Inside My Table #87 | Excerpt
Dining Without Borders—Home of the Gift-Wrapped Chicken
By Dennis Abrams
When I’m traveling, one of my favorite things is to visit the local markets. The sights, the smells, the crowds, the foods: Nothing can give you a better, truer look at a culture than its marketplaces.
In myriad ways, the marketplace is the heart of a town. It’s where the farmers go in the morning to sell their produce, where the women go to purchase the day’s food and catch up on talk, where workers congregate to eat a cheap and filling lunch. It’s where the local populace reveals its most basic secrets. As Jean Antheleme Brillat-Savarin wrote in his culinary classic, The Physiology of Taste, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” By observing a society’s food and culinary tastes, we can get a much better sense of what the society really is. As an added bonus, the daring market explorer gets the chance to taste a whole bunch of new and exotic foods.
Living in Houston, of course, one does not need to travel far to visit ethnic markets, even if these markets are not driven by local farmers wearing colorful “ethnic” garb. Our city of immigrants is chock-a-block with markets geared to meet the needs of the ethnic groups they serve. Asia Market for Thai, Hong Kong City Mall for Chinese, Michoacana for Mexican and Maru Ethiopian Market for, obviously, Ethiopian are just some of the markets that sell groceries, liquor, produce and meats as well as the prepared foods of their immigrant communities. Recently a new market opened on Blalock that should please both the Korean community and committed foodies throughout Houston — Super H Mart.
As it says on its website, H Mart was “founded in 1982 in Woodside, Queens, on the East Coast of the United States, with the philosophy of love and sincerity.” There are, in fact, two parts to Super H Mart. One is the actual supermarket — a huge, clean, modern market selling every thing needed to prepare Korean and most other Asian cuisines. There is wonderful live and fresh seafood, meats, exceedingly well-priced produce, oils, spices, rice, noodles, condiments, even an entire corner devoted to kimchee in all its sundry forms. (I loved the scallion kimchee.) On the right hand of the store, though, is the main reason for this column: the food stalls.
They’re not, in fact, really food “stalls.” Not only are they cleaner than any food stall I’ve ever seen, they are thrillingly high-tech as well. Giant flat-screen TVs show you pictures of the food you’re ordering, and your choices include Korean food, Chinese food, sushi and even Korean-style fried chicken. The ordering system does seem a bit complicated the first time, since two or three of the stalls handle the actual ordering for all of them, and, as you’ll learn, English is definitely not the language of choice here. But no matter. Once you order, find yourself a table and wait for your number to be called. Your patience will be amply rewarded.
The Korean stall at the end of the food court area, Sobahn, has some terrific choices. The soups I sampled there were excellent — hot, spicy and delicious — and the bulgogi (hibachi-grilled beef), while not as good as that at, let’s say, Nam Gang over on Gessner, was still pretty tasty. But my favorite dish there was the “Hot Stone Bibimbap.” It’s basically fried rice with cabbage, shiitake mushrooms and strips of meat, served with a raw egg yolk sitting pretty on top. The genius of the dish is that it is served in a blisteringly hot stone bowl: The bowl keeps the ingredients hot (the egg is cooked when stirred into the hot rice — be sure to add some of the Korean hot chili paste served on the side), plus the hot bowl ensures that if you don’t spend too much time mixing the ingredients and have the patience to let it sit for a couple of minutes, the rice at the bottom of the bowl will get nice and crunchy, adding an additional element to a dish that is already a complicated festival of tastes and textures.
The sushi stall offers a spicy tuna roll that is not Houston’s best, but is definitely one of Houston’s best sushi values. And, a soon-to-open dumpling stall is showing pictures on its video screen of kimchee dumplings that I’m eager to try.
Avoid the special cold summer noodles available at a couple of the stalls: The clump of soba noodles in a large bowl of icy, spicy liquid was, while not bad, just extremely odd.
For my money, and reason enough alone to go to Super H Mart, is the Korean-style fried chicken prepared by a company called Toreore: Chicken & Joy. (How could anyone not want to eat at a place that brags of providing both chicken and joy?) The chicken comes in six varieties: basic marinated, sweet and spicy, garlic tasty, etc. The one you have to try first is #6 — hot, sweet and spicy. When you order it, the person at the register will warn you several times that the chicken is “very, very hot.” Trust me, she’s right. But you should order it anyway.
The chicken will be ready in about 15 minutes. It is served in a beautiful gift box, all wrapped up in a bow, undoubtedly the most elegant fast-food delivery system I’ve ever seen. But the box is more than just decorative. As Toreore’s flyer boasts, “our state of the art anti-moist packing keeps our chicken crisp and crunchy.”
Now, whether the real reason is the state-of-the-art packaging or the fact that the chicken is fried to order is up for debate, but undoubtedly the chicken is crisp and crunchy. It is also juicy as all get out, as perfectly fried chicken as I’ve eaten, even if it is cut into pieces that are unlike any I’ve ever seen. Outside of a wing and leg, I couldn’t begin to identify the other parts.
Okay, if you’re not a fire-eater, order the basic “marinade” fried chicken, still as good a piece of fried chicken as I’ve had in Houston. But the #6 chicken is absolutely thrilling. Hot, hot, hot, just on the verge, the veritable precipice of being too hot, when it’s pulled back by the underlying sweetness of the chicken’s marinade. It is, in a word, a phenomenal piece of fried chicken, described on one Houston foodie blog as being “like crack, but the kind that sets your mouth on fire and makes you beg for more.” The only thing that could make it any better would be an ice-cold beer to drink with it. Alas, the stalls only offer sodas, juice and water.
So jump off the Katy Freeway and take a detour to Super H Mart. Explore the aisles and find new foodstuffs and ingredients to take home and use in your own kitchen. Visit the food stalls and taste some of Houston’s best fried chicken. But above all, explore a bit of Korean food culture right here in Houston. With the price of airfares being what they are, it’s an incredible bargain.
SUPER H MART
1302 Blalock, bet. I-10 & Westview, 713-468-0606
Tip The bakery near the entrance has some interesting items, including sweet corn doughnuts, chocolate croissants and green tea pan bread.
