New Korean fusion and the latest fried chicken craze

You could argue that Atlanta has emerged as one of the country’s (if not the world’s) great towns for Korean food, and many of the area’s best chefs find inspiration from the restaurants and markets throughout the Northern suburbs. We’re ripe for a Western-style restaurant like this, which assumes a certain level of familiarity and comfort with Korean flavors on the part of the customer, both in terms of its chile heat and its twangy funk of fermented vegetables.

This restaurant also has some budding star power behind it: Jiyeon Lee and Cody Taylor of Heirloom Market BBQ. This project seems more like Lee’s baby, and she oversees the menu. It feels one part derived from Korean family recipes and home cooking, one part Southern farm-to-table, and one part rock ’n’ roll new Asian in the manner of Miso Izakaya or Octopus Bar.

I liked some of what we sampled over a big lunch on my first visit, but also left with the feeling that the menu was a long way from settled. The restaurant seemed to be trying to figure its competing urges out.

A lotus root salad featured both dehydrated and pickled lotus slices atop greens and chives. Unfortunately, neither possessed the great calling card of lotus root, which is its distinctive water chestnut-like crunch. The dressing, piled on the side, was apparently yuja cha — a kind of goopy marmalade made from citron rind (often called by its Japanese name, yuzu). A spoonful of this jam is commonly diluted in hot water to make a kind of digestive tea, but it makes for a very sweet salad ingredient.

The bulgogi roll turned out to be a kind of Gangnam-style cheesesteak — a funny pile of marinated beef slivers with onions, pickled mushrooms and a sweet, creamy kimchee rémoulade sauce. It seemed like it would be good drunk food. Ditto the nori corn dog — a smoky sausage impaled on a chopstick and then thickly battered and fried hard. Taylor infuses nori seaweed into both the sausage itself and the batter coating it, but its sea flavor doesn’t really pop.

Then came a bowl of kimchi-miso kale — incredibly delicious, with an umami-rich elixir of a broth that I wanted to drink. This pronouncement may sound like a bad caption to a New Yorker cartoon, but I don’t think I’ve ever had better kale.

I appreciated the flavor of chicken kalguksu — a rich, overnight chicken broth holding hand-cut fresh noodles, threads of egg crèpe, greens and nori seaweed. The noodles seemed a bit soft, but I understand they’re a work in progress.

When I returned for dinner, the many moods of this wholly original restaurant came into better focus. I paid more attention to the esoteric beverage list assembled by manager Daniel Crawford. From a fresh draft makgeolli (a cloudy, white wheat-and-rice brew that will bring to mind nigori sake) to bek se ju (a limpid, golden rice wine with a distinctive ginseng aroma), Crawford thinks far beyond the mass-market Korean lagers. I loved washing down my meal with a can of Westbrook Goze — a German-style sour beer brewed with salt and coriander.

Looking beyond the few, hotly contested tables to the semi-open kitchen, I saw a machine that grinds soybeans to make fresh tofu, an industrial ice shaver for the signature bingsu desserts, and a pasta station where a cook was rolling fresh kalguksu noodles. They were far better that night, chewy and springy, hungry for the flavor of their broth.

I loved the fresh tofu, both as an appetizer served with kimchi and miso mousse, and then again in an unusual version of bi bim bap made with a base of kimchi-reddened rice. Arugula, shiitake mushrooms, melting braised onions, a gorgeously oozy-centered egg and a few slivers of sesame leaf joined the tofu on top of the rice.

Start with pork belly bossam — you wrap the crisp tiles of heritage-breed pork in lettuce leaves — and then proceed to this bi bim bap to taste this restaurant at its best.

Skipping dessert is not an option. You will have bingsu — a kind of sweet and salty Korean sundae served on a base of that freshly shaved ice. Puffed grains, fried lotus chips, berries, shredded basil and rice-taffy nubbins all figure in. The three varieties of bingsu served here all have more stuff and less ice than you’d get with a more traditional version on Buford Highway. But they’re dynamic. The signature version — with green tea ice cream, sweet azuki beans and Korean pear compote — is everyone’s favorite.

That’s two visits. There will be more. Many more.

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You perhaps know the drill by now. The fried chicken is only available on one night of the week. It sells out early, so you should aim for a 6:30 dinner. The waiter relays the countdown by way of greeting: “Welcome! Would you like a drink, and how many of the remaining orders of chicken should I reserve for the table?”

Ever since Scott Peacock changed the very meaning of the word “Tuesday” in Atlanta with his fried chicken at Watershed, this little chicken dance has been a mainstay of destination dining.

What do we look for in fried chicken? That Anton Ego moment of innocent childhood rapture at Mama’s table? An antidote to the guilty pleasure of Popeye’s? A flavor missive from the collective unconscious? Or maybe we just want to know if it’s possible for chicken to taste like more than that blandly agreeable bird we know so well.

The buzzy fried chicken in town now roosts at the General Muir, that deli-inspired restaurant where chef Todd Ginsberg does so much so right. It happens on Friday nights, a Southern vision of Sabbath dinner.

“We’ve got nine orders left,” says our waiter loudly, as both a statement to us and an implied question to other servers within earshot. Nine? Nine. The three of us do the sensible thing: We order two. He runs to the kitchen to claim them and then returns for our drink order.

It is good fried chicken: three pieces swaddled in a dishtowel, with sheer, dry and crackly skin. Ginsberg always brings finesse to his food, an attention to textures and composition, a touch that is all his.

But in the final count his chicken is just chicken — pleasant enough, properly cooked, nice in the way of a Sunday roast. No more than that. I can see why he chose a boneless breast for that skin, but I don’t necessarily agree with it. I’m not sure if I was missing the Colonel’s 12 secret herbs and spices or Watershed’s salty brine, or maybe I’m one of those people who keeps ordering fried chicken, waiting for something more.

Thank Yahweh the third member of our party ordered a Reuben sandwich. Have you tried the General Muir’s Reuben, made with house corned beef? Now that’s bliss.