If I were an octopus, my kind of house would be a cave under a nice stack of rocks or a big conch shell, maybe with a hermit crab as a neightbor. This new Korean restaurant in East Flushing is pretty far from the Ktowns in Manhattan & Queens, but they do specialize in octopus. A generous variety of banchan are served, which includes a tasty freshly fried sardine for each person. We made the mistake of ordering 2 spicy dishes, the Spicy Stir-Fried Octopus and the Pork Backbone Soup. It was kind of my fault for not reading the description for the pork soup more closely because we assumed it was the mild version.
There are 3 octopus dishes on the menu, but we opted for the lower priced one. The octopus was cut up into small pieces and swimming in red pepper sauce with onions, cabbage & thick slices of jalapeño peppers. It comes with a ball of rice noodles and a bowl of purple rice & beans, which cut some of the spiciness back. Towards the end, we just picked out all the octopus pieces like a treasure hunt in the sea of hot sauce. The pork soup had giant pork bones floating in a flaming red broth and covered in tiny pepper corns. To say that it was spicy is an understatement because even the potatoes and bok choy in it were scorchingly hot! We were lucky to be sitting next to the water dispenser, going back for refills every few minutes. Whew!
We also ordered the Seafood Pancake and the Mandu Gui fried dumplings, which were gratefully mild. The pancake is not the best we've had and it was kind of mushy. It had a lot of scallions, some squid and tiny shrimp. Definitely skip the pancake. The fried dumplings were really good though. They came out super hot out of the fryer, stuffed with meat and we even had a bonus dumpling. You know what I would really like is plate full of those fried sardines! read more