We’re totally feeling dishes that aren’t immediately identifiable on sight; last week, we took a gander at some cheese rosettes. Today…well, what do you think it is? It sort of looks like macaroni salad, right?
Of course not! Those glistening tubes are squid, not noodles. Say hello to haemul pajun ($7.50) from Jin Ju, in Edgewater. Semi-obscured by the mass of cephalopods is a scallion pancake, or pajun (haemul, or hae moul, or hey-mul, means seafood); you can see the scallions poking up here and there, nicely charred, and a mass at the bottom that are covered in fried oil. Near the back of the pancake, a small colony of shucked mussels awaits its inevitable fate under cover of hot sauce. This is a somewhat unusual arrangement for haemul pajun: more often, the seafood is mixed in with the pancake material, but not in this case. Advantages of this separation include being able to cook the seafood separately and differently from the pancake, optimizing each ingredient. From the looks of things here, they know exactly what they’re doing.
Jin Ju [MenuPages]
[Photo: Zesmerelda/flickr, who is nigh unstoppable]
