Unrated during the pandemic
Strangers assume the best part of being a food critic is employer-paid meals in top-ranked restaurants. Let me set the record straight. As far as I’m concerned, the more interesting and challenging aspect is identifying something noteworthy early in its life, before the masses weigh in on social media and everyone and their dog walker knows about, say, Incheon in Annandale.
Google the restaurant and its location. Not much but a website, and a spare one at that, materializes. Incheon posts photos of a couple dishes, but doesn’t bother to even identify them, let alone feature a menu. As of late June, no Yelper had filed a field report. Then again, the Korean restaurant has been open only since May and for just three nights a week. Incheon almost dares you to find it.
Seek it out. Justin Ahn is doing some fine work on a small stage, and if you haven’t heard of him before, you’re in good company. Just a few years ago, he was working on the Hill and mulling a move to the private sector. A regular at Alfie’s, the regional Thai restaurant created by chef Alex McCoy, the self-taught Ahn impressed the owner with both his deep thinking about food and cooking and his disarming graciousness — McCoy says Ahn would ask him if he could buy him a drink in his own restaurant. Before long, the two became friends and Ahn volunteered to help out whenever McCoy needed an extra hand with special events, where his work left an impression on professional chefs. Who is this guy Justin Ahn, they wondered. And who flies to London to help someone out — for 36 hours — as Ahn did for his friend when McCoy was invited to showcase his Isaan menu as guest chef at the creative center Carousel?
Whatever he cooked, “he crushed it,” says McCoy, who compares Ahn’s style to that of chefs with Michelin stars and went on to offer Lucky Buns, his burger phenom, as a place for his friend to stage his debut pop-up.
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A massive stroke in 2018 interrupted Ahn’s trajectory, although part of his rehabilitation involved cooking, a forever passion that he says helped him “pay attention to minute details” again and led to creating his own restaurant.
On the restaurant’s way to acquiring a name, Ahn, 34, tasked his business partner, Brandon Kim, with sharing a bunch of personal information. What was his Zodiac sign? His high school mascot? His kids’ favorite colors? Ahn eventually settled on the name Incheon. The transportation hub outside Seoul suggested “international flair,” he says, which is more or less what the chef’s cooking is about.
The mistake is to think of the 45-seat restaurant as yet another Korean outpost in an area brimming with similar menus. Ahn was born in Korea but relocated to Southern California when he was a year old. He grew up watching his mother cook the food of their homeland and was raised to pick and choose the best of both Korea and U.S. cultures. Ahn, who says “Koreans are very parochial about their cuisine,” promises his “flavors are going to be Korean” even if his techniques are otherwise. “You’re not going to get the usuals here.”
That’s fine by some of us. My first taste of his restaurant was gyeran jjim, a silken steamed egg custard fragrant with sesame oil and finished with bird’s eye chiles, fish sauce and lime juice — a very Thai touch. Fried garlic chips balanced the otherwise oh-so-smooth eating. My second taste was a play on bibimbap, the colorful rice dish and one of Korea’s most recognizable foods. Ahn swaps out the rice for elastic wheat noodles (jjolmyeon) imported from the restaurant’s namesake city in Korea, arranged with a rainbow of cucumbers, carrots and onions plus tender sea snails instead of the traditional beef. Diners are instructed to mix the ingredients with a nearby sauce based on gochujang so that each bite delivers the taste equivalent of a little bugle blast. It takes skill and good timing to achieve jjolmyeon with the desired chewiness. Ahn delivers.
At least in its early months, Incheon has been slow enough that Ahn himself might introduce his menu, tailoring diners’ experience after some conversation. “Allergies?” he asks us one night. When we told him we had no restrictions, he cracked, “Just to bad food?” before disappearing into the kitchen.
Magic sometimes returns to the table. Ever had risotto in a Korean restaurant? Me neither. Ahn combines arborio rice and pecorino cheese as deftly as any Italian chef, but makes his risotto singular with the help of dashi instead of chicken stock and diced boiled abalone as the featured attraction. Ahn thinks of the dish as an enhanced juk, or Korean porridge. For sure, the classic has competition at Incheon.
More allure comes by way of ivory dominoes of soft-crisp pork belly, fanned onto a plate shared with julienne radish kimchi, a pungent ssamjang (paste) made with walnuts, and spears of lightly pickled napa cabbage. Ssam fans know where this is going: Diners add tastes of the meat and condiments to the cabbage leaves, which serve as crisp modes of transportation from plate to mouth. (Ssam means “wrap.”) The resulting heat, sweet, cool and hot is a marriage of genius.
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There are no inferior dishes, only dishes you might want more or less of. Between the two beef dishes, for instance, my heart belongs to the strip steak cooked medium-rare, sliced and striped with a “chimichurri” that once again nods to Thailand with chiles, coriander, fish sauce and lime. A bed of mashed sweet potatoes acknowledges Korea’s preference for the white variety. Short ribs sweetened in part with Mexican Coke and dropped off on a pool of soft polenta are pleasant enough, but beef and boiled cornmeal is fairly commonplace. Go for what’s different at Incheon. See: beer-battered cod teetering on a base of thick-cut daikon on a glossy pool of soy sauce shot through with garlic and ginger and spirited with mirin and sake.
Calls to the restaurant are returned by the hands-on chef, who will ask if you want to order his tasting menu. Agree to the $60-a-head proposition, which showcases pretty much everything on the list — seven dishes at last count — and sometimes a plate that’s not. The sense of someplace personal extends to the dining room, a long space with windows on two sides, a ceiling partially dressed with a canopy of faux greenery and video montages splashed on the wall as the evening wears on. Residents will be familiar with the address, which recently housed a watering hole, and surprised by the modern update to the storefront.
The restaurant’s youth and inexperience make themselves known from time to time. Most notably, the handful of staff tend to refer even basic questions to their boss in the kitchen. But Incheon is remarkable for the style and finesse it delivers, plate after plate and week after week. The deliciousness extends to the bar. Rare for a Korean restaurant in Northern Virginia, Incheon makes lovely cocktails. Ahn says he wants to give customers a city vibe in the suburbs. Mission accomplished with every sip of the egg-white-capped Lucky “Bok” Sour, which goes from whiskey-gold to rose with the addition of a shot of bokbunja, Korean raspberry wine, at the table. The wine list, while brief, embraces respectable South African rosé, French viognier, German riesling and pinot noir from California’s Central Coast; bottles average a budget-friendly $43.
My biggest reservation about Incheon has less to do with the restaurant than with how popular it might become as word spreads. For the sake of chef and customers alike, no rushing, please.
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Incheon7118 Columbia Pike, Annandale. 703-688-3347.incheon-restaurant.business.site. Open for inside dining 6 to 11 p.m. Thursday through Saturday.Prices:Appetizers $11 to $18, main courses $21 to $34 ; tasting menu $60 per person.Accessibility: No barriers at entrance; ADA-compliant restroom.
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