Maybe I should start with the door, which is admittedly nothing special. Just a very plain door to a very plain building you’ve driven past 1,000 times if you’ve ever driven on Buford Highway. Above the door, a sign in block letters reads “KANG NAM JAPANESE RESTAURANT.”
First things first: This claim isn’t true. Kang Nam is — in every respect, from the staff to the menu — a Korean restaurant, albeit one with a sushi bar.
So, let’s open the door. It’s ... dark inside. Really dark. Sinatra is playing on the soundtrack. You can make out some pillars twined with string lights, that glowing dolphin perched on the hostess stand and high-backed black vinyl booths in the central dining room. It looks like a New Jersey dinner house that hasn’t been remodeled since 1963. Like one of those places where you get a gilt basket of wrapped crackers with your Old Fashioned, and the Thousand Island dressing comes in a refrigerator-cold metal serving boat. The hostess wears what appears to be a vintage TWA stewardess outfit, and she leads you to your booth.
Have we figured this place out? Is it a redoubt of the swinging 60s that has gone unnoticed all these years?
Not quite. A Korean menu the size of the 9/11 Commission Report lands at the table and it is filled with set menus with prices in the hundreds of dollars and many liquor options. There are also inexpensive lunch specials.
I order hwe dup bap — a salad topped with diced raw fish. I expect the staff to bring the typical Korean assortment of pickles, kimchee and side dishes — collectively called ban chan — to nibble with the entree. I don’t expect the five-course meal that ensues.
“This is pumpkin soup,” says the waitress, offering a bowl of the thick orange puree that’s sweet, vegetal and warming as it hits the back of the throat. Terrific.
The soundtrack staggers oddly to Bob Dylan, and the waitress begins bringing unusual ban chan — oily shreds of rawish potato, ribbons of fried fish cake, limp bean sprouts. The music suddenly turns to cheesy 80s pop, and the waitress arrives with the most hilarious thing I’ve eaten in years: a sizzling cast-iron plate filled with corn niblets draped in elastic white cheese. It sputters and bubbles like primordial Velveeta and starts to crust around the edges. It is as fantastic as it is horrible, and I suddenly feel the urge for a Scotch on the rocks. Aha.
Looking around the room, I soon see it is lined with discreet private rooms. Each holds a table around which eight or 10 people could squeeze. This is a drinky restaurant that serves good absorption food. I get it.
“Fish bone soup,” announces the waitress, as she arrives with a sputtering stone bowl. Inside the bowl, I find slivers of zucchini and a chunky cross-segment of white fish — bones and all. It has a beautiful flavor, and I alternate between slurping up the broth and teasing shreds of milky-sweet fish from the bone with my chopsticks.
“Hello!” I look up, and the waitress is standing beside the table holding what appears to be a baptismal font. This red-and-black lacquer bowl is bigger that the humongous salad bowl we pull out for potlucks. You could bed down a litter of puppies in it.
In the center of it, the mound of hwe dup bap ingredients rise like the yolk of a sunny-side-up egg. I stir it up with some rice from a side dish as well as a healthy squirt of cho dang — a sweet and vinegary chili sauce served in a ketchup squeeze bottle. I think it’s a good if not great version of hwe dup bap, mostly because the ample shreds of iceberg lettuce that prop it up remind me of eating in a cheap Mexican restaurant.
Before she drops the check, the waitress has one final surprise: a scoop of green tea ice cream served in a clear, fluted cup with one of those tiny plastic ice cream spoons. It is a welcome gesture — an amazing gesture, really, when you consider this lunch cost $11.95.
I want to find out so much more about Kang Nam. Who goes there? What’s the scene like on Saturday night? Can one buy a whole bottle of whiskey for the table? Who picks out the music?
But then again, I don’t. Some inexplicable and mysterious restaurants are best left that way.
Kang Nam. 5715 Buford Highway, 770-455-3464.
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