French Food Homemade Style at Mommy in the Kitchen
By Kim Tong-hyung
Staff Reporter
It would be hard to find any culinary culture that suffers more from stereotypes than French cooking. Lavish and over-engineered dishes, haughty waiters and ridiculous price tags are often the first associations with French dining for the average person.
Then there is Mommy in the Kitchen, a small 40-seat restaurant near Sungshin Women’s University in Donamdong, northern Seoul, which thrives on serving unpretentious French food in a casual setting.
Mommy is certainly a champion of the food-blog era, with buzz created by Internet-based food-lovers allowing owner and executive chef Kwon Suyoung to open her second restaurant, Le Pied, in the trendy district of Apgujeongdong last year.
The tables at Mommy were still fully occupied at around 8:00 p.m Tuesday, standing out in an otherwise quiet street mixed with boutique dress shops, accessory stands, snack venders, and a 24-hour convenience store. Perhaps the location of the restaurant itself is a departure from the snobbish French stereotype that Mommy is supposed to combat.
Mommy is all about an easy at-home menu, so ordering coq au vin ― a conventional home dish of chicken cooked with wine, butter, mushrooms, herbs and vegetables ― was a natural decision.
At the recommendation of a restaurant staff member, we also ordered Mommy’s Pot, a seafood stew cooked in the Provence style.
The first bite into the winecooked chicken was enough to confirm that the chefs took no shortcuts in creating an authentic French flavor. It was certainly a welcoming departure from the coq au vin at many other “classic” French restaurants, which conveniently forget to add bouquet garni (a mixture of bay leafs, thymes and celery sticks) in the wine marinade and produce an overpriced dish of bland meat.
As good as the coq au vin was, Mommy’s Pot was even more of a pleasant surprise. The restaurant’s attention to fresh ingredients is richly rewarded in this aromatic seafood stew that combines shrimp, squid, mussels and vegetables in chewy tomato sauce that simply leaped from the tongue.
It was a pity that the kitchen ran out of the day’s supply of baguette bread at the end, as they tasted beautifully when dipped into the stew.
Mommy’s dishes were certainly a good representation of home-cooked French food, but the bill brings you back to thoughts of snails, frog legs and blue cheese.
The coq au vin was priced at 21,500 won as a course menu and 17,500 won a la carte, while the Mommy’s Pot was tagged at 35,000 won as a course menu and 27,000 won a la carte, not including a 10 percent tax.
Although Mommy’s simple and honest food certainly reminds you of the French “mom” you never had, the lessthan-generous proportions didn’t. However, all was forgiven after a marvelous dessert of glace au choux.
The restaurant is a 10-minutes walk from the Sungshin Women’s University station on subway line No. 4. For more information, call (02) 929-1102.