West 8^th Street recently welcomed a new addition to its restaurant row. 8^th St Kitchen ups the scale of the ambiance and offers a refreshing change from the hectic restaurants in K-town. The restauranteurs and Third Floor Café manager Jungmin Kim have branded 8^th St Kitchen as a Korean small plates restaurant, which sounds like an interesting concept, but is essentially piggy backing on the enormously popular tapas trend in the NY dining scene.

The restaurant’s got a trendy, casual feel to it, and the décor is done quite nicely, with the minimalist furniture and modern lighting.

I love the asymmetrical wood pieces that span across the entire wall. C’est tres chic!

Now onto the food. Between two people, we ordered one appetizer and two dishes, which was just about the perfect amount. One caveat is that they don’t serve banchan here. I’m sure it helps cut down costs, but that is something I always look forward to. At least they should serve the steamed egg!

What’s a Korean meal without pancakes? Below is the classic Hae Mool Pa Jon (green onion pancake with shell fish and squid). The portions were generous, and the pancakes were fried to crispy, golden color. We both agreed that the quality was definitely comparable to K-town.

Next, we had the Jap Chae, which are wok-fried glass noodles sautéed in soy sauce with assorted vegetables. Unfortunately these noodles were not as flavorful as we had liked. They were chewy and not too greasy, but lacked the rich, meaty flavor that is usually found in excellent jap chae.

Finally, we ordered the Je Yook Gui, thin sliced pork-belly marinated with pepper sauce and served with mixed greens. This was actually my least favorite of the three, as I felt the red pepper sauce was overly salty and overpowered the natural taste of the pork belly. The texture was very soft nonetheless, and the mixed greens helped neutralize the heavy sauce. In hindsight, I think it would have been fine if they had served the dish with rice, but that’s for next time.

If you live around the area or go to NYU, be sure to mention it and you’ll get an extra 10% off

All in all, I think the key takeaways are that 8^th St Kitchen’s ambiance is a big winner, but the food needs a little more flavor to compete with the ones in K-town. Perhaps the young’ens have much to learn from the ajimaas in K-town?

Cheers,

Jess

8th St Kitchen
22 W 8th St
New York, NY
10011-9002
(212) 477-7755

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