lettuce.

I ordered a seafood pancake ($12.95), as well as dolsot bibimbap ($13.95), a one-dish meal of rice, vegetables and egg served in a hot stone bowl, asking the kitchen to hold the ground beef and cook the raw egg that usually come with it.

You add a mildly spicy red-pepper sauce call gochujang and mix up all the ingredients before eating it with a spoon. True comfort food.

My wife and son tried a spicier version of bibimbap with kimchi and pork, and loved it (also $13.95).

I also tried a ring from a large squid served on a hot metal plate, but found it too chewy ($19.95). We brought our own wine and beer to this BYO.

We paid about $23 each, including tax and a 20% tip. I also took home a large container of Gam Mee Ok's delicious cabbage kimchi ($7.44).

There is seating for about 40 between wood-beam walls that display modern art. The sound system played jazz from WBGO-FM in Newark. Cool.

Details

Gam Mee Ok, 110 Broad Ave., Second Floor, next to Chinese Mandarin Restaurant; 201-945-6300.

BYO, free parking on side streets.

Where seafood lovers gather

Image by wallyg via Flickr

The Seabras are an enterprising Portuguese family in Newark with a supermarket and restaurants in the Ironbound section, including Seabra's Marisquiera, where seafood is king. With the word "sea" in their name, how could they miss?

To avoid the Mother's Day rush today, I took my wife and son there Saturday night for a bountiful meal of lobster, shrimp and cod. We watched other families digging into platters of octopus salad, fried squid and whole fish.

 My wife and son started with a briny, pureed seafood soup that had shrimp, pieces of lobster in the shell and some elbow macaroni floating in it. One portion ($8.50) yielded two bowls of soup. I was very happy with a crisp watercress, tomato and onion salad ($4.50) that came on a large metal platter and was perfectly dressed in just enough oil and vinegar, good for sopping up with soft Portuguese bread.

My wife and son shared an entree -- twin lobsters stuffed with crab and accompanied by those addictive, homemade potato chips ($34). The waiter grabbed two live lobsters from a tank and brought them over. Did we want a single big one or two small ones? When I said two small, the eye of the junior crustacean seemed to swivel in my direction.

The lobster meat was tender, but I ended up eating must of the chips after my wife and son asked for some rice.

The waiter tried to talk me out of my selection -- salted cod boiled with potato and onion  ($21) -- and steer me to grilled fish. But I wanted to try the cod. A long, thick fillet of the snowy fish came on a platter with crisp broccoli and carrot, black olives, potato and onion -- a classic boiled dinner. This was the tenderest salted cod I had ever tasted, but it could have used a simple sauce. It wasn't salty at all, so I sprinkled on fresh lemon juice. It also was a big portion; I took a lot home.

A small bottle of Portuguese green wine (two to two and a half glasses) was $10. I finished with an espresso.

Seating is in a front room and bar and a rear dining room, where tables are lined up family style, so another group might be seated next to you. The two rooms are split by an open kitchen and a display of beautifully iced whole red snapper, sections of larger fish such as grouper and hake, enormous shrimp that looked to be five to six inches long and tanks of live lobsters.

The menu is extensive and offers cold and hot seafood combinations for four ($45). When we left, waiting customers were lined up in the corridor connecting the two seating areas.

The cod dish had a happy ending this morning, when my wife incorporated the leftover fish and potato into her Jamaican ackee and saltfish breakfast. Delicious.

Seabra's Marisquiera, 87 Madison St., Newark; 

973-491-6634. Open seven days. Off-street parking. 

rdison ax: (973) 491-633087 Madison Street, Newark, N
5-1250
Fax: (973) 491-6330

At Chung Dam Dong Restaurant

Image by xoundbox via Flickr
Broad Avenue is the main street in Palisades Park, home to dozens of Korean restaurants and coffee shops.

If you love to see your meal cooked on the table at a Korean restaurant and if you're a big fan of octopus and squid in a seriously spicy sauce, head over to Chung Dam Dong in Palisades Park.


We had dinner there last night after negotiating with the waitress and the kitchen over what we wanted in our seafood stir fry instead of those invertebrates, which I love but which my wife and son abhor. 


The meal came with eight panchan, or side dishes, including a delightful salad of greens, two kinds of terrific kimchi, stewed radish and fish, steamed egg, and potato salad with mayo and raisins. Another was scallion, green pepper, carrot and Spam on a toothpick, battered and fried.


So we agreed on pork and shell- and head-on shrimp in our stir fry, which was cooked with vegetables and a half-dozen mussels in the kitchen and brought to our table in a wok that was placed over a gas grill to keep it bubbling. 


The mussels never opened, so I didn't eat them. A stone bowl of coarse, bland bean curd -- or was it tofu? -- was the perfect counterpoint to this spicy dish.


After we put a serious dent in the entree and several dishes of salad and kimchi, which were replenished when empty, the waitress brought out fresh bean sprouts and a medium-size bowl of steamed white rice and dumped them into the wok, stirring them into the remaining sauce and flattening the rice against the bottom and sides of the blackened wok -- for sort of a Korean paella. We tried, but couldn't finish the rice.


I don't know the name of this entree, but you can find it on the menu by its lofty price -- $42.99. The waitress told us it served only two and urged us to order soup, in addition to the fried vegetable dumplings we wanted ($11.99). We declined. 


This is one restaurant where the quality of the "free side dishes" make some of the pricier entrees palatable. The only beer available is Coors Light, and a small bottle of soju is about $12.


Chung Dam Dong also offers Korean barbecue, but I didn't pay too much attention to those selections, because we have long ago decided to buy our own free-range, grass-fed Australian beef and prepare barbecue at home, after consuming so much "mystery meat" at restaurants.


You'll find this second-floor restaurant in the same building on Broad Avenue that houses So Gong Dong, our favorite soft-tofu place. At the top of the stairs, you turn right for tofu stews, left for spicy stir fries and great side dishes.


Chung Dam Dong Restaurant, 118 Broad Ave.,
Palisades Park, 201-313-8900. No Web site.