Update for Korean barbecue lovers

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It's happened again. Madangsui Restaurant in Fort Lee, once my favorite Korean barbecue restaurant, was fined $1,033 last week by the borough environmental health specialist "for allowing a rat infestation, with droppings too numerous to count," The Record reported on Friday.

Madangsui was fined $285 on Nov. 10 for defrosting meat on the floor and not covering it.  This was a real surprise, because it  had always boasted of serving fresh beef and was the first Korean barbecue restaurant to offer prime beef, the highest USDA grade, after it opened more than five years ago.

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We love all the vegetables and soy served by Korean restaurants, but I've long been concerned about their "mystery meat" -- sliced extremely thin and marinated to improve flavor and tenderness. So we started buying free-range, grass-fed Australian beef and preparing barbecue at home, with rice, kimchi and other side dishes.

Thankfully, the newspaper Friday also contained a ShopRite circular offering Nature's Reserve free-range, grass-fed whole beef tenderloin for filet mignon from Australia at $3.99 a pound with a store card, $5.99 a pound without (4- to 6-pound average). Make sure you get the Australian beef, because the supermarket chain also has put on sale the same cut of conventionally raised U.S. beef. The sale starts today and ends Feb. 6.

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What I did the last time I bought this Australian beef was to trim it carefully, slice it thin and store it in the freezer in bags with bulgogi marinade, available at H Mart, the Korean supermarket in Little Ferry, Englewood, Fort Lee and Ridgefield. (Illustration shows the tenderloin just below the sirloin.)
 
There are few meals that can match the fun quotient of Korean barbecue, where you use red-lettuce leaves to wrap up meat, hot pepper paste, rice, garlic, kimchi and whatever else you can manage, then stuff the whole package into your mouth.

Korean restaurants in the news

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Korean food is vibrant and a great source of vegetables and soy, but at least two restaurants have been fined for sanitary code violations recently by health inspectors.

The Record today reports a $960 fine for Gam Mee Ok Restaurant in Fort Lee, one of my favorites for its unique kimchi service and its stone-bowl bibimbap. Two issues the inspector noted were "storing beef in stagnant water" and the "staff's failure to wear gloves when handling hazardous foods."

Madangsui Restaurant, also in Fort Lee, was fined $285 on Nov. 10 for defrosting meat on the floor and not covering it.  This was a real surprise, because it  has always boasted of serving fresh beef and is the only Korean barbecue restaurant I've been to that offers prime beef, the highest USDA grade.

I've long been concerned about the "mystery meat" served at many Korean restaurants, so much so that we started buying free-range, grass-fed Australian beef and preparing barbecue at home, with rice, kimchi and other side dishes.

Maybe the lesson of these fines is to avoid eating meat altogether. With soft-tofu stews, spring-chicken soups and other non-beef  selections, that's easy to do at Korean restaurants.

More on industrial farms' use of antibiotics

Check out the following link to The Pew Charitable Trusts' Web site on the use of antibiotics in industrial farm animals:

http://www.saveantibiotics.org/

One point it makes is that "70 percent of U.S. antibiotics go to animals raised on industrial farms that aren't sick, to offset crowding and poor sanitation. This practice promotes the development of deadly strains of drug-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans."

Something to keep in mind the next time you are shopping for chicken, pork or any other meat in your favorite supermarket and are drawn by the low prices on products from Perdue and Tyson, and meat producers you can't identify because of a store-labeled package.