You eat the chook with a plastic glove and the noodles are made of seaweed. Restaurant critic Kim Knight experiences a life-changing Korean dinner in Ponsonby.
Last year, I upgraded my bed.
I ditched the sinking mattress that had been dragged between four flats and two cities and sucked inmy breath when I hit "enter" on the credit card transaction. How could a new bed cost more than an international flight?
The base weighed a tonne, the top-layer specs read like a science project and none of my old sheets fitted. I feared I'd made a terrible mistake. Dear reader, I had not. That bed is more supportive than my mother. If I could, I would live in that bed because it is the exact and perfect mix of yield and bounce. In short, it is the Korean noodle of my household furniture collection.
Until a few Saturdays ago, I'd never eaten the glass noodle stir-fry that is japchae. And then the japchae at Ockhee, on Auckland's Ponsonby Rd, literally changed my life.
"Made from kūmara starch, Korean dangmyeon noodles are naturally fat-free and low in calories, making them a healthy choice for noodle lovers," said the menu. It went on to describe the potato jeon as "a Korean-style potato fritter served with pickled onion sauce" and I was momentarily torn but kudos to the excellent waitperson who steered us towards those chewy kūmara noodles, soaked in soy and smoky wok heat, and loaded with crunchy fresh vegetables and sesame seeds ($22).
The next day, I hit the grocery store. I had, by then, read approximately 3000 recipes for japchae. Most of them insisted every vegetable is cooked separately. The noodles (soaked and boiled for maximum bounce, as per the instructions on the packet) went in last. There was a lot of soy sauce. Japchae required more organised labour than any stir-fry I've ever made, but it was also the most delicious and texturally interesting.
Plastic gloves are optional but the fried chicken should not be. From the menu at Ockhee, a Korean restaurant on Ponsonby Rd, Auckland. Photo/Dean Purcell
Virtually every mouthful of food we ate at Ockhee could be described thus. Order the seaweed noodles ($15) and wonder how something can be both crunchy and wet. These are nothing like the sesame-soaked shredded bits of bright green you buy with your sushi. Think baby bubble-wrap meets cucumber; nubbly and crackly with a cool garlic-mustard (and, I think, vinegar?) note that sliced right through the fatness of an obligatory $18 order of glazed, fried chicken.
According to the Internet-so-it-must-be-true, there are more than 36,000 fried chicken restaurants in Korea. It took a while for this trend to hit New Zealand but, raise your plastic-glove protected hand in praise, no other nation makes it more moreish. At Ockhee, we ordered the spicy soy version. My taste buds copped more of the former than the latter; deploy the seaweed salad as a kind of culinary icepack.
Kimchi-stuffed cucumber ($7) was dank and uncompromising; carrot and flat chives with a musky ferment was an acquired taste (but, also addictive - I'm still thinking about it three weeks later).
Our final dish was the bul baek ($26). Thin, schnitzel-like pieces of pork had been cut into strips and marinated in a sweet-salty soy before a quick pan-fry. Again, we took the waitperson's advice. Ordered it "saam" style (an extra $7) and the dish turns into a DIY meat salad. Select a leaf of thick napa cabbage, crispy lettuce or soft, aniseedy perilla, pile in the pork and dip it in the sweet, pungent sauce.
Some of the pork was quite chewy and there was zero chance of elegance on my side of the table but the flavours were so gorgeously balanced. Once again, it was all about the textures.
Inside Ockhee on Auckland's Ponsonby Rd. Photo/Dean Purcell
Ockhee's website promotes a very cool vibe in which "Ockhee" is a 70's diva who puts the soul from Seoul into Ponsonby. She doesn't do dessert, but she will (and I quote) "get your juices flowing with her hot and sexy authentic Korean food".
I have few points of reference to confirm the authenticity claim but this is, indeed, a sexy restaurant and not just because you're eating so much food with your fingers. More comparable in vibe to Karangahape Rd's newbies than Ponsonby Rd's stalwarts, it has one distinct advantage over its city-fringe neighbour - proximity to a Duck Island icecream store. That chicken was still stinging. I finished my perfect dinner with a perfect scoop of roasted white chocolate and miso icecream. And then I went home to google "japchae".
Ockhee, 171 Ponsonby Rd, Auckland, ph: (09) 217 2020. We spent: $132 for two.
