red house | one scoop kimchi

Red House Honolulu has been on our map for quite a while. The space has housed other restaurants (most recently a jjajang myun jip); most of them have not lasted long. Red House has been around for a few months now and judging from the crowd, they won’t be going anywhere soon.

Red House is a boutique restaurant that is capitalizing on the Korean wave/hallyu craze in a huge way. The motif is K-pop. The foyer has a magazine rack full of the latest K-pop magazines and the back wall acts as a screen for an endless loop of K-pop videos. During our visit, the average age was 16 and every single eye was glued to the screen while we were there. Can’t say I blame them, for whatever reason K-pop is mesmerizing. Sujin would say it’s for the talent, I compared it to rubbernecking at a car accident.

The menu is primarily bun-sik, which are small, shared dishes similar to tapas. Red House has a good selection of menu items and looking at the other tables we saw that the portions were big, a good sign considering the prices. In spite of the potential for some fancy bun-sik, we immediately decided to limit our time at Red House by ordering only a couple of dishes. A full meal would be order afters.

We ordered the buch’u-jon (chive pancake), yangyom-dalk (seasoned fried chicken), and a pitcher-sized bottle of Hite beer. It was all fantastic, particularly the chicken. Meaty and perfectly seasoned (it’s often overdone), it surpasses even Choo Chun’s version, which is the Honolulu standard for Korean fried chicken. It was served promptly upon leaving the fryer and seasoning bowl. Perfect. The buch’u-jon, on the other hand, was over priced, albeit tasty. Buch’u-jon is often served as panchan, and the serving they gave us could easily have been a (free) side dish anywhere else.

Our second stop was Choi’s Garden. I’ll save the details for another post, but I will say that Choi’s has undergone some changes recently, and it appears to be for the better. They seem to be looking for a unique identity in the Honolulu K-restaurant scene. They’ve added some menu items like ori-gui (duck) and unique samgyupsal cuts such as ch’obal-gui (“first cut” bbq that cooks fast and fresh). They haven’t, however, veered too far from what makes places like Choi’s reliable: ample panchan, delicious chiggye, and fresh main dishes. We had the ch’obal-gui, gopcjh’ang (pork intestine), and al-t’ang (roe stew). We left with big smiles.