I love culinary cultural exchanges. French occupation of Vietnam gave us Vietnamese sandwiches on airy rice flour baguettes. According to a story my friend Miho loves to tell, an Indian prince fell in love with a Japanese woman and stayed in Japan to be with her. She, in turn, created Japanese-style curry to sate her lover's craving for the food of his homeland. In Alsace, sauerkraut and wurst-laden choucroute celebrates the cultural mesh of German and French.
So when I was walking down 32nd St. and saw a menu advertising ja jang myun at Shanghai Mong, I had to stop in and try some. Ja jang myun is a delicious noodle dish made with spaghetti-width Chinese wheat noodles and a black bean gravy with vegetables and meat. According to Asia Food's website, ja jang myun is a Korean dish with Chinese origins. Actually, the only place I ever tried it was at a Chinese restaurant that may or may not have been run by Koreans on Shattuck Ave. in Berkeley, CA. I thought about that dish from time to time, the way one thinks of an excellent one night stand. "I wonder if that ja jang myun's still as good as I remember."
Shanghai Mong advertises itself as a Shanghai fusion restaurant. It's an odd place, the wait staff bedecked in Pearl River Mart chinoiserie, tufts of astroturf serving as bright green accents against the caricature Chinese reds and lacquer blacks. The restaurant is shaped like a wrist watch, the front and back rooms like long watch band strips. Oddest of all is the watch face middle room. Individual seating is in the round, with diners facing out at the circumference of the room, not in. In the middle of the watch face is a brown velvet button of a couch where I guess people are supposed to hang out and wait for their tables.
In a way, this circular middle room makes Shanghai Mong an ideal, no-nonsense place to eat when you're alone, as evidenced by the many Korean businessmen who came and went as I sat there with my ja jang myun. But, like any other New Yorker, I hate sitting with my back to the room. Even more disconcerting was having to stare at the iridescent tile on the wall twelve inches in front of my face the whole time I was eating. I like being alone with my thoughts, but I don't like being cooped up with them.
The ja jang myun? It was aight, and cheap at $5.95. Soft, elastic yellow wheat noodles were nestled under a robe of black bean gravy with a sort of burnt sugar sweetness, studded with overcooked potato, tender cubes of zucchini, caramelized onion, and tough little chips of what could have been air dried beef or dried scallops or shoe leather for all I know. I should have ordered what the guy next to me had -- a genius bowl divided by a wall down the middle, one half filled with ja jang myun, the other half filled with spicy noodle soup with seafood. I think it's only a dollar or two more than the plain ja jang myun.
The search continues for the delicious ja jang myun of my memory. Anybody have any recommendations?
Shanghai Mong
30 W. 32nd St. (Koreablock) between 5th and Bway
BDFV to 34th St.
6 to 33rd St.
