North Korean Ox Knee

"Yo, I had North Korean food last week," said my part-Korean-American, all-New Yorkian friend Michael. "Whoa really? There's a North Korean restaurant here? I wanna check it out," I replied.

So last night we met at the Hongqiao Parksons in Shanghai, and went up to the fifth floor. We were greeted by a pack of supposedly North Korean women wearing traditional dresses and eager smiles. The other restaurants in the Parksons mall are a bit more upscale, so the bone-white fluorescent lights and the too-loud karaoke music were the first reassuring clues that this place was North Korean.



I've been wanting to visit North Korea for years, but American passport holders are not allowed to enter. If you're interested, check with the fine folks at Koryo Tours; they were able to answer all my tough questions. North Korea's in the news a lot lately, so the photos and stories on Koryo's website are a refreshing alternative to all the grim tales and doomsday predictions.

So let's take a look at the menu. Many of the dishes were called "Pyongyang" something or other, like "Pyongyang kimchi", etc. Of course, the proud capital. We searched for the weirdest meat on the menu, and finally settled on the "Steamed Ox Knee" (the only thing spelled correctly on the menu). There were actually a lot of weird things on the menu but with all the mispellings, I didn't want to be disappointed with something not really weird, like just some normal fish with a weird sounding name.

Like most Korean meals, you order one dish, and it comes with a gazillion side dishes and kimchees. So we ordered the ox knee, and something called "garbogone" (a soup with mystery meat and instant noodles). Most of the spelling on the menu was wrong, so I don't know the true name of this dish. It had these tube-like meat-things that I figured to be some kind of intestine, but Michael and the waitress agreed it was some squiggly sea creature. "One that goes like this, yo," said Michael, wiggling his arms and making silly face. "Right. That one," I said as I maneuvered the squiggly tube-like sea-meat-thing into my mouth with the metal chopsticks. Pretty good. Like a more delicate, less-rubbery calamari.

Then came the Ox Knee, steamed in a bamboo basket, table-side. It looked like raw chicken, even after a 20-minute steam job. Pure, gelatinous cartilage. Now that's a knee.



The color, and even the flavour, reminded me of raw hamachi (sushi), but the texture was unique. It had a pleasant chewiness -- a soft, sticky gelatin texture -- and subtle flavors that balanced well with the other, more spicy dishes.

So, the ox knee was good, but the rest of the food ... well, everything was just not that good. More specifically, the kimchi and other small dishes were unbalanced, erring on the side of bland or acidic. With only one North Korean meal under my belt, I'm not sure if this is the fault of the restaurant or the cuisine, but I'd guess the former.