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Hwa Gae Jang Tuh, Korean in Twinbrook - Barbecue with Private Dining on Viers Mill Road


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One of the joys of owning a restaurant is getting to dine there on a regular basis. Having your dinner interrupted 27 times by staff asking questions etc. So sometimes, you can't wait to get out and eat somewhere else. If that happens late at night, my Silver Spring options are pretty limited and Rockville is even worse {New Kam Fong, Kabob n Kahari, Irene's when its not loud music night are a limited rotation. So to find Korean joint on Vier's Mill open until 2am was a nice surprise.

2 solo meals so far: very friendly service. The entry way looks unprepossessing due to the private rooms on the left (sort of lets build a clubhouse look to them} but the back seating area is very nice and clean, if a little sparse. Everything I have tried is good to very good, not great but at 11 or midnight its my best option if my top three are not sounding good to me.

So far the Seasoned Tofu appetizer has been nicely fishy with lots of seaweed on top and very good quality tofu. The shrimp BBQ is very nice but a bit much for one to eat. By the time you power thru the first 6 oer so shrimp the next 8 or 10 begin to get a little dry. But at a table of 2 or 4, it would be a quick bite. The soon du bu was superb. This is the add in give up their flavor to the soup variety of soon du bu: the clams, oysters, beef, pork and shrimp and more {conch I think, squid, octopus maybe} all add their flavor to the rich broth at the expense of a little ruberiness. But I would have licked the bowl clean if not for the thought that burning my tongue would have pissed me off. I want to go back to get the Kalbi with cold noodles combo. Privces are right at the woo mi leel but the food has more love if not quite as expert cooking than Woo Mi. But Woo Mi stops seating before I ever get there.

Not worth a cross town journey, but a top MoCo Korean option. The Soon du bu is almost as good as Lighthouse Tofu!

Its int he Twinbrook Center across the Viers Mill from the Post Office, the Dairy Queen etc, just North of Twinbrook.

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Sometimes when you start a thread, you go back and ay what was I thinking? So way my reaction tonight. Tonight we dove into the meat of the menu: Man Du, BBQ pork bely and BBQ brisket. WOW! Fantastic. Magic Johnson hitting a game winner from 23 feet. Kirk Gibson httting a home run when he could barely walk. This place rocks. GO! Eat fatty meats. Enjoy life!

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Friday night, we drove up to an open sign and the staff locking the door. As ssoon as they saw it was us and that the open sign was still on, they demanded that we come in for dinner "Just BBQ and cold noodle, all right?" All right!

The best Galbi ever, incredible tongue done on a hot stone, a huge bowl of cold noodle, a hot sake and a beer, two people hovering over us to make sure everything was OK. And I am sure that just as I had put in a 14 hour day Saturday, they had probably done the same if not more.

Please go there!!!!!

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I finally got a chance to eat here after I had a good time at the Taste of Bethesda this afternoon. I ordered the short rib meal (Galbi + cold noodle) and my friend ordered spicy tofu stew. I can't say the short rib was superior to Yechon or Woo Lae Oak but it was very tasty. The tofu stew was very delicious. I think it is more flavorful than Lighthouse's stew. Another thing, quality of the ban chan was way more than average. Thank you Dean for writing about this place. Without your recommendation I wouldn't have found out how good this place is.

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I can't say the short rib was superior to Yechon or Woo Lae Oak but it was very tasty. The tofu stew was very delicious. I think it is more flavorful than Lighthouse's stew. Another thing, quality of the ban chan was way more than average. Thank you Dean for writing about this place. Without your recommendation I wouldn't have found out how good this place is.

While there are other places that have good kalbi, the tongue and brisket on a stone plate are the best I have had anywhere! We showed up that same night.... about 11pm.

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Thanksgiving lunch at Hwa Gae Jang Tuh. Our favorite "go to" dish: To-Shi-Sal, a cut of beef that is less fatty than Kalbi but thicker and juicier that Bulgogi. I enjoy this most when it is hot off the grill and wrapped in lettuce with rice, doenjang (fermented soybean) sauce and a vinegary slaw of lettuce and green onion (yum), but you can also just dip the meat in a little bowl of seasoned sesame oil. Order two portions of To-Shi-Sal, and you get a free mini-bowl of doenjang jige, a vegetarian stew with doenjang, tofu, potato, onion and jalapenos that add a nice spicy kick. Also had some mandu-guk, a steaming bowl of Korean dumplings, green onion, seaweed and egg in a clear broth. Pretty stuffed after that, but still waddled over to Shilla Bakery next door to have a Fruit Bingsoo, a shaved ice confection (yes, I know it's late November, but still) with fresh fruit, a little condensed milk, chewy chunks of mochi, and we swapped out the vanilla ice cream and got red bean instead. Left with a soft loaf of chestnut bread and managed to stay awake for the drive home (fortunately, since I was driving). All in all, a solid outing.

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Has anyone been lately? I am in limbo for about a week or so in this neighborhood and walked by, curious, this morning. My experience with Korean food is limited to what was cheap in Ann Arbor long ago: bibimbap, mainly.

(I thought I saw a thread on Dining in Twinbrook a little while ago, but this is what came up in a basic search, first.)

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We don't go much since they shortened their hours. Last time we went it was up to usual high standard.

Wow, they really have shortened their hours - now open only until 10:30 PM.

There is a 10% off coupon here good through April - I *think* it's for everything, but I'm not quite sure.

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So, it was a very long day and with no time for dinner, I ended up at the restaurant last night around 9. The sign said "Open," so I entered.

No one there except the entire staff seated in a booth in the back.

A real shame and I wish there were some way to remedy that.

I ordered the soo doo boo or however you spell it, the seafood version, though I regret that decision and wish I had done combo or beef. This is, in part, due to personal taste and ignorance: I didn't realize an egg would be broken into the dish and I still haven't quite gotten over that awful seafood quiche decades ago that swore me off the combination. Too bad I feel that way because the silky, creamy texture of the tofu and that of hot-potted egg, just beginning to form curds, suit one another in a yang-yang sort of way. I had to smile in re-reading Dean's original post because there were a few pieces of flavorless, marine-raised rubber and perhaps because of the hour, the empty house and the fact that I was ordering only one thing, the shrimp could have been cooked through and not simply curled (translucent vs. opaque). Another quibble: it wasn't particularly spicy, though a language barrier may be to blame. When warned it was spicy, I said I liked spicy and ended up having to clarify, not extra-spicy as my waitress wrote down. The cooks might have dimmed heat as a result. Who knows?

I appreciate very much the patient lesson in how to eat the dish and really liked the seaweed, one of the many little dishes spread around my hot pot; an icy-cold rice drink came with my bill.

The tofu, also, was vastly superior to what one buys at supermarkets and now I want to take advantage of my final days out here in Rockville and investigate better sources for this particular ingredient. I wonder about the huge Korean Market, for example, that I passed in Veirs Mill Road on the way out here.

Final thought, though I am not sure it belongs here: Why does Rockville have so many really cool places like this, yet is so damn ugly? If you're into antiques, you drive up pretty, winding stretches of New England in late September, gawk at the colors of the leaves, stop hither and yon and wallow in preciousness. But just as the car made fast food the junk that it is, it also created a sore-eyed hideousness out of architecture and wasteful use of space that destroys the human spirit and turns what ought to make the heart soar into tawdry vapidocity. The joy of exploring this part of Maryland and finding new foods to consume need not be qualified by its location.

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Final thought, though I am not sure it belongs here: Why does Rockville have so many really cool places like this, yet is so damn ugly? If you're into antiques, you drive up pretty, winding stretches of New England in late September, gawk at the colors of the leaves, stop hither and yon and wallow in preciousness. But just as the car made fast food the junk that it is, it also created a sore-eyed hideousness out of architecture and wasteful use of space that destroys the human spirit and turns what ought to make the heart soar into tawdry vapidocity. The joy of exploring this part of Maryland and finding new foods to consume need not be qualified by its location.

Having grown up in Rockville, and being an armchair planner and Rockville historian...I could go on and on about this. Maybe someday, generations from now, Rockville will stand out as a specimen of post-WWII suburban sprawl, where the rich people lived here, the commoners there, the shopping was somewhere else....and all of it was a paved haven for cars. A giant monument to awfulness.

The Rockville Mall was the crowning glory of this monstrosity. Rockville Pike became a place for a car to see and be seen - but the only pedestrians were indigents. Rte 28 was rerouted through town to allow cars to really zoom past the victorians to the north and west of town...thus killing many of them as homes, rendering them useful only for attorney's office use.

Rockville nearly lost its soul over the last 50 years. Were it dependent on (ironically) the auto industry, a la Detroit, it might be an abandoned place now - who would defend such a place and attempt to save it? Instead, it banks on the Government and thus survives, even thrives in areas.

Rebuilds in the Town Center and the planning around White Flint will help. But knocking down a whole town isn't feasible - not when the bad design was all built on greenfield property.

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