Korean-Chinese favorites with a friendly touch in Watertown
There is no fancy façade or sprawling dining room at Kingstar Food Restaurant on Route 11 just north of the city of Watertown.
Way before China Buffet, Great Wall and Super Wok landed in Watertown, the Kim family was serving up home-cooked Chinese and Korean dishes at their family-owned restaurant.
They originally opened under the name Pine Tree on Eastern Boulevard and kept that name when they moved years ago to Route 11 before changing it to Kingstar Food.
We arrived on a weekday evening to an empty dining room. Each table was plainly set and ready for action. Authentic Korean decorations draped the walls.
A large flat-screen TV tuned to a Korean station via satellite further set the mood with news and weather in the native tongue, peppered with occasional Korean music.
Mrs. Kim greets and seats you with a smile, takes your order and offers welcomed suggestions, cooks and serves your dinner and cashes you out. Mr. Kim assists with the cooking, and the evening we were there took on the additional role of delivery person.
They offer both Chinese and Korean cuisine, cooked to order. Since Chinese restaurants seem to dot the American landscape these days almost as frequently as McDonald's, we made the executive decision to stick to the Kims' Korean menu.
We began with a plateful of yakimandu ($5), a wonton-type wrapper filled with cabbage, carrot and ground meat, folded as a triangle and crisp-fried. You might say it's the Korean version of the Chinese egg roll. Soy dipping sauce was provided, but these were tasty enough all by themselves.
Kimbob ($6) resembles a California roll that you'd find in a sushi restaurant. It's seaweed, commonly called nori, wrapped around rice with strips of carrot, cucumber and sweet red pepper in the center.
Sliced into thin discs, these worked well with the not-too-salty soy sauce but were a little harder than the yakimandu to negotiate with chopsticks. Traditional American flatware is provided on the table for the novice Asian diner.
Mrs. Kim provided us with samples of her kimchee. I've had it only one way in the past, the spicy hot pickled cabbage version. Mrs. Kim's was noticeably hot, made with Chinese cabbage, bok choy.
There was also a pickled cucumber version of kimchee with green onion, along with a chunked turnip kimchee and a refreshing vinegary version made with julienned turnip and carrot. All were different from one another, providing interesting flavor and texture combinations.
Entrées arrived piping hot and cleanly plated, filling the dining room with wonderful aromas.
Bulgogi is beef, chicken or pork, marinated usually with soy, sugar, sesame oil and garlic and sometimes green onions and mushrooms. We tried it several different ways.
Spicy pork bulgogi ($13.99) was a mountainous mixture of tender pork slices and fresh vegetables that included onion, peppers, broccoli, garlic and ginger.
For being billed as a spicy dish, it started out quite mild until we dug deep into the mound of food and we found the heat — not overbearing, and tamed a bit by being stir-fried with what tasted like honey or hoisin sauce.
The bite-sized pieces of chicken in bulgogi sweet sour chicken ($11.99) were crunchy from being deep-fried, then covered in a red sweet and sour glaze not unlike the Chinese version.
Beef bulgogi ($10.99) consisted of paper-thin-sliced beef, melt-in-your-mouth tender, with definite sesame and ginger overtones. The soy flavor in the sauce had some sweetness and tang but wasn't too salty.
Spicy stir-fried squid ($10.99) was not overly spicy. The tender squid was nicely cooked, giving it a slight crunch along with onion, carrot, broccoli and cabbage in a mildly spicy sauce.
Rock bowl bee bim bab ($12.99) was a visually interesting conversation piece, with layers of sweet red peppers, green peppers, onion and garlic, bulgogi-type meat and a bit of kimchee on top of steamed white rice, topped off with a soft sunny-side-up fried egg. You mix it all together for the full flavor sensation.
Fried rice was served with most of the dishes, basic with soy sauce and peas, and was just a little dry, we felt.
There's a decent selection of beer and one wine, Korean SoJu. There were no desserts on the menu, but we had enjoyed a good amount of food by this time anyway.
Dinner for five with a few to-go boxes required totaled $77.
If you care to try the Chinese side of the menu, all the favorites are there: the chow mein, the lo mein and the chop suey along with General Tso's chicken, moo goo gai pan, shrimp with garlic sauce, seafood delight and, of course, sweet and sour chicken.
You can get Asian buffet food anywhere, but at Kingstar you get fresh, homemade, healthy food cooked to order with pride by Mr. and Mrs. Kim.
You can contact restaurant reviewer Walter Siebel via e-mail: wsiebel@wdt.net.
Kingstar Food Restaurant
22265 Route 11
Watertown, NY
786-0246
Authentic home-cooked Korean and Chinese cuisine
HOURS: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. seven days a week
OUR FAVORITES: Yakimandu, kimbob and kimchee (four different ways); Rock bowl bee bim bob, spicy pork bulgogi
RATING: 3 forks
