Kimchi salsa-topped nachos and bulgogi sliders are just a few of the yummy pub grub offerings at Ahn-Joo, a snack bar and restaurant opened by TV food star Debbie Lee.
by Rebecca U. Cho
Los Angeles’ Koreatown is a mouth-watering hodgepodge of Korean eateries, from upscale BBQ houses to hole-in-the-wall noodle shops. But for one L.A. patron looking for late-night drinks and snacks out on the town, perhaps the ideal venue, still little known to mainstream America, is the sul jib, the Korean pub.
To change all that, in steps chef Debbie Lee, the former top-three contestant on season 5 of the hit show, The Next Food Network Star. Inspired by the dishes at the sul jibs she used to frequent with friends as a college student, Lee is set on courting the intrigue but removing the intimidation she believes surrounds Korean food through Ahn-Joo, a Korean snack bar and restaurant that opened late last year in Glendale, Calif.
“My friends thought [sul jibs are] amazing, ‘is this a normal thing?’ I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s where we go for a late-night snack. It’s our Cheers bar,’” Lee said in a recent phone interview. “People don’t know we eat like this.”
At Ahn-Joo (the Korean term for “pub snacks”), tteokbokki, a spicy rice cake dish, receives a Latin makeover as “Korean Nachos,” served up in a smoky chile queso cheese sauce and topped with kimchi salsa. Sliders come filled with bulgogi (soy sauce-marinated beef), rather than hamburger meat.
Lee’s also sharing her Korean pub grub recipes with home cooks through Seoultown Kitchen, a cookbook largely featuring staple Korean dishes such as mul naengmyeon (buckwheat noodles in a chilled sweet beef broth) and tong dak (twice-fried chicken), along with some of Lee’ s fusion takes.
Growing up on Southern cooking, Lee, 42, describes her culinary upbringing as “Seoul 2 Soul.” Her Korea-born parents immigrated to the U.S., settling in Jackson, Miss., and then moved to Arizona, where Lee was born and says she grew up trying to fit into rural white America. It took her experience on the Food Network to push Lee to embrace her Korean heritage wholeheartedly.
Today, Lee still remembers the sting she felt on her last cooking challenge on the show when she realized she had failed to showcase her Korean heritage—something for which judge Bobby Flay scolded her.
“It hit me that I was still trying to hide myself by blending in fusion flavors,” she said. “Not that there’ s anything wrong with it because that’ s how I eat and grew up, but as a chef, I’m depriving myself again of really sharing my culture with the world.”
That realization led Lee to take to the streets of L.A. in 2010 to communicate the diversity of Korean food to a new audience with the Ahn-Joo food truck, which in turn led to the opening of her restaurant. She has plans to open more Ahn-Joo locations across the U.S.
She believes chefs such as herself and Roy Choi, who started the mobile food craze with his Kogi truck, are toppling barriers between Korean food and mainstream America. “We’re now realizing if we bring our food to them,” Lee said, “they’re going to come running.”
This article was published in the February 2012 issue of KoreAm. Subscribe today!
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