Culinary star Roy Choi added another restaurant to his rapidly growing empire after being named head chef at the swanky Beechwood Kitchen in Venice, according to LA Weekly.
Choi replaced former Top Chef season 5 contestant Jamie Lauren, LA Weekly reported.
Chef Jamie Lauren is out and Choi is in at the sleek New American restaurant in Venice. Owner Dave Reiss has asked Choi to step in and “provide some new direction for the kitchen while making plans to renovate and update the dining space,” according to Alice Shin, Choi’s PR and Twitter maven. Get ready for Choi’s most American menu to date, one that’s “laid-back, beachy and contemporary, while expressing some of the classic idiosyncrasies of Roy’s imagination.”
Photo via WSJ.
The inaugural issue of Momofuku chef David Chang’s new quarterly food journal Lucky Peach is set to hit newsstands next week as the popular maker of Korean and Asian fusion cuisine continues to expand his rapidly-growing foodie empire.
Each issue — published by McSweeney’s — will focus on a single topic via photos, essays, travel journals and interviews. The first topic will be — what else — ramen. Hopefully enough people will want to read essays about noodles to justify a $28 annual subscription.
The premier issue will also include a foreword from culinary buddy and TV personality Anthony Bourdain as well as a scientific look at alkaline noodles and MSG.
An iPad app with videos and more photos will also be available. The first installment will have an interactive bowl of Momofuku ramen where the user can click on ingredients to reveal recipes and more videos.
“We thought the ramen was the best thing to start with,” Chang told the New York Times. “Within that soup there’s so many things. We wanted to see how far we could go down that rabbit hole.”
Check out our profile of Chang from the June 2009 edition of KoreAm.
South Korean streaming video company GOM TV is looking for English-language announcers to cover StarLeague, the professional league for the StarCraft 2 video game.
If you have passion for eSports and love casting, do not hesitate to show us what you got!
I guess the popularity of watching other people play video games continues to grow (there are over three channels devoted to this in Korea) and has spread to English-speaking audiences.
CanBot: When drinking and robots collide
CNN
A Japanese inventor thought it would be a good idea to make a robot disguised as a beer can.
The robot’s mission? Move very, very slowly across a table. Or roll, roll, roll it’s way to victory.
Seems pretty pointless but I’m sure it sure beats these ridiculous Japanese inventions.
CNN reported that the inventor made his alcoholic robot Bluetooth-ready and is operated remotely via a Wii controller.
Check out the video on YouTube.
Online consortium of Korean Women, Kimchi Mamas Power Bloggers
Korea Times Los Angeles | original article (in Korean)
A group of Korean American mothers have teamed up to create the mommy blog Kimchi Mamas, according to a recent article published by the Korea Times of LA. Continue Reading »
North Korea-owned restaurants are spreading across Asia and providing a much-needed source of income for the cash-strapped country, according to the Atlantic.
The magazine reported that the Pyongyang Cafe, which offers traditional Korean fare along with musical entertainment from hanbok-clad women, has carved out a niche in many popular tourist cities in the Far East and beyond.
North Korean government-run restaurants have existed for years in China, in regions adjacent to the [Democratic People's Republic of Korea]‘s northern border, but in the past decade the business has truly gone global.
In 2002, a branch of the Pyongyang restaurant chain opened in the Cambodian tourist hub of Siem Reap — the first outside China — and it became an immediate hit with South Korean tour groups visiting the nearby temples of Angkor.
Since 2003, the Atlantic reported, branches have opened in far-flung places such as Thailand, Laos, Indonesia, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Nepal and Dubai. Another branch is reportedly
How did a North Korean restaurant wind up in Northern Virginia?
by Mike Paarlberg
photographs by Hyungwon Kang
THE FIRST THING YOU NOTICE on the menu is what isn’t there: beef. It’s the essential feature of South Korean restaurants, particularly in barbecue form: beef ribs and bulgogi.
But Pyongyang Soondae—Pyongyang Sausage—isn’t a South Korean restaurant. It’s North Korean, so the menu skews toward seafood, poultry—and pork, pork, pork. The staple meat of the South is nowhere to be seen, except in a single soup dish. That would be naengmyeon, the one northern dish every Korean knows, a buckwheat noodle soup with cucumbers and slices of beef, served cold, often with ice cubes in the broth.
Most Korean restaurants advertise “Pyongyang naengmyeon” as a mark of authenticity, regardless of whether their chefs have ever been to the totalitarian ruled city that serves as the soup’s namesake. Pyongyang Soondae does them one better, serving its version with balls of pheasant meat.
The authenticity might explain why the new restaurant stands out in a region already dense with eateries from the peninsula. For that often elderly chunk of the Korean immigrant population that traces their ancestry to the North, the spot is unique.
Owner Ma Young-Ae has been advertising heavily in the local Korean press, both print and TV, since opening her restaurant last fall. Among the customers lunching on pork liver and intestines are Lim Sung-Il, 73, and his wife Hye-Gyung, 71, both of whom left Pyongyang as kids. Both made the trek from Maryland to Pyongyang Soondae’s storefront, lured by childhood culinary memories.
Sitting near the border of Alexandria and Fairfax County on Little River Turnpike—the restaurant-saturated main drag of Northern Virginia’s Korean community—the restaurant doesn’t tout its unlikely origins, at least not in English. Its only English-language sign, in the parking lot, features the name of the previous restaurant to occupy the narrow building. “Pyongyang Soondae” is written above it, in Korean. Which makes it the perfect place to find a restaurant owned by a former spy and operated by North Korean defectors.
Clad in a red apron decorated with cats and hearts, Ma Young-Ae, 48, looks like the quintessential ajumma—a Korean woman who has settled comfortably into middle age and the privileges that accompany it: being bowed to, getting seated first on the bus, giving unsolicited advice to strangers. Her day revolves around restaurant work. By 9:30 in the morning, she’s shopping for supplies. She works until at least 10:30 each night. In her spare time, she listens to music and watches movies. She likes action flicks, especially those about the FBI.
A little more than a decade ago, Ma was an undercover agent for North Korea’s Ministry of Public Security, conducting drug investigations. Her job was to bust smugglers—farmers, mostly—who were exporting opium to China. It was an odd assignment, considering the North Korean government’s documented involvement in the drug trade itself: along with weapons and counterfeit “superdollars,” opium has been a key source of revenue for the cash-strapped regime. Ma says her job was a bit less righteous: She was tasked with busting smugglers operating without government approval.
Besides a slight North Korean accent—pronouncing nias nei—there is little that would make Ma stand out among Northern Virginia’s large Korean community.
Until she gets to talking about politics, that is. A devout Christian with the zeal of a convert—she found Jesus in South Korea, where she lived after abandoning the atheist North—Ma is waging a missionary campaign against the state that once employed her. Her political activities are evident on the walls of her restaurant, decorated with pictures of her with Hillary Clinton and members of the South Korean parliament. She travels to New York frequently to lead protests at the offices of the North Korean ambassador to the United Nations, the only official North Korean delegation in the United States.
Last year, following North Korea’s controversial sinking of a South Korean naval vessel, she was back, waving a picket sign at the ambassador. She says a North Korean official pulled her aside to growl at her: “Where do you think you are, bitch?” she recalls, through an interpreter. “You just watch. We will kill you.”
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Featured Event
One of the the biggest Asian cinema events to hit Southern California opens on May 10. The Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival, presented by Visual Communications, features the latest works by established and emerging filmmakers, along with seminars, panel discussions and symposiums on topics relevant to Asian Pacific cinema.
Opening Night features “Shanghai Calling,” directed by Daniel Hsia and starring Korean American Daniel Henney, who plays a Chinese American expat lawyer navigating his way through the mean streets of Shanghai (the picture above also indicates he is a raisin smuggler). But does he take off his shirt? Go watch the movie to find out! read more
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