Taking up the torch on the part-time food beat at the Guardian, Virginia Miller rounds up several new Korean restaurants to try, noting first of all that we have kind of a dearth of Korean food in general in S.F. due to a relatively small population of Korean-Americans. She checks out the chandelier-strewn Aato, at Lombard and Van Ness, where she loves the eel ssam and the hangbang bo ssam, as well as the man-du Korean dumplings; Nan California Korean (Fillmore and Geary) where she likes the bulgogi beef; and Manna (845 Sunset), where she says the buttery seafood pajeon is “one of the best I’ve ever had.” [SFBG]
Jonathan Kauffman heads to Filipino eatery House of Sisig, in a Daly City strip mall, for this week’s review, where he says the namesake sizzling pork sisig is leaner than at most sisig trucks, and “hard to stop snacking on.” His favorite dish of all is the only halfway-vegetarian one, called laing, “taro leaves cooked until satiny, then stewed with coconut milk, chiles, thumbnail-sized curls of shrimp, and translucent cubes of pork fat,” which he promises isn’t “anywhere near the gut-bomb it sounds.” And he’s charmed by the not-advertised kamayan (picnic) style of eating that the restaurant offers for groups. “Something about the act of reaching onto a communal table of food, or pressing rice and vegetables together with fingertips on the banana leaves’ smooth surface, displaced the sensation of being in a restaurant.” [SF Weekly]
