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! 

Quarter Bistro

Burger #30: Quarter Bistro – Bistro Burger – $12

Borrowed from Urbanspoon

I’m so close to being done I can taste it!  I haven’t had a burger since the New Year, and I’m trying to keep my beef intake to a minimum.  So far so good.  Enough small talk, on to the review. 

This is a review I am happy to do, since it’s one of the top restaurants in the city.  Quarter Bistro was rated as number 30 on the Cincinnati top 40 list, and it was the 34^th burger I had in 2011.  I had no preconceived notion of what to expect at Quarter Bistro, other than what you get from the name.  I assumed it would fall into the middle point of my rating just like the rest, but it far surpassed my expectations in food quality, atmosphere, and service.  While I was NOT on a date, this is the kind of place that would make it seem like you knew a thing or two about fine dining.  And you know what I always say, if you don’t have it, fake it until you do!  Seriously, people think I’m some kind of gourmet chef nowadays and a few years ago I was using a George Foreman to cook chicken breasts with bbq sauce every night.  And now I just made octopus the other day just to see if it might get some people sick to see it.  Hahaha! I’ve come such a long way to blogging about fine dining.  Ok…back on track.  I hit Quarter Bistro in Mariemont on Wednesday, December 7^th on what appeared to be a fairly busy dinner time.  I was surprised by the amount of people in the place seeing as I’d never heard of it.  When you walk in you get a feel for the atmosphere they are going for with a lot of red colors coming at you right away.  One thing I had to take note of was the ceiling was amazing to look at.  If you go to the website you’ll see what I’m talking about, but even though I saw it online beforehand, it didn’t do it justice to sit inside of the dining room and experience it.  They also have seating outside, but it is winter, so it wasn’t out. 

There isn’t a huge menu at Quarter Bistro, but everything is well thought out.  Quarter bistro uses a lot of fresh, local ingredients in all of their dishes.  There are a lot of seafood choices on the apps menu including: lobster mac and cheese, seared diver scallops, and prawns (white cheddar grit cake, bacon consommé (when I read this I think bacon jelly…wait what?!) , and tomato coulis).  There is an assortment of tacos (mahi, veggie, and short rib) and pizzas (roasted chicken and goat cheese, margherita).  Some of the entrees that stood out were the 18 hour short ribs, blackened tournedos, Scottish organic salmon and the steamed mussels.  I am disappointed I didn’t get to try at least one of the entrees because they looked awesome on other peoples tables, but I had to stick to the list. 

We took the picture a little late,
because that burger is destroyed!

There is only one burger on the menu so this will be a short review.  The Bistro Burger was a half pound angus beef on an egg bun with whatever toppings they have that day.  The toppings weren’t on the menu, so the waiter will go over the list from memory.  I went with bacon, mushrooms, onions and tomatoes.  The burger came a bit more well done than medium and grease wasn’t covering the plate by any means.  What was memorable about this burger is that it wasn’t just cooked on a griddle with all the rest of the food of the day.  This burger had a charred flavor that you get from cooking over a flame, which is a great reminder of grilling out in the summer weather even though it was December when I went there.  The bacon was normal cut, but nothing that stood out.  The tomatoes were very red for this time of year, which is a good sign of the quality of the food overall.  They also had one of the softest, most flavorful egg buns to date.  On top of that they had some great home made chips.  They were cooked really crispy, but they also seasoned them just enough to make them better than a lot of fries on the list. 

This is a place I plan on going back to if I hit Mariemont again and I don’t have one of my 50 new 2012 places to hit.  You should definitely get out there if you’ve never been to Mariemont or you just want to have a great burger.