Review Tue Mar 06 2007

Taste of Lawrence Ave: Han Bat

Tucked into the back of a small parking lot on the south side of Lawrence, near California, is the Korean restaurant Han Bat. Its austerity makes it easy to miss, and even if you happen to stop and peek in, you might be put off by the coldness of the decor and the almost nonexistence of a menu. You'd be remiss to leave, though, and miss Han Bat's specialty -- and, in fact, the only dish on their menu -- the Korean soup seolleongtang.

We visited Han Bat Saturday night. When we sat down, we looked at the options available to us. Seolleongtang is a very basic soup at its root: a milky broth containing glassy noodles and some kind of beef. Every bowl starts with this blueprint. But you are given one option: which type of beef you want in it. Pretty much the whole cow is available: tongue, spleen, tendon, tripe, intestine or plain old brisket. This was our first time, so we stuck with the brisket.

What's striking about the soup at first is how plain it is. Not exactly something to build a restaurant around, perhaps. This is when you look past your bowl and realize the table's filled with a variety of accoutrements meant to be tossed in at your pleasure. Most seolleongtangers opt for the sea salt, and in copious amounts. Ditto the sliced scallions, which come to your table spilling over the sides of a serving bowl twice as big as your soup bowl. It still wasn't quite there for me, so I threw in a few spoonfuls of the hot sauce, along with some spillover from the plate of kimchee. Heck, I think I threw in some kimchee as well. Now we had something.

Chowhounder RST writes this about the pleasures of seolleongtang:

It's not an easy dish to appreciate: the soup hits you first with a wall of blankness and emptiness. It asks you first to defer pleasure and enjoyment. Pleasure is deliberately withheld and then ritually reclaimed as one adds a bit of sea salt, a bit of chile paste.

An accurate assessment. It's a dish that makes you work for it, and the payoff is subtle. But as soon as you leave the restaurant, you find yourself mentally scanning your calendar for the next free night you'll have to go back and try it again.

(As many Chowhounders have pointed out, Han Bat benefits from one fantastic, yet completely accidental, additional feature: it's immediately next door to The Penguin, home of the delectable, super rich Argentine gelato. No trip to Lawrence Avenue can be considered complete without it.)

— Sandy Weisz / Comments (1)