Korean sushi, some of it worth driving for

Dan Moo Ji, 3230 Steve Reynolds Blvd., Duluth. 770-814-2310

Pepper Garden, 2605 Pleasant Hill Road, Duluth. 770-497-9010

Manna Korean Snack Restaurant, 2570 Pleasant Hill Road, Duluth. 678-417-1131

Writing about cheeseburgers, oysters on the half shell or chocolate layer cake is easy. When these foods are praiseworthy, they go on an assessment scale that culminates with “omigod, this food is making my mouth, my brain and my stomach delirious with joy.” These are foods people crave.

Does anyone crave gimbap? These Korean sushi rolls — which you may have noticed or even tried while shopping at an Asian supermarket — may be colorful to look at, but they taste bland. You don’t even season them with soy sauce or wasabi. You just pop them in your mouth, one slice after another, and quietly crunch. As food goes, gimbap has close to zero sex appeal.

Yet I find myself as often as once a week not exactly craving gimbap, but realizing it is the only food I want to deal with. I discover I have a gimbap-shaped hole in my stomach, a place that wants the bulk of its vegetables and its padding of rice. I want to crunch aimlessly and appreciate the flavor without really thinking about it. I suppose that’s the same mood people find themselves in when they eat a bag of chips for lunch, but I could never do that, so I eat gimbap.

The version typically sold at Asian markets, such as Super H Mart, wraps seaweed (gim) and rice (bap) around a filling of cooked and marinated vegetables (spinach, radish pickle, carrot) as well as egg omelet, crab stick and beef bulgogi. There are variations with ham or thin, crisp burdock roots instead of the beef. The rolls come packaged evenly sliced, tiled on a Styrofoam plate and wrapped tightly. You pop them in, one after another, and think about something else. They taste like an Asian version of something your mom would bring to a third-grade class buffet.

Gimbap developed during the prewar Japanese occupation of Korea in the 1940s, when the population developed a taste for the fat sushi rolls called futomaki. Koreans remade the traditional seasoning to their palate, getting rid of the futomaki’s oddly sweet ingredients, which includes sakura dembu, a kind of fish flake sugared to a fare-thee-well and dyed an alarming shade of pink. They even removed the sugar and vinegar from the sushi rice and replaced it a drop of savory toasted sesame oil, the better to complement crisp vegetables. Everything tastes better with bulgogi, so in went that thinly sliced marinated beef.

If you’ve never tried this kind of gimbap, I’d recommend you pick up a tray and see if it could fit into your mindless snacking or meal aversion routines. Notice I qualify it with “this kind,” because there’s another kind of gimbap that is very much worth searching out.

Lately I’ve begun exploring the kinds of Korean restaurants in Duluth that are collectively known as “boon shik.” These casual, modern eateries are snack shops, and they serve the kind of fast food that young adults crave when they want a lot of flavor bang for the buck (or won). Think rice cakes bubbling in thick chile sauce, ramen noodles and gimbap stuffed with all kinds of ingredients.

The best known is Dan Moo Ji, named for the pickled yellow radish that is served alongside gimbap as a palate cleanser. The walls are covered in cartoon cutie-pie animals and brightly colored decal letters, the waitresses wear mini skirts with ankle socks, and the song “Let It Go” from the movie “Frozen” plays on infinite loop. You feel like you’re in a teenage girl’s clubhouse.

The gimbap filled with lots of crunchy vegetables and tuna salad are delicious, the spicy version even more so. You also can get processed cheese slices rolled up inside.