Restaurant Review: Somssi

The menu, designed with J.P. Park, who serves arsenic Somssi’s culinary director, is little overtly Korean than the restaurant’s sanction and affiliations mightiness pb you to expect. Korean flourishes look present and there—a mustard-greens kimchi adding an audacious sour borderline to a classical bolognese; a fiercely peppercorn-y sauce, evocative of japchae, au poivre-ing a tender picanha steak—but dishes gully connected a wide palette of influences. An tremendous treble mutton chop, rubbed with a saccharine and aromatic spice blend, and divided lengthwise similar a technological specimen to show its rosy pinkish interior, is inspired by Chinese cumin lamb. I loved a wedge of caraflex cabbage, roasted to tender sweetness, which arrived hidden nether a fluffy pale-yellow duvet of custardy egg-and-crab sauce, affluent with the earthy-sulfuric spirit of achromatic pepper: it’s ovum foo young, but silkified, sultrified (and now, tragically, nary longer connected the menu). You tin inactive get your ovum hole successful fried form: a sunny-side-up specimen comes atop a comforting small vessel of mushrooms and curried rice, a spot bibimbap-ish, a spot Indonesian, the curry blend pleasingly dense connected the coriander. A quartet of Gulf shrimp, shells and heads intact but cautiously deveined (this is simply a bully restaurant, aft all), are serried connected a swirl of smoky, corn-infused mayonnaise and doused successful a mildly spicy chile oil. Whether you usage a fork and weapon oregon teardrop the crustaceans isolated with your hands, it’s a physically messy dish, successful a mode that feels intentional, a infinitesimal of carnal chaos to bring the calculated exuberance of the remainder of the paper into relief.

Beverage-wise, there’s a delightful absorption connected itsy-bitsy drinks: two-ounce cocktails and spirits, including a terrifically weird enactment of after-dinner options. The caput sommelier, Jenny Eagleton, guided maine to a sip-size determination of a cherry-infused mead made upstate, with notes of lemongrass, rosemary, and piney resin. “Freaky, right?” she said. “But benignant of beautiful, too.” It paired satisfyingly with a quadrate portion of olive-oil cake, served with a tangy effect compote and whipped cream, but my favourite dessert was an crystal pick infused with White Rabbit, the Chinese sweet-milk candy, with amazingly delicate, delicious results.