A Taste of North Korea at Ham Heung Nengmyun in Koreatown: Average Noodles Smothered in Red Hot Spicy Sauce

I finally got to try Ham Heung Nengmyun that serves the North Korean specialty, cold noodle dish usually made with buckwheat but the noodles from this region are made with potato or sweet potato based so they're chewier. The cold buckwheat noodles are probably most familiar as the one with cold beef broth called mool nengmyun or another one called bibim nengmyun with no broth but smothered in a bright red, spicy and slightly sweet sauce. 

This Ham Heung nengmyun is an interesting hybrid -- it has some broth but the broth is blood red and it also has the red sauce. The big difference besides the type of noodles is that Ham Heung nengmyun has hong-eo-hoe, or skate sashimi. The nengmyun was average and the hot broth served on the side called yooksu was good but not nearly as good as the one in Chilbomyunok on 6th. Koreans' "drink" of choice paired with ice-cold nengmyun? Piping hot beef broth that is the base of the nengmyun broth, naturally. It's a winning combination. It also comes with sliced cucumbers, radishes, pieces of broth ice and half a hard boiled egg. I didn't love the hong-eo-hoe pieces that were in place of the usual meat slices. They were too hard. The sauce was just in-your-face spicy without much depth of flavor. 

You can order a plate of marinated rib meat taken off the bone when ordering any nengmyun for just $5.99 so we did. The meat was like candy and not in a good way. Sure, the rib pieces were glistening as in the image above but the meat was fatty and marinade overly sweet. At first, this seemed addictive but one can only have so many super sweet pieces of meat. I wanted savory. It did help to balance out the super spicy nengmyun but not sure I would get this again.