Asian comfort food redefined for a new generation

But a cohort of Asian-American chefs across the country has been doing just that in recent years. They’ve reached for their mothers’ and grandmothers’ recipes and interpreted them through the prism of their lives: their childhoods filled with burgers, pizza and tacos. Their late-night, beer-fueled runs in college to Americanized Chinese restaurants with greasy noodles that hit the spot. Their trips to visit family in the Old Country, where hot peppers and Sichuan peppercorns get applied by the handful, and the streets are alive with food stalls.

The best of these chefs are essentially redefining comfort food for the next generation.

George Yu, who recently opened Makan in Decatur, gives a shout out to these trailblazers — people like Roy Choi in Los Angeles, who invented the Korean taco and unleashed the food truck movement, and David Chang in New York, who created the oft-copied (never bettered) pork belly bun and turned countless Americans on to the joys of ramen obsession.

Yu, who was born in Taiwan and grew up working in his immigrant Chinese family’s restaurant in Milwaukee, tells his own story through the menu at Makan, along with those of his partner Michael Lo (whose family emigrated from Hong Kong) and their two Korean-American wives.

The menu seems most conversant in Chinese and Korean cooking idioms, but there’s also a little of this and a little of that in the mix. The word makan is Malay for “to eat” and the menu pictures an outdoor street scene in Japan.

That’s a big continent to cover, and the barely month-old restaurant seems to be feeling its way through an ambitious menu. Yu, a former sous chef at Ecco, cooks with evident joy and seemingly has a zillion fun ideas. His goal should now be to render each one of his inventive dishes comforting, if not craveworthy.

The first question everyone will ask is how Makan compares with Sobban, the Korean-Southern diner a couple miles up Clairmont Road. My quick take? Sobban comes off more like a Western restaurant with an Asian palate. At Makan, it’s the other way around, with fewer beautiful plates and more noodles to slurp. But it’s still very much a work in progress.

The meal begins with a rolling banchan cart. Unlike in Korean restaurants, where these tiny dishes come free with each meal, you pay two bucks a pop here. But then you get tea eggs, lemon cucumber pickles, fresh tofu with pecan pesto and slivers of delicious cured pork jowl.

Get an excellent local local craft beer on tap (such as Orpheus Serpent Bite), and you should experience that wonderful feeling when day turns to night. Hello, drink! Hello, dinner!

I have yet to find an appetizer to fall for here, but I’ll keep looking. Pork and shrimp wontons are a bit too soft and ready to fall apart in their bowl of chili oil. Boneless fried chicken chunks with five-spice are perfectly acceptable as nouvelle nuggets but have zero oomph. I appreciate the challenge of salt-and-pepper frog legs, served with scallion, fried jalapeño slices and red onion. But the batter is soggy, thick and all too ready to slough off the meat. What I really want with that second beer is a serious plate of salt-and-pepper squid.

But I’m happy to recommend the Taiwanese-style beef noodle soup, which comes with massive, meaty, delicious cross-section of bone-in oxtail plunked right in the middle. Add in some slick homemade noodles, a tea egg cooked to an ideal semi-gush and a broth bristling with sweet aromatics, and you’ve got a new obsession. When I asked Yu about the recipe, he said it was a version of his grandmother’s soup. Of course.

A bowl of ramyun (i.e., Korean-style ramen) has a more in-your-face flavor. Its overnight pork and chicken broth, rich and salty, gets further pumps of flavor from kimchi and poached garlic. The very good noodles (from Sun, the nation’s top ramen noodle company) will keep you reaching your chopsticks again and again into the bowl.

A little of that excess might have helped the limpid, mild chicken broth in the Hong Kong noodle soup. I like trying this kind of soup without the attendant MSG and salt that most Cantonese restaurants rely on, but this dish needs work. Also, the whole quail bobbing in the soup is just about impossible to eat with chopsticks.

When Yu and company dial up the flavor, they get closer to that comfort-food spot. A hanger steak, grilled in a sweet kalbi marinade and served with rice, sauteed Asian greens, Korean pepper sauce and a big ol’ fried egg, makes perfect food sense, whether you come from Seoul or Omaha. An entree of glutinous rice cakes, tofu and veggies is the kind of sad plate of goop that makes vegetarians despair.

The appealing space never lacks for comfort. Whether on its wonderful patio tucked behind high walls or its spacious, understated dining room (industrial without seeming hard-edged), you’ll want to linger. If lingering turns to dessert, you’ve got choices, the best being a bowl of black sesame ice cream made for the restaurant by the local company Honeysuckle Gelato. The dessert called Asian birthday cake tastes like typical Asian pastry: bland, soft, poofy.

There are also homemade sesame balls, which come hot from the oil and gush red bean filling.

“Wow, this tastes just like my grandmother’s,” said a Chinese-American friend one night. I’ll take that as an auspicious sign for this edgy new restaurant.