Usually, upon arriving in Montréal, I head straight for a ramen shop. The thought of soft-cooked eggs and toothsome noodles in rich broth is an irresistible draw. This time, though, as we walked down Rue Sherbrooke Ouest, my friend pointed out a colorful sign reading “kantapia: cuisine coréenne.”
All of a sudden, my imagined bowl of soup looked a bit different: shreds of cabbage piled in a pool of deep red liquid, cubes of tofu and pieces of fatty pork, a sprinkling of scallions.
I nodded my assent, and we headed inside. The spot was busy at lunchtime on a Sunday, but we snagged a table and scanned the laminated menus. Coming from Vermont, I have little experience with Korean food, and I was excited to sample as much as possible.
An appetizer sampler seemed like just the ticket. The platter came with crisp fried mandu (dumplings), slices of kimbap — which are nori-wrapped rice rolls that approximate Japanese maki — and a separate dish of tteok bokki, a rice-flour noodle that is shaped somewhat like gnocchi, slathered in chile sauce and dotted with white and black sesame seeds.
The tteok bokki was fun to eat. The rice “cakes” themselves had a sweet flavor, while the sauce was rich without offering a lot of heat. I struggled to keep the slippery bites on my metal chopsticks. The kimbap slices, stuffed with cucumber, fish cake, egg and pickles, left me cold: they simply weren’t particularly flavorful.
Our final appetizer was haemul pajeon, a seafood pancake studded with mussels, squid, scallion and strips of carrot. Unlike other such dishes I’ve had, which were thin and crisp, this one was thick like an omelette, and a bit doughy. However, the bites that I had, swiped through the soy-based dipping sauce, were pleasant enough.
My favorite thing was that bowl of soup I’d been craving. Called kimchi jjigae, and delivered sizzling in a fetchingly beat-up pot, it was a warming and comforting winter dish. Kimchi, slices of pork and cubes of tofu swam in the broth, and scallions dotted the top. A bowl of rice came on the side.
Overall, I wouldn’t recommend Kantapia as a Montréal dining destination, but if you find yourself near Place des Arts and hungry for Korean food, head there for some reasonably priced dumplings and a bowl of soup.
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Being Korean myself and reading the items you had, it seems like this would be a wonderful place to get the real thing. Eating my mother’s cuisine, a native from South Korea in a little town near the DMZ, and many of her friends whose food I ate growing up, I would say that there is some difference from family to family on how you prepare items. But, that is like every cuisine. I know you said you’re not that familiar with Korean cuisine, but the items you mentioned are classic. I believe you shouldn’t compare kimbop to maki. It’s like comparing apples with oranges. All the seafood pancakes and vegetable pancakes I’ve had in my lifetime have been omelet thick and a bit doughy, just like your description; I’ve never had them thin and crisp. The batter you mix the items in is very much like a pancake batter but thicker; so it’s very difficult to get a thin pancake with all the other items in the batter as well which will naturally “bulk” up the pancake. The rice cakes look nothing similar to gnocchi. I believe you are trying to compare once again an item that people are not too familiar with (rice cake) to an item people may know (gnocchi). Gnocchi is a potato pasta that contains potato, flour, and egg. Rice cake is exactly that. Rice cooked down with some salt added and then pressed to formation. I have to disagree with you about the sweetness of it. Rice cake itself is not sweet…I would say that the red pepper paste which is the base of the sauce in the dish you ate had some sugar added to take off the heat. Every cuisine is beautiful and Korean cuisine is no different in that aspect. I don’t believe you should be recommending or not recommending a dining establishment if you don’t really have a full understanding of the cuisine in the first place. I am excited for your report solely to have an option that is closer by to me to choose to dine at for a cuisine that you normally only find in larger urban areas.
Kyla, Montreal is a larger urban area.
Yes, I agree and much closer than Boston and NYC which is why I’m excited!
Omma on Rue Bernard O. is worthy of a try as well.
Hi Kyla, thanks for your comment. I agree that I don’t know much about Korean food, so any evaluations that I have are not about authenticity, but about whether I found the dishes to be delicious. That’s the same thing I do when I evaluate restaurant dishes from cuisines with which I’m more familiar. Is something bland on the one hand, or oversalted on the other? Did it arrive at the table hot, if it was a hot dish? Do I want to go back and eat it again? I don’t believe one can ever fully understand any cuisine, even one’s own. There’s so much complexity, nuance and history!
Gnocchi can be made from various starches — wheat, potato, winter squash, rice — and sometimes, I’ve made them straight and long, very similar to the shape of garaetteok. For those who think of something entirely different when they hear “rice cake” — such as the hard, crunchy snack food that is sold in sleeves at the grocery store — I thought that I’d make a comparison.
I believe that comparisons are incredibly useful for helping people understand new things, so I make them often. If I eat a new, bloomy-rind cow’s milk cheese, I may describe it as being “similar to Brie” if it has one particular flavor profile, and “similar to Camembert” if it has a particular different flavor profile, because that will help people decide if they might like to eat it, or not. And helping people find things they want to eat is the primary reason I write about restaurants!