If you want, read my first review of this upscale 'Korean' restaurant, and notice here the adjustment down?
Why?
Their version of the Korean traditional dish of gumjatang (pork backbone and potato soup/stew). When an insipid soup comes of the kitchen, and I feel impelled to dump most of a whole take-in container of doenjang soybean sauce/paste to bring the flavour up to approximate how it's supposed to be, then there are problems in the kitchen.
Once again, I doubt that there's a Korean cook, chef or supervisor helping out back there, and so the pinoy cooks are forced to do their best by memory, likely taming the dish down so that flavours are leached out and authenticity almost totally gone.
Yes, the pork is plentiful, but it's not pork backbone, but rather are large bone-in porkchops.
The potatoes are fresher and more plentiful than usual, but this dish is such a weak diluted copy, then gotta rate it as such.
Their 7 pre-meal appetizers are pretty good, but that doesn't constitute the main course. Sometimes in such poor representations of a super food culture, my wife and I want to get up after downing the appetizers, and with a small tip, leave.
Who needs an entree that fails to be real on so many counts?
More?
I am not at all a Koreano cook but I know some of the ingredients of the real thing (online searching quickly bring some up for you).
So the next day with the large amount of leftovers at home, I added some ingredients: a couple of chopped-up local red peppers, two crushed cloves of garlic, some Chinese black bean paste (not dissimilar to doenjang sauce/paste), and some red mustard seeds (the better Korean restos around the world add them for some extra zing and eye appeal).
How were the results?
Really good and fit right in. Given we'd dumped a brought-in container of doenjang paste into the 'dine-in' meal, it had time to permeate the dish overnight, and then with the added ingredients, it approximated how it should taste!
Chodam?
Go there if you want, but I rather doubt we will return.
I think I can do better, including their deep-fried spicy chicken.
Why pay out 400-750+ pesos for mediocre stuff that a home cook can quite easily duplicate and better?
Bye, bye, Chodam. read more