Sung Korean Bistro

Sushi #24: Sung Korean – Volcano & Spicy 911 rolls – $27

Apparantly I misplaced my photos from this place. :(

Well, the burger list is done and now onto sushi, pizza, the top 10 restaurants and several of the highest rated new restaurants.  I made a compilation list instead of taking say, the top 50 pizza places, or the top 40 sushi because I am all burgered out!  While it was one of best New Year’s resolutions to date, you have no idea how much I just wanted it to end by the end of 2011!  I just wanted something else like Indian food, Thai, Mexican, or something without ground beef in it.  I started cooking a lot more at home during this past year to keep costs down and I learned that I can actually cook all of those foods at home now, which is quite the feat for a single male.  I even made home made burgers during the summer at a party, but no more... onto new experiences!

Sung is my first sushi experience of my 2012 list.  I hit it 2 days into the year,1-2-12, with my first date of the year. They are located on 7^th and Elm downtown Cincinnati.  I’ve been several times before and it was my favorite Korean place for a few years until I found Riverside Korean in Covington.  It is not as authentic as Riverside, but is more of a fusion feel since they are all about their sushi.  Plus, you’ll find some really tasty infused cucumber or strawberry sake here. If you aren’t drinking, the honey ginger tea is awesome.  There is something about the atmosphere with the red lighting and cool art work on the walls that stuck with me.  The young professional to older crowd is usually pretty dead except for the weekends, but that’s to be expected downtown. 

Their menu is diverse, but also concise.  Seafood and egg is in a lot of dishes.  For an appetizer I’m a fan of the haemul pajun: pancake with egg, crab, shrimp, squid and veggie’s.  With your entrée you get a tray with 6 pickled side dishes.  These could be kim chi (a cabbage mix), radishes, sweet potato, seaweed, mushrooms, tofu, etc.  Try it when you get it, don’t just look at it funny.  Get out of your comfort zone.  The most popular item is dolsot bibimbab: kind of like a stir fried rice with your choice of meat, veggie’s, a Korean spicy chili sauce, and an egg with the yoke raw that is served in a mortar bowl at cooking temperature so when they mix all of this it cooks in front of you so you have crispy rice on the edges…trust me, get this your first time, you’ll go back!  Aside from that I’ve had the best asian pork ribs and I’d get them again too.  There is a big grilled dinner section as well as a lot of different stir fried dishes.  If you are feeling outgoing and like sushi, try the squid, I had one at Riverside I’d recommend. 

The sushi menu is surprisingly long and expensive for a Korean place.  I will admit my mid-western ignorance right now: until I made this list, I had not idea there was sushi at so many Korean and Thai places.  I’ve also learned that EVERY single sushi place has a Bengals, Reds, Bearcats, Cincinnati, or some other city specific name for their most popular sushi.  It’s a marketing ploy that’s working nicely.  It’s not that they made one in honor of your city, they just renamed what they had that may have had similar colors as the team.  My date and I had the Sung’s spicy 911 (15$) and the Volcano (12$) rolls.  I’m always happy when I find a friend that brings up that they can handle spicy and they want to prove it to me.  Moral of the story I had my first girl crying 2 days into 2012…not sure if I’m proud or frightened of that fact?!  The spicy 911 was fried shrimp, roe, avocado and cream cheese rolled in seaweed, topped with hot pepper, torched spicy crab and flakes.  It was rolled so big it was awkward to eat on a first date.  The volcano roll had fried shrimp, scallops, avocado, roe, and crab mix.  Then it was cut, layed sideways, and spicy mayo was put on top and it was cooked in an oven in aluminum foil.  This was a unique way to do this, and it came out not like you’d expect sushi to come out, but I really like this one too and would get it again.  Overall the quality and presentation were excellent.  The service was good, but no one else was there on a Monday night. The price was high, and there is no half price time, so points deducted for that. 

This is the start of the new year’s reviews so it’ll take some tweeking to get it right like it did with the 40 burgers.  Go to Sung, it’s one of my favorite restaurants and try Korean food if you haven’t and then try the sushi the next time you go.  Hopefully people are still keeping up with their new year’s resolutions!