Blue Sand, Traditional Korean with BBQ on Markham Street, Annandale

[weezy]

Got a late start on Saturday night and places were either closed or packed with no tables available until midnight, and we were circling around and ended up at Blue Sand for dinner around 10:00 or so.  The menu isn't particularly easy to navigate for non Korean customers, but with some help from the server, we ended up with a double order of pork belly (double order required), and squid tempura. 

The good:  about a half dozen banchan -- seaweed salad, kimchi, pickled eggplant, mung bean salad, spinach, a couple of other things I didn't recognize -- and two different soups came with the meal, a tofu soup/stew  and an egg soup that eventually cooked into a soft custard.  The squid tempura was very nicely fried, not greasy, tender with just a little chewiness, a good sized order, and came with soy sauce & onion to dip into.  The pork belly was cooked at the table grill and was not seasoned or marinaded at all that I could discern, so a little bland.  Definitely needed the gochuchang and lettuce wrappers to give it some oomph.  For two people, the bill came to $50.

The bad:  the music.  incessant 90s Korean disco pop, loud enough that it was impossible to ignore and we so wanted to ignore it.  Also, this is not one of the 24-hour restaurants, and so we closed the place down at 11:00, but the tables that were remaining when we came in were all male and all 50+ in age, so not a hipster joint by any stretch of the imagination.  The place was clean but the decor was tired looking.

[weezy]

The heading given is a bit misleading re the noise level.  It wasn't so much that the music was loud, it was just incredibly bad (think Korean SNL style satire of Olivia Newton John disco tunes), but the volume was just enough that you couldn't possibly ignore it.  Easy enough to converse over but every second sans conversation, this earache inserted itself.  The only good thing about it is that none of it was hooky enough to become an earworm.