I was under my triple quilted comforter, and one of my cats is snoozing right next to me. Lying on top of the comforter were hardcover copies of The Complete Carl Barks Disney library (you can read comic books and be an adult if you have a mortgage). It's 10a Saturday morning, it's chilly out, a large mug of Tea Forte Earl Grey on the nightstand, my wife is in bed watching a Korean drama on her iPad while stroking the other cat, I am at my happy comfort zone after a rather stressful week.
"Hun?" "Hmmm?" "i want some sujebi for lunch".
If it was anything else I would grab my phone, open Seamless, hand her the device, have her order whatever and go back to my blissful half-slumber dreaming about unca Scrooge. Instead my next action was to check on the bus to Murray Hill/Auburndale. If it's anything other than Arirang, I wouldn't bother. But for a bowl of that chicken sujebi, I would get out of bed in the middle of a blizzard.
What's sujebi? The literal translation in Korean is "dough flakes soup" but that's like calling a handmade buttery croissant "bread". It's handmade pasta tossed into a pot of savory broth and cooked. It's not a uniquely Korean concept - the Tibetans call theirs Thenthuk, Jamaicans commonly toss hand-made dumplings into their pots of soup, the same goes for chicken and dumpling soup served on both sides of the Mason-Dixon, both as noodle-like slickers and pillowy floaters. Imagine a pot of highly flavorful chicken soup (with bits of Daikon radish, potatoes, spinach and flakes of chicken meat), deeply seasoned, piping hot and slightly thick from the starches off the dumplings, and the dumplings themselves a chewy but soft sheets of dough, ready to absorb any flavors introduced. The Koreans consider a bowl of sujebi to be their rainy-day, long-dark-tea-time-of-the-soul comfort food, usually served with mung bean savory pancakes. It's not something you find in typical barbecue or chicken joints - it's in small humble, mom-and-pop places, near your gukbap (beef soup) or joek (congee) places. In fact, only about 7 to 10 places across the NYC metro region will serve you sujebi, and they are all found within 1 mile of the Broadway LIRR stop.
So what makes the version from Arirang so special that I am willing to endure a bus ride to get there? The soup. I am not sure what they put in there, but along with Parksanbal babs (a block away), they are the yardstick to which I measure my own. Why? It's that massive dose of umami but without the usual signs of MSG usage (MSG is just a seaweed extract so you can just go nuts with natural kelp and anchovies in your broth until it gets you that flavor). It's a chicken soup where the poultry speaks the loudest to your soul - both fresh tasting, mild but yet satisfyingly slightly gamey. If the usual "tastes just like chicken" applies to their soup, someone turned the volume of the usual up to 20. And when combined with small bits of potatoes, radishes, shreds of fresh chicken and their puffy but soft sujebi pasta, it's nourishment of the highest order. If there's such a thing as transcendental soup, this would be it. A bowl is 18 bucks but it sure made my day - the only thing left now is to head to H-Mart, pick up some groceries, head home, open up the latest chapter in the Duck Tales saga, and dream of Arirang's chicken sujebi. I know I do. Everything else (the long way to get there, the wait for the table, the not-all-that-cold cups of water, the quite-alright-banchan) just dissolves away when compared to chicken sujebi.
Oh yeah, their seafood sujebi is quite alright, as well. Not quite peak soup as the chicken sujebi, but it is quite satisfying. read more