Kim Chi Binge -ey

Last night HP and I went to Shin Toe Bul Yi (map, reviews), a Korean greasy spoon on Taravel in the Sunset, just a few blocks down from one of my favorite places, David's Kitchen (map, reviews).  It's right on the L line, easy as pie to get to.

We went on the recommendation of my friend Lou Ann, who's been just about everywhere.

OK, so we're in this place (packed, btw) and they start throwing food at us before we order. We don't even know what the stuff is — some of it was REALLY good, like the "yellow pickle" and some sort of flat, quesadilla-like thing they brought us immediately. We would ask, "hey, what is this?" and the answer was, "it is on the house" which is nice but didn't tell me what I was eating.  Not that it mattered — it tasted great and it wasn't brains or intestines (the latter was on the menu).

I looked at the menu and didn't have a clue, so I did what I always do in those cases, I told the (very nice) waitress "I don't know what to order. What's good here?" She pointed me towards the short ribs, which were totally delicious. HP had a hot kim-chi stew stew like thing (looked like donburi), which sounds unappealing (shouldn't kim chi always be cold?) but was actually really quite good, all garlicky and saucy and sweet and sour. If my short ribs hadn't been so deeeeelicious then I might have been envious. Regardless, HP ate a bunch of mine and I ate a bunch of his, like we usually do.

We had waaay more food than we could eat. The bill came out to $30 for the two of us, but easily could have been $20 if we both hadn't ordered the two most expensive things on the menu.