The Mill Korean Restaurant is a fairly longtime institution on 114 and Broadway. I found a few reviews saying they "a few years ago" converted from a Jewish greasy-spoon diner to a Korean restaurant when a cook there, a Korean guy, bought the place. That was from 1995, so it's been a while now. It's the only Korean place that I've seen on the Upper West Side, so we're glad they made it. We're also glad that they've got outdoor tables on a beautiful early-summer evening. We both ordered the Dolsot Bi Bim Bap, Greg with beef, Sarah with tofu. Although we both stirred it around pretty vigorously to cook the raw vegetables and egg in the hot stone bowl, the waiter came over a couple times to encourage us to stir it up. Greg ordered "rice cakes," thinking he might compare them to the risotto cakes we've made. That's them in the red sauce above Greg's bowl. Does that look like "rice cakes" to you? It's an extruded tube of boiled fish and rice paste, in a spicy pepper-and-vegetable sauce. It was a little like chewing rubber tubing, but the sauce tasted good and added some welcome flavor to my a-little-bland Bi Bim Bap. 
The most fun part, aside from eating outdoors and cooking everything at the table in those stone bowls, was a holdover from the Jewish diner days. We've heard that this place makes the best egg cream around town, and so we had to try it. And the egg cream was great. Stirred more heartily than the Key West version, and not nearly as sweet, it was the highlight of the evening for us.

1 comment:
Stir, stir, stir...about the bibimbop, I agree, but an egg cream should be jiggled, not stirred, so it's still fizzy and not overblended when ready to serve. The other menu holdover from the days of the Mill Luncheonette (counter to the left, tables and a rack of school stationery supplies to the right) is the lime rickey. It's almost sickly sweet, but it cuts through any spice that the Mill can throw at you.
Post a Comment