Arisu 1099 is a fairly new Korean restaurant on East Butler Road in Mauldin.
I had been in Japan a few weeks prior and my lunch at Arisu, which was wonderful, and it felt similar to Japanese. Abigail, the owner’s daughter, set me straight.
“Korean preparations may look similar, but our food is bold and sometimes spicy, and we use a lot of gochugang (red pepper paste) and doenjang (fermented soybean paste),” she said. “Japanese cuisine is very subtle, ours is more aromatic and we love our garlic.”
Fast forward a couple of months for my third meal at Arisu where I was accompanied by chefs Dayna Lee Marquez and Steve Zurkey for dinner. Abigail gave the three of us lessons in Korean cuisine. Our first dish was tteokbokki, small cylinders of rice with noodles and braised vegetables in a lively sauce that reminded Steve of a beloved Italian preparation.
“Fra diavolo. With these sweet, and spicy peppers and mushrooms. And this scallion pancake is perfect,” he said.
Gamjajeon is Korean-style hash browns. A large disc of shredded potatoes mixed with scallions, cut like a pizza and served with a fortified soy sauce. Dayna’s eyes lit up on her first bite.
“So crunchy and yet warm and soft inside and a little dab of this sauce. Perfect.”
Next, we were served a bibimbap (meaning “mixed rice”) in a scorching hot stone bowl. I’ve heard different pronunciations of this dish and Abigail’s is the one I’ll use from now on: BeeBee-ehm-bap. The charm of this dish is as one eats the vegetables and egg that sit on top of the rice, the heat of the stone bowl creates a thin layer of sticky, almost caramelized, rice that one enjoys at the end.
Dayna agreed that it resembled a Spanish paella or a Mexican arroz rojo.
“The stone bowl even resembles a molcajete. Isn’t that cool?” she said. “All these ancient cultures were making the best of what they had at the time, and today we have all these great cuisines.”
I chimed in with: “A couple of years ago I was working in India and my first breakfast was bhindi masala, a soup of okra, tomatoes, onion, and garlic in a heady broth. I was instructed to place a fermented rice dumpling into my bowl then top it with soup. After doing so I recognized a dish of my New Orleans home, okra gumbo over rice.”/p>
The three of us agreed that, if one is willing to dig deeper, cuisines across the globe may not mimic but they do rhyme. One of our favorite dishes at Arisu 1099 was the kimchee, which is nothing more than pickled vegetables with a touch of heat to which Steve reminded us that a lack of refrigeration was the impetus to everything in food that is wonderful today.
Arisu 1099 at 1099 East Butler Road is open seven days a week for lunch and dinner.
