Ann About Town: An Emo('s) Valentine's Day

Editor's Note: Emo's Korean Restaurant closed on April 24, 2016.

Remember that one time on Valentine’s Day when we ate all the condiments at Emo’s?

But let’s back up a bit. I had a fantastic plan for this week’s Ann About Town. It involved a fairly interesting series of adventures, and a killer perspective on the City we love.

On Saturday morning, the day available for adventures, it was so incredibly cold outside that the fantastic plan (which involved quite a lot of walking on both sides of Grand River Avenue) seemed increasingly less fantastic, or even bearable. Then there was the whole Valentine’s Day thing, which put paid to several other bright ideas involving restaurants.

“What about Emo’s?” asked Captain Carnivore, my companion in life and at meals.

“I already wrote about Korean food once,” I replied, already thinking about how nice it would be to eat something hot and spicy as fortification against the cold.

“Korean food is awesome” he said. “And you keep telling me about how fermented food is good for us. Plus,” he finished triumphantly “you wanted to see what the construction looked like on Trowbridge.”

And so it was that we drove across the tundra to Emo’s Korean Restaurant at the corner of Trowbridge and Harrison, right next to Better Asian Mart.There’s nothing fancy about Emo’s inside or out; it’s clean and small with serviceable red vinyl booths and tabletops with built-in heat elements. A mounted flat-screen TV was tuned to the basketball game being played at Breslin, and large windows let us watch other brave souls navigating the blowing white stuff.

Our waitress took drink orders immediately, and then brought us a covered container of steamed rice, along with bowls of soy sauce, kimchi, pickled sprouts, and two kinds of pickled radish. After a brief discussion about whether we were supposed to eat these things or save them as condiments, I confess that we were so hungry that we constructed bowls of rice topped with some of everything and ate it all.

Apparently this was unremarkable, if not actually correct, and our server replaced the soy sauce and rice as if people routinely came in and ate bowls of condiments as an appetizer.

Next we shared an enormous kimchi pajun, or kimchi pancake, plate-sized, crispy on the edges and softer in the middle. It was full of kimchi, scallions and onions, and we broke off pieces, dipped them in soy sauce and ate as we decided on a main course. I was very intrigued by the Budae Chigae soup for two, described as a “Giant hotpot of kimchi, spam, shrimp, sausage, tofu, bean sprouts, green onions, shin ramen noodles and rice cakes, in a spicy broth served with two bowls of rice” because it sounded incredibly exotic. Captain Carnivore, however, wanted Bulgogi.

“But you had Bulgogi last time,” I said. I might have been whining a little.

“I like Bulgogi” he said. “Plus, I’m not writing a story about the restaurant, I’m just a guy eating lunch and that’s what I want for lunch.”

I couldn’t argue with that, so he ordered Bulgogi (again) and I asked for Emo’s Hot Chicken. Customers came and went as we waited, mostly but not all students. In the booth behind us a couple discussed visa applications, and a few regulars came in and were greeted by the staff.

The Bulgogi had more vegetables in it than one usually sees, and came with three fried dumplings on the plate. The Hot Chicken was in a sauce that was both hot and a little sweet, complex, and somewhat addicting. After consuming our respective weights in pickled vegetables and kimchi pancake, we decided to eat only half of our entrees and take the rest home for later.

It turns out that a thin omelet filled with leftover Emo’s Hot Chicken is not at all a bad dinner.

My original, fantastic plan will be executed one of these weekends after the worst of winter is over, which might happen by June. In the meantime, we added a new chapter to the story of our love. You know the story, it begins “remember that one time on Valentine’s Day when we ate all the condiments at Emo’s?”