Mill Creek Bistro: Korean, Japanese dishes please your taste buds

Published 8:35 pm Wednesday, April 21, 2010

“Bibimbap means mixed up,” my husband told me, as I stared at my bowl of bibimbap. “Just mix it all together and eat it.”

I was trying to figure out the best way to eat a fried egg with chopsticks. I was failing miserably.

After I took his solid advice — he grew up on Korean food, after all — I managed to eat the bibimbap with fewer chopstick theatrics.

We were having dinner at the Mill Creek Bistro, technically located in Lynnwood, featuring Korean and Japanese dishes and sushi.

The restaurant is small and cozy, with only about a dozen tables. The menu is short and simple. It offers a nice variety, without an overwhelming number of choices.

In the mood for a sushi roll? There are 13 choices, including the classics: California roll ($5.50) and spicy tuna roll ($6.50). The Las Vegas roll ($7.95) was tempting — it’s a deep fried roll with eel, cream cheese, avocado, spicy tuna and special sauce — but we settled on a very enjoyable crunch roll ($7.95).

It was shrimp tempura rolled up with cucumber, crab and avocado. The outside of the roll was coated in small, crunchy tempura bits. The quantity of ginger and wasabi on the side was a bit stingy, but I will confess to being a bit of a glutton about wasabi and ginger.

For our main course, I settled on the Dolsot bibimbap ($8.95). It gave me some good chopstick practice. The bibimbap came with sauteed greens, vegetables, beef bulgogi (Korean marinated beef) and a fried egg on top. On the side was a large bottle of hot sauce. Everything was served together in a hot stone bowl.

Once I got everything mixed up nicely, it was quite tasty. The beef was tender and full of flavor, and the greens were sauteed to the point of softness, but not mushiness. I was a bit tenative with the hot sauce, but I shouldn’t have been. I quickly learned that the sauce wasn’t that hot, and the bibimbap was even better with a healthy serving of it.

My husband ordered the sweet and spicy chicken wings. We both loved these. The wings were splendidly fried. I’m not normally crazy about the skin on chicken, but the skin was perfectly crisp with only the faintest hint of lingering oil. The sweet and spicy marinade was also nicely balanced. I had a hard time not stealing most of the wings off Jerry’s plate.

Each meal came with miso soup and side of salad. We also ordered a cup of green tea.

The green tea was tasty, with puffed rice giving it a nice nutty flavor. It did, unfortunately, take our server quite a while to get the tea to us. I would have liked to sip tea while waiting for our meal.

The miso soup was lukewarm, at best, which rather detracted from what would have otherwise been a pleasing start to our meal.

The salad, on the other hand, was a pleasant surprise. I was expecting a small bowl of wilted lettuce. Instead the salad was a generous plate of crisp mixed greens. The lettuce was mixed with a slightly sweet dressing and diced nuts. Just right. The dressing coated the lettuce without drowning it and the rich flavor from the crushed nuts was an added bonus. It was a delicious, simple salad.

At the end of our dinner, I discovered the source of a small annoyance that had bothered me throughout the meal. We had unfortunately been seated next to a plug-in air freshener. The perfumelike smell was distracting, and detracted from the food. A large TV in the corner of the room was another distraction, because it disturbed the otherwise relaxing atmosphere.

Aside from these drawbacks, the meal was enjoyable and fairly priced. The servers were friendly, and the bibimbap and chicken wings won us over.