Robin Garr's LOUISVILLE Restaurant Reviews

77	Kim's Asian Grill 813 E. Market St. (502) 595-7025

For many years, Kim's Asian Grill built its reputation on its location: It was a tiny spot on the kind of urban block where you wouldn't really expect to find gourmet fare, flanked by gun shops and vacant storefronts and just across the street from the homeless shelter at Wayside Christian Mission.

Then it moved uptown and upscale, opening a larger spot on Frankfort Avenue; and Mayan Gypsy moved in to its old quarters, only to migrate in its turn to a more artsy quarter a few blocks west. The storefront stood vacant for a while, but now ... surprise! ... Kim's is back, its East End exile having ended with a lease issue last year, sending this lovable little Korean-and-pan-Asian eatery back where it started.

An interior renovation has created a simple, almost elegant space, a small dining room with pale orchid-color walls and white tile floors, just room enough for a dozen small, undraped black tables furnished with flat-black chairs with dark jade seats. A few framed Ansel Adams prints and a couple of plastic potted plants in the corners complete the decor.

An extensive dinner menu offers a dozen appetizers from $1.25 (for an egg roll) to $5.99 (for seafood tempura) plus eight soups and salads from $3.50. A variety of maki-style sushi rolls are $3.25 (for cucumber kappamaki) to $6.50 (for a tempura roll).

Entrees include nine Korean and Japanese favorites, from $8.25 (for spicy tofu soup) to $10.95 (for calamari Bo Kum). Other Korean specialties include Bulgogi (Korean beef barbecue, $9.95) and Bibimbap (rice with vegetables and beef garnished with a fried egg, $8.95). Japanese dishes include tonkatsu or chicken katsu (breaded and fried cutlets over rice, $9.95). Other Asian dishes - mostly Chinese with an occasional foray into Southeast Asia - include 10 chicken, seven beef, 10 vegetarian and five fish or seafood entrees, mostly for affordable prices under $10. Vegetarian Bibimbap is $8.25, and Korean stir-fried vegetables and Kung Pao spaghetti, a notion I found vaguely disturbing, are $8.50. Among others, Japanese yakisoba noodles with chicken are $8.99, Thai green curry beef is $9.95 and Thai red curry chicken is $9.99.

A shorter and even more affordable menu offers eight appetizers, soups and salads from $1.25 for an egg roll to $4.25 for Kim's house salad with "creamy Asian-style dressing;" and eight lunch entrees - all $5.35 with fried rice, egg roll or soup - include a trio of Korean specialties and eight Chinese-style stir-fries.

Kim's offers a short but reasonably priced wine list, nothing really exciting but everything under $20 by the bottle and $3.75 to $4.25 by the glass. There's really more of interest on the beer list, which includes Korean, Chinese and Thai beers as well as Hite brand Korean beer and Hoegaarden white beer from Belgium.

We dropped by for lunch on a mighty cold day and quickly warmed up over a couple of bowls of soup. Those bowls, unfortunately, are tiny ones, holding almost insultingly stingy portions, particularly considering that the $2.50 price for egg drop and hot-and-sour is on the high side by Chinese-restaurant standards. Stranger still, the bowls seemed to have been pulled from the freezer, so cold that they quickly cooled the soup. These are not good things, but the soups were so good that we almost forgave them.

Egg drop soup was thick and clear, a hearty broth with fluffy shreds of scrambled egg, speaking more clearly of egg than chicken (which came first?) but warm and comforting. Hot-and-sour might be the best of its kind I've tasted in Louisville, making the puny portion even more irritating. It was thick and flavorful with crisp julienne strips of bamboo shoot plus black mushrooms, carrot bits, tofu and egg, showing a perfect balance of spicy and tangy flavors with the delicious earthy-floral fragrance of roasted Szechwan peppercorns singing counterpoint.

An appetizer order, pot stickers ($3.75), was fine: Six plump, crisp-sauteed Asian pastry pillows were filled with steaming ground beef and savory minced onion that presented a nicely balanced mix of beef and aromatic onion flavors.

I chose a Korean lunch entree, Dae Jee Koki ($5.35), a generous portion of thin-sliced, flavorful and tender pork stir-fried with scallions, thick white-onion slices and julienned carrots in a spicy red-chile and garlic sauce. It wasn't the hottest Korean food I've ever tasted, but hot enough to make me sit up and take notice and be thankful that it was served with a mound of lukewarm, sticky white rice.

My wife's Chinese-style lunch choice was offbeat enough to put her off her feed, although I liked it well enough. Lemon chicken ($5.35) consisted of a boneless chicken breast coated with tempura-style breading, deep-fried and cut into five slices (much like a traditional Cantonese war sue gai), served over shredded cabbage with lemon slices and a thick, tangy lemon sauce that's either very tasty or very peculiar (or both), depending on your taste. Very sweet and quite lemony, the combination reminded my spouse of lemon meringue pie, a concept that once stuck in your head is awfully hard to get out of it.

Service was not particularly speedy for lunch time, to the extent that anyone who had only an hour for lunch might have become a little tense toward the end; and our server, a polite Korean lad, had the odd habit of never looking at us when he took our orders. He was helpful enough, though, and got the right dishes to the right places in a timely manner, so we tried not to get worked up about the shifty-eyed glances.

The food was good and well prepared, and the price was right: An ample lunch (except for the soup) with iced tea and hot tea came to a thrifty $14.26, plus a $2.74 tip. $$

(January 2002)