Oriental Food & Gifts' bibimbap / COOPER LEVEY-BAKER
Oriental Food & Gifts
2234 Gulf Gate Drive, Sarasota
924-8066 or orientalfoodandgifts.com
This is the umpteenth entry in a weekly column dedicated to eats that are cheap. If you have an idea for a place to feature in Cheap Eats, comment below, email me at cheapeatssrq@gmail.com or hit me up on Twitter:@LeveyBaker.
Oriental Food & Gifts' stir-fried fishcake / COOPER LEVEY-BAKER
For many, autumn Saturdays mean chilling on the couch, crushing Buds and Papa John's while watching teenagers somewhat connected to your alma mater play sport. There is a better way, friends. And it starts with a trip to Gulf Gate's Oriental Food & Gifts, a well-stocked specialty Asian food store that, each Saturday, slings extraordinary homemade Korean food at ludicrous prices.
To find the good stuff, wind through the shop's cramped shelves and coolers to the back, where a small counter stands next to a solitary table covered in a red-checked tablecloth. On the counter sit stacks of small clear plastic containers. Behind them, a cutting board, a host of fresh ingredients, a small stovetop and two staffers: one rolling up fresh Korean sushi, the other sautéing eggs to order for the shop's bibimbap.
Would my wife and son and I like something? Yes. How about that, this and, oh yeah, that. In fact, let's just take one of everything, even though I don't know what I'm grabbing.
Oriental Food & Gifts' fresh food counter / RACHEL LEVEY-BAKER
We crack open the plastic containers and start munching. An early winner: the shop's tempura ($3.99), not even close to the tempura I'm used to — i.e. Japan's battered and fried vegetables. No, this shop uses "tempura" to refer to the packaged fishcake it slices up then stir-fries with onions, carrots, red peppers and a generous blast of chilies. The tempura is dense and chewy, with an oceanic funk, and the spicing is just right: hot, but not overpowering, a trend in almost everything Oriental Food & Gifts serves up.
Fried vegetarian dumplings ($3.99) are served at room temperature. They'd be better hot, but they taste just fine dunked in the shop's sweet and vinegar-y homemade dipping sauce, available for purchase bottled. That dipping sauce makes a repeat appearance in place of soy sauce with the Korean sushi ($4.99). The rolls include crabstick, sautéed egg, tofu, lettuce and more stuffed in rice then wrapped with seaweed. Ginger and wasabi complete the dish, close enough to Japanese sushi to hit that sweet spot but different enough to intrigue.
I greedily pull over the rest of our meal. Crispy sprouts ($3.99) come marinated with more hot chilies and a strong dose of sesame oil, while a box of noodles ($4.99) provides a rich and flavorful mix of mushrooms, strands of carrot and onion, and thin rectangles of pork. I'm stuffed, but then there's that bibimbap ($5.99).
The dish is a complex mixture of several ingredients, tossed into a bowl with a gently cooked egg then mashed up into an oozy ball of incredible. Here's just some of what goes into Oriental Food & Gifts' version: rice, shredded seaweed, carrot slices, lettuce, cucumbers, sprouts, hot pepper paste and who knows what else. Mushed up with the egg, the entire mixture ends up coated in yolk and looking red from the pepper paste. The result: heavenly.
Oriental Food & Gifts' Korean sushi / COOPER LEVEY-BAKER
To accompany all this, dip into the shop's Coke cooler for some unusual finds: melon soda from Ramuné that comes in a strange bottle with a marble rattling around just below the neck, sugar-free canned green tea from Pokka that is the best canned tea I've ever had and sikhye, or "traditional Korean rice drink," a horchata-like blend of sweet, nutty and pasty. And be sure to stock up on prepackaged goods while you're here. Homemade kimchi ($2.99) tastes fermented and spicy and sweet rice cakes ($4.99) sautéed at home then dunked in honey are an unusual treat. And grab all kinds of pantry ingredients: rosewater; dried anchovies; cooked, shredded and dried pork. I feel like I could shop here for hours, even though store has only a handful of aisles.
Saturday, put down the Bud Ice, kick that garlic margarine dipping sauce to the curb and be there.
