Hey, where have those Amster-Burtons been? New York. We spent the last week there, doing mostly Iris-driven activities (if Iris isn’t having fun, no one is having fun). We strolled through Prospect Park and took Iris to see, as she puts it, “a real dead mummy” and many suits of armor at the Met. On Thursday night, however, I sneaked away to Momofuku Ssam Bar.
Everything I had at Ssam Bar, other than the desserts, was a delight. The standouts were fuji apple kimchi with guanciale (crispy pork jowl) and labne (somewhere between yogurt and creme fraiche); the famous pork buns; and a rustic pate with pickled tomatillos.
Hit up Google and you’ll find dozens of reviews of Ssam Bar from amateurs and pros alike. So I’d like to take a step back and try to figure out what’s going on here and why everybody loves this place.
Ssam Bar reminded me of another New York restaurant that, despite obvious differences in price, service, and ambience, has a kitchen with a similar outlook: Babbo. Both restaurants are run by rebellious, larger-than-life chefs who take a traditional cuisine and thumb their nose at it–and are brilliant enough to get away with it. Mario Batali takes a cuisine everybody likes, Italian, and reinvents it in his own image. David Chang takes a cuisine too many people have ever tried, Korean, and does the same thing. People go to Ssam Bar and Babbo and try things they would never try anywhere else (brains, tendons, eels, etc.) because they trust that if Mario Batali or David Chang dreamed it up, it’s going to be good.
Chang’s food is good because he seems to have an intuitive sense of how to modulate five factors: salt, acid, umami, chile heat, and pork. All of these things make food taste better, but it’s so easy to overdo it. Everyone has had the experience of the dish that tastes incredible on the first bite and after that just makes you thirsty or bored–like a punk rock album that really gets your first pumping, until your fist-pumping muscle gets a cramp around track seven. French chefs understand this, and they approach it by backing off to midtempo and letting you sigh languidly through the meal. David Chang approaches it by turning one or two of the knobs to eleven in each dish and setting a bunch of dishes on the table at once. The fuji apple kimchi was seriously sour. So I took a couple of bites and turned to the lemongrass pork ssam, wrapping a bit of the pork sausage in a lettuce leaf and achieve pork nirvana.
Okay, this is sounding an awful lot like a Pitchfork review. One more thing. Chang calls Ssam Bar an American restaurant, and he has a point, but a whole lot of the food is recognizably Korean. That makes Ssam Bar (and the rest of the Momofuku family) the first international megahit Korean restaurant. I’m a huge fan of Korean food, so I couldn’t be more pleased. I give it a 9.5.