Want to see a cool food hack? Book a seat at the new Ingle Korean Steakhouse in Vienna, where every table is equipped with a brass grill, and watch how your server tends to the meat.
Similar Korean restaurants push the main event around and encourage you to eat, quickly, so it doesn’t overcook. Ingle Korean Steak adds a thick slice of radish to the grill, creating a rest stop for the pieces of cooked beef. A server oversees the process so you don’t have to, placing different cuts of meat on separate parts of the radish, so there’s no confusing, say, short ribs from rib fingers.
Your job is to sit back, relax and inhale the show.
The pleasure actually starts at the entrance, where the theme is revealed in the form of 50 or so pounds of dry-aged beef plate ribs, suspended on a hook, and an international wine display. Open and airy, the dining room distinguishes itself from the Korean competition, too. Ingle’s booths and banquettes are the color of toffee, its granite tables preset with crystal wine glasses. A hostess fussing over napkins signals attention to fine points, which include a chic, greenery-topped bar and prime cocktails. Owner James Jang says he envisioned the restaurant, opened in October, as “a place I could bring my parents for a special occasion.”
Mom and dad’s good fortune is ours. Ingle, a Korean reference to charcoal fire, employs two chefs, Jay Youn and Joon Yoo, who is also a butcher. Their menu is not particularly large, just a handful of shareable appetizers, four cuts of beef and a trio of non-grilled entrees. Never more than three salad-y banchan accompany a meal. But within that range is some very good food, and, in combination with the hospitality and ambiance, plenty of bang for your buck.
Try some raw beef before some cooked. The kitchen makes a terrific tartare from prime top round, which it tops with mustard seeds, a raw egg yolk and crisp batons of Asian pear. Servers encourage diners to mix the ruddy sliced meat well, an action that imbues each bite with some spark, silkiness and subtle sweetness.
Advertisement
Maybe you’re more in the mood for seafood as an entry point. The kitchen has you covered. Sliced scallops and whole shrimp adorn a salad of shredded vegetables, tossed with a delicately sweet mustard dressing. I didn’t expect to find some of the best steamed mussels in the area at Ingle, but here they are, gathered in a broth enriched with butter, sharpened with scallions and offered with fingers of toast for sponging the liquid gold. There also are oysters, nicely shucked Blue Points from Virginia and fruity Kumamotos from Washington, splayed over ice.
Banchan keep your chopsticks moving, too. Lightly pickled yu choy and kimchi make regular appearances, joined by an ever-changing little third dish, some days ribbons of housemade fish cake, other meals potato salad threaded with carrot.
Show time! In preparation for whatever cut you choose, a server swabs the lit grill with a morsel of tallow to prevent the meat from sticking. For the sake of comparison, I like to order both plain and marinated kalbi. The latter crisps as the seasonings caramelize. There’s no getting bored eating bite after bite of beef; the kitchen’s delicious dips — soy-mustard vinaigrette, smoked chile salt, the traditional sweet-hot ssamjang — are an opportunity to compare and contrast and graze the night away.
Ask the servers to bring your rice later in the meal. Meat this tantalizing deserves your total attention. Plus, other enticements await. “Chilled buckwheat noodles” are so much more than what the menu reveals. Ask for mak-guksu and you get a bowl of the expected refreshment heaped with cucumbers, pickled radish, sesame seeds, nori and kimchi broth, the last element of which adds a little fire and makes for easier stirring. A cold night practically demands the company of sundubu jjigae, a stew the color of lava whose silky tofu absorbs the flavor of the shrimp, mussels and other seafood that share its bowl.
Ingle represents a departure for Jang, who also owns Donburi restaurants in the District and McLean, a fast-casual brand created in his 20s. “I’m getting older,” says the restaurateur, now 35 and a father. His foray into fine dining is an attempt to re-create the steakhouses popular in his native Seoul.
The owner’s secret weapon is his sister, Evelyn Jang, a 2014 graduate of the Culinary Institute of America who discovered she preferred the wine and hospitality aspects — front-of-the-house work — to cooking in restaurants. Her résumé is as gilded as they come. Worldly, too. Following the CIA, she went on to be a back waiter at the Modern in New York, a captain at Benu in San Francisco and the manager at Mosu in Seoul, the recipient of three stars from Michelin. At Ingle, where she’s pitching in for a few months — seating guests, selecting wines, running food from the kitchen — she says, “I’m, like, everywhere.”
So are the 18 servers under her, a vigilant and knowledgeable bunch. Notice how the toilet paper is folded just so, and how staff point with their hands rather than their fingers? Those are Evelyn Jang’s touches. Someone is also apt to open the door for you as you depart from one of the best restaurants to debut in Northern Virginia this year. As Jang puts it, “Paying shouldn’t be the end of the guest experience.”
Ingle Korean Steakhouse
8369 Leesburg Pike, Vienna. 202-845-4966. inglekoreansteakhouse.com. Open for indoor dining 11 a.m to 2:30 p.m. and 5:30 to 10 p.m. daily. Prices: shareable appetizers $18 to $24, a la carte meat selections $36 to $46. Sound check: 72 decibels/Must speak with raised voice. Accessibility: No barriers at entrance; ADA-approved restrooms. Pandemic protocols: staff members are vaccinated and masks are optional.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLOwu8NoaWlqYmR%2Bc3uPcmaippehsm63zqucmqZdqMGmrcqhpq6rlWK%2Fpr%2FTmqyrmZ6perOx1aKcsGc%3D