Skip, Don't Walk, To Mott Street
By Melissa Wiley in Food on Jun 21, 2013 3:30PM
The new restaurant from Edward Kim and his Ruxbin crew doesn’t play hard to get—only hard to get over—with cuisine that dares you not to remember it. Mott Street, which occupies a drab corner of Ashland Avenue in a building wholly nondescript except for its burnt peach paint job, is esprit that you can taste. It's rodeo set to violin. And the crab brains, for the record, taste like chewy bacon bits, which we like to think says something, though what exactly we’re not sure. We’ll just have more.
Mott Street bills itself as a night-market Asian feeding frenzy, where you eat your fill hours after you presumably already have. We supped early, however, at 6:30 pm in the stark just-setting sunlight and still aren’t hungry 13 hours later (and we’re always hungry 13 hours later). The food’s controlled cacophony, then, says something of a long goodbye, but that’s perfectly fine with us because we didn't have leftovers.
The ethos of this low-key eatery centers on instant gratification tasteful to the point of elegance. The food arrives fast and intensely flavorful but in quantities commensurate with their price point, making for a happy marriage of gluttony and restraint. The dense flavor quotient prevents you from overindulging yet ensures you feel as though you had. The oyster mushrooms ($10), for instance, may as well have been fungal soufflé, while other dishes, including the banana-choc dessert, tease your taste buds out of their complacency. But no fear. This trick mirror-laden carnival ride of a Korean brasserie is only scaring you for your own fun. So squeal away—and order the crab brain fried rice ($10).
On the surface, the menu is merely sensible, dividing up into veggies and salad, rolled and steamed, soups and noodles, and proteins, of which you can choose among chicken, pork, and seafood. But this neat organization belies the serene anomie that ensues once you begin putting kimchi to tongue.
First things first, there are no appetizers here. The flavors don’t develop; they wallop, so expect your kimchi and Oaxaca spring rolls with chimichurri creme fraiche ($8) to match your proteins for impact, flavor, and quantity while possibly arriving on your table several minutes afterward. Whatever the sequence—and in our experience it’s wonderfully haphazard—inhale on the spot and don’t let anything grow cold.
The blazing burnt umber sahmjang butter coating the sultry charred leeks ($9), in other words, is an end in itself, not a sign of things to come or humble filler food. And that’s exactly as it should be in our opinion, but then we love leeks, much better than the chicken gizzards and rice on a stick ($6) as it turned out. We did forget, though, that we don’t love gizzards, and the grilled rice cakes, sorry to say, tasted a little like stale cheese puffs. Some animal organs, we’ve come to realize, are just too crunchy for their own good. And the folks working the Mott Street stovetop didn’t bother softening them beyond recognition, which we might in fact have preferred.
We do, however, relish a good miso, typically the simpler the better. But Mott Street’s self-described funky miso ($8)—made with fermented bean stew, yellow zucchini, potatoes, baby clams, and chrysanthemums—doesn’t want to just slip demurely down your throat while you wait for your pork jowl. We didn’t know that miso soup could actually aspire to Sicilian rusticity, but there the clam shells were, fully intact, the equivalent of whole sprigs of rosemary poking out Mediterranean peasant bread, anyway. The soup’s briny texture boldly defied classical miso-ness and yet evolved it.
Even if you don’t relish the unapologetic idiosyncrasy of every dish you order—even if you do have a gizzard on a stick in the bunch—Mott Street will wow you with something. Kim’s kitchen is where neutrality comes to die, though were the pot stickers served cold and uncooked they may have approached anodyne territory, as pot stickers that don’t hit the deep fryer usually do. But that was the only close call and not much of one at that.
Meanwhile the banana-choc ($3), served in a cardboard container fit for corndogs at a county fair, fleetingly numbed the tip of our tongue with its roasted Szechuan peppercorn peanuts. But that, our waiter assured us, was all part of the plan, a way of shocking the palate clean before the final flavors of the night sank in. And sink they did, right to the bottom of a certain happy place that dwells exclusively among Chicago summer patios and cooked crab neurons.
Mott Street is located at 1401 N. Ashland Avenue.