I’ve got a lot of catching up to do on my hip East Side restaurants. I could’ve done worse than rekindle my L-train patronage by hitting Momofuku Ssäm Bar at lunch today. The name means “lucky peach” but could it be a reference to the cheap noodle daddy himself?
This I know is true: Momofuku snags enough bloggy snark, it’s got it’s own Gawker tag, which delineates everything from 29-year-old restaurateur David Chang waxing sarcastic on his predicted one-star Bruni review of the months-old Ssäm Bar (it received a “very good” two stars) to the Shake Shackesque “worth an hour wait for glorified fast food?” ruminations on the restaurant’s original incarnation, Momofuku Noodle Bar. But you know you’re blessed with full mass in the NYC restaurant universe when a fangirl grants you your very own Urban Outfitters-style T-shirt.
Ssäm is Korean for something like “wrapped food” and it’s tough not to notice the similarities to the goods of a certain McDonald’s majority-owned burrito chain. You wait on a cafiteria-like line, all gleaming and spotless stainless steel, and direct your white-clad counterman to load up your flour pancake with kimchi, edamame, pickled shiitake or eight other Asian extras. I tried an order of the infamous pork buns ($8 for two baseball-sized bundles) and found them reminiscent of the best street-vendor snacks: tasty, sloppy, foil-wrapped and boasting potent alcohol-absorbing power. The buns, bleached whalebone white, are freshly plucked from a steambox in a Copperfield puff of fragrant steam. Tongue-shaped and spongy like a Dr. Scholl’s insole, they’re folded over a savory wad of pulled Berkshire pork, a slop of spicy-sweet hoisin, crisp pickled cucumber and slaw. It’s all folded-over and twist-wrapped in a sheet of foil for on-the-go goodness.
Those who opt to eat in can sit at the bar or a number of tables, all sleekness and right angles, in grand contrast to the no-name facade brooding on a boring corner across from the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary. But, yeah, I’d eat there again. Damn hipsters.
Momofuku Ssäm Bar
- 207 Second Ave. (at E. 13th Street)
- (212) 254-3500
- Meal 7 of 52: an order of steamed pork buns ($8)