By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter
Teriyaki is often associated with Japanese cuisine, but the technique of grilling dishes in a sweet soy sauce has become popular everywhere.
At the Manna Teriyaki restaurant in Haebangchon, Itaewon, the recipe for the sweet teriyaki sauce is not from Japan. It's actually from a popular chicken teriyaki chain based in Seattle, Washington.
The restaurant has a fairly extensive menu of different teriyaki dishes. You can sample teriyaki-style chicken, beef, spicy chicken, chicken salad, pork, chicken katsu, beef short rib, tofu, tuna and shrimp.
Since we wanted to try different dishes, we opted for the combination meal menu. We chose the chicken and shrimp (8,900 won) and chicken and egg roll sets (8,900 won). Each dish comes with rice, salad and pickled radish.
The chicken teriyaki and shrimp dish was served with a sizable serving of sliced chicken strips, a skewer of grilled shrimp, two scoops of rice and vegetables.
The chicken was tasty and flavorful, helped by the sweet teriyaki sauce, which is drizzled liberally on the chicken strips. If you need something spicier, you can pay an additional 500 won to get a spicy sauce.
While the chicken was juicy, the grilled shrimp turned out to be a tad too dry. We were also expecting a fresh salad (as seen in the huge photos on the wall) to accompany the dish, but instead stir-fried vegetables were served. But the vegetables were warm and provided a good contrast to the sweet teriyaki sauce.
As for the other combination, the chicken teriyaki and egg rolls complemented each other well. The egg rolls were crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. But it would have helped if they offered a different sauce for the egg rolls.
The menu also includes yakisoba and various side dishes like egg rolls, gyoza, spring rolls, french fries, chicken nuggets, chicken wings, hash browns and fried shrimps. We tried the gyoza (2,000 won for five pieces), which turned out to be too greasy for our taste.
Manna Teriyaki has nice, clean and bright interiors, decorated with a handful of framed images of Seattle. Overall, the restaurant offers good value for money since the teriyaki dishes are fairly sizable for the price. Service is fast and efficient.
The restaurant is open seven days a week, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Call (02) 749-9297. To get there, leave exit 1 or 2, Noksapyeong Station, subway line 6. Cross the road using the overhead footbridge. Turn left and walk straight for about 100 meters, and you'll find Manna Teriyaki on your right.