Seattlite blogger Lovely Lanvin gave me some recommendations for eats during my trip. One of her recommendations was for korean food, with a twist, at Revel. It’s in the Fremont area and it’s fairly new. It’s a pretty gorgeous restaurant. It’s one long rectangular room, with the open kitchen taking up most of one side. There’s a chef’s table along the entire length of the kitchen. The other side has some tables. The walls have several large pop-art paintings. I dig it.
I love sitting at the chef’s table because it’s dinner and a show. And it still boggles my mind how the whole thing works. I love to watch everyone. Revel also has adorable plates and flatware. It’s all minimalist. The entire chef’s table is just one giant raw butcher block. I love it. Can I have my kitchen look like this?
The menu is quite stark and small, which is the way I like it as I tend to get overwhelmed and indecisive when given too much choice. I started with one of their pancakes, the pork belly, kimchi, and bean sprout. This is definitely korean. It is a good sized pancake served with 4 different sauces. Aren’t they adorable? I liked the pancake, but I would have preferred that the pork belly was more evenly distributed throughout the pancake, and that the pancake would have been thinner. The middle, where it was the thickest, had all the pork belly and had too much not-cooked-all-the-way batter concentrated there. I prefer my korean pajeons to be a bit more crispy on the outside and well cooked on the inside. I think if they made it thinner in general with less batter or if they made the pancake bigger with the same batter, they’d get a better result. But the flavor was definitely good and the pork belly was delicious!
My other dish was a noodle dish with five spiced duck meat balls, lacinato kale, smoked chili, with medium thickness noodles. This was definitely tasty, but there was absolutely nothing korean about it. Zilch. Nada. So instead of this being korean with a twist, it was just plain twist. In fact, there was cilantro in this. And cilantro is not in any korean dish, ever. And if you asked korean people of my mom’s generation or older, they would probably not be able to stand cilantro, at all. To see it in this dish was odd. It’s ok though, because I like cilantro! This dish was tasty, nonetheless, until the the unthinkable happened. I suddenly bit into raw thin strips of ginger. How could this be? I’d eaten half the bowl already free of this raw evil, but then all of a sudden it became a raw ginger fest! So then I spent a lot of the rest of my time picking out or deftly avoiding the ginger pieces. This is not easy to do! But I made sure I did it. Oh well. Despite these little glitches, I enjoyed this place immensely. The service was good and I am absolutely in love with the feel of this place. The food was also good, despite how non-korean some of their dishes may be.

I wanted to go to Blue Fin with my mom, but damn it, they’re closed on mondays. Note to you all… do not trust the hours on Yelp. Seriously, because if I hadn’t called Blue Fin and had just gone all the way there, trusting the hours on Yelp, I would have been angered. So with that little setback, I decided to go for thai instead. And I wanted to stay close to home, so we went to Siamese Princess. This place is totally small and cute and decorated up the wazoo with paraphanalia from thailand.
I decided to go crazy and get a random appetizer – steamed kow-park-more. These were a couple of steamed thin rice crepes filled with chicken, turnips, and ground peanuts, topped with fried garlic and veggies, served on a bed of julienned veggies with a vinaigrette soy sauce. Strangely enough, the actual crepe part was my least favorite part of this dish, but I liked everything else about it. Here’s to me for trying new things!
My ma got the chicken and eggplant dish. It was chock full of chicken, eggplant, and all kinds of veggies in a savory and slightly spicy sauce. This didn’t have coconut milk in it, which neither of us like, so it was a win for us. Sorry, I forget the official name of this, and damn Siamese Princess for not having much of an online presence.
I was feeling noodley, so I got the pad see  yew with tofu. Why tofu? I like it, and I just didn’t feel like chicken that night. This was chock full of veggies as well, which I thoroughly appreciated. I always love how the green beans are barely cooked, just the way I like them. And I love me some wide flat rice noodles. Everything tasted super fresh in this dish. And it was plenty of food. There’s only one lady working in the front of the house. Even still, she did a great job, was friendly, and it didn’t take long for the food to come out. I’ll definitely be back!

If someone were to drop me off on Washington Ave anywhere near either of the two vietnamese shopping centers, I’d be a happy camper. So it’s no surprise that I end up here as much as I do. I always long for pho when the weather gets to be this bitter cold. Pho & Cafe Viet Huong is always a go-to place for me. Their yummy yummy cha gio, the fried spring rolls… I never noticed before that they come out on personalized plates!
Here’s the vermicelli bowl with pork meat balls, except they’re not meatballs, they’re more like creepy dark pink finger-like sausages. But good sausages! The bun here is quite good, but what’s with the extra thick noodles these days? They’re really puffy.
Here’s my pho bo kho, which has a spicy broth and giant hunks of stewed meat. It’s supposed to have rice noodles, but strangely, it had extremely skinny egg noodles instead. Bizarre! I didn’t care, but it was really weirdly unexpected. It tastes just fine and hearty, regardless. I love this damn place.