Peter Meehan
The Pioneer Valley, home to a whole mess of Western Massachusetts’s finest higher-education operations, is not a bad place to eat per se. But I know from friends who live or have lived there that the options can feel limited. So I was stoked, when passing through last week, to be taken to a restaurant that I hadn’t heard of and actually liked: Gohyang Korean Restaurant, a shoebox of a place on Route 9. There’s no reason why there shouldn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t be a good Korean restaurant there, but I was quietly thrilled about it.
Gohyang is probably best known as “that Korean place in Hadley,” because the English-language signs one can read from the road identify it as “Korean Restaurant” and it is in Hadley, Mass. It’s housed in a smallish, bluish building with three doors: one for Gohyang’s Singing Rooms, a karaoke parlor; one for the restaurant; and one for Kim’s Oriental Mart, a place piled high with Korean kitchen supplies.
My friend Pete, who took me there, was bummed to see that the restaurant had put a fresh coat of paint on walls that were once covered in customers’ graffiti. The place is now adorned with old photos of the scribbled-up walls (meta? sentimental?) and little else. I’d describe the décor as nondescript. There looked to be a section of the restaurant with floor seating and low tables, but it wasn’t set up at lunch.
The menu offers jjajangmyeon, jampong, jjigae – all the Korean hits. We started out with beef mandoo that the menu (and our waiter) took pains to note was made in house. I’ve been mired in a forever-long streak of absolutely mediocre mandoo, and Gohyang’s pan-fried dumplings broke it. The beefy insides were tasty, but it was the texture (I’m sure the skins were from the freezer case next door) and how the guy in the kitchen cooked up the dumplings so they had an ideal ratio of wafer-crisp brown mottling to tender, gyoza-thin skin that put them over the top.
The banchan – that parade of little dishes that comes with certain Korean meals – is nothing out of the ordinary but solidly put together, and there’s enough variety on the table (cucumbers, bean sprouts, a few types of kimchi, etc.) to keep your chopsticks busy.
Gohyang’s kimchi pancake was more fried than I prefer my pajeon, but that didn’t stop Pete and me from eating almost all of it. Better still was the plate of fried nuggets of pig in a sauce that was as sweet as honey and shiny like shellac. I should probably jump up and down in protest and invoke General Tso and authenticity, but you know what? Fried meat in sweet sauce is soooo good, usually even when it’s bad, not that this was. It was actually good enough that I was still picking at it well after I was full.
The same was true of the kalbi: I worked over the pile of cross-cut short rib bones with sweet, gristly meat clinging mightily to them long after the meat was gone (and hunger with it). The short ribs were cooked in the kitchen – there are no table grills at Gohyang – and served with scissors to slice up the meat at the table.
The kalbi, like much of the meal, reminded me of home-cooked Korean meals that I’ve eaten, more so than of restaurant fare, which is also a way of saying that it’s a place to hit if you’re in the area and looking for a meal, not a destination. In its favor, the place is not at all expensive: our food cost $50, and it was enough for three or four people, honestly.
Due to the perverse liquor laws of the great state of Massachusetts, you can save money drinking there, too, because Gohyang does not have booze to sell you. Make preparations at home or stop two driveways to the west of the restaurant, where a place called Fonzie’s next door to a pizzeria has a wide selection of industrial American lagers, a few bottlings of Northeastern geek beers and Sierra Nevada-level ales — and no Korean beer.
Gohyang Korean Restaurant, 113 Russell Street, Hadley, Mass.; (413) 586-2682.
