Korean Buffet

With only two days off for Spring Break, we Minxes tend to stay close to home. It was a good time, however, to make a pilgrimage to Catonsville to visit H-Mart and stock up on exotic produce and meat.

By the time we finished standing in the long checkout line, we realized it was time for lunch. We headed a couple of doors down in the same shopping center to Hanoori Town to pick up some carry-out. The buffet at the back of the first floor food court serves sushi for $7.99/lb and hot food for $5.99/lb. Not completely trusting of sushi that's sitting out in the open, we opted for the hot buffet, trying a little bit of just about everything.

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My favorite items were the kimchee and the spicy bulgogi. The kimchee was young, pretty much completely un-fermented (I really don't like the almost-effervescent quality of aged kimchee) and cabbagey/nutty/spicy. The bulgogi was similarly spicy (plenty mild for my taste buds) and the meat was tender and beefy.

On the less-successful side, the chicken wings were heavily battered and had gotten extremely soggy under the heat lamp (and over the water bath). They were probably quite tasty when fresh out of the fryer. The fried squid suffered a similar fate - soggy breading. The meat itself wasn't as tough and rubber-bandish as one might expect under these conditions, however. The shrimp, which included heads and tails, were tasteless and completely mushy and disgusting. Avoid those.

Other items were merely ok - nothing took us back to our favorite Korean buffet at the now defunct Purim Oak. But it made for a pretty decent lunch. I'd eat there again, in a pinch.

Hanoori Town
822 N Rolling Rd
Catonsville, MD 21228
(410) 747-8315