Nurtured in Japan and raised on naan, his food is rajasic

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Nurtured in Japan and raised on naan, his food is rajasic

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A plate of saffron rice, Kashmir curry, naan bread and fresh pickles.

Lim Jong-hyuk is the chef and owner of Sari, a new Indian restaurant that opened one month ago in Jung District.
He’s the kind of man who can restore one’s faith in humanity and Korean cooking, all with one dish of fish masala.
Indian food has become one of the dominant cuisines of England, my homeland.
Actually, it always was.
The first Indian restaurant in the United Kingdom, the Hindoostanee Coffee House, opened in London 40 years before fish and chip shops made their greasy debut.
Being raised on papadoms and chicken tikka masala I have high standards when it comes to curries. Sari, to my surprise, exceed them.
Sake Dean Mahomed, who opened the Hindoostanee in 1810, was born in India and moved to England in his twenties. He went on to settle in Brighton, where he opened another Hindoostaneee and an additional business doing shampoo baths for wealthy ladies don’t ask and married an Anglo-Irish aristocrat.

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Tandoori chicken and maharajah salad.

I suspect Lim would have found some common ground with Mahomed, for Sari’s proprietor is Korean, he learned how to cook Indian food in Tokyo under the tutelage of a Japanese chef who then became his father-in-law and he plans to develop recipes in a few years that incorporate kimchi into Indian cuisine.
When it comes to most Indian restaurants one suspects the owners all go to some vast Indian restaurant supermarket where they buy industrial-sized drums of bright red sauce and rolls of wallpaper covered in purple velvet.
One can blame the English for both of these errors of taste. The wallpaper was popular in English houses for decades and the necessity who mothered the sauce was the British colonial administrator whose bland palate persuaded his Calcutta chef to ruin an otherwise perfect masala with Heinz ketchup. No wonder the sun set on the British Raj.
Lim has made sure that Sari does not suffer from either of these colonial hangovers.

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Above:The exterior of Sari in Jung District, near the JoongAng Ilbo building.

His sauces are not red but a wonderful umber with shades of ocher and sienna that glisten beneath the restaurant’s tasteful lighting.
The illumination, which is such a refreshing change from the industrial-style floodlighting usually found in Seoul eateries, falls softly on Italian leather seating, delightful white linen, porcelain from Milan and an intriguing ceiling decoration that Lim designed himself.
The first dish to arrive is a Kashmir curry (18,000 won or $20). Lim was quick to explain that his version is vegetarian, as is a lot of authentic Indian food. One reason Indian cuisine uses spices in innovative ways is that so many types of food either are or have been considered taboo.
At one time or another, in different parts of India, everything from cows to corn have been excluded from the menu on religious or spiritual grounds. Indian chefs rose to this challenge by combining bland basic ingredients, like lentils, with a kaleidoscope of spices, in order to create a dish that plays in the mouth like a Mozart symphony.
Thus, despite the fact Sari’s Kashmir curry looked like a muddy puddle mixed with clots of earth it actually tasted sublime.
A full orchestra of spices serenaded my taste buds each time I took a bite from a perfectly prepared piece of naan bread that had been dipped into my curry bowl.
Lim said he used 40 different spices to make his Kashmir dish. For a second I doubted his word, but the he began to list them. I stopped listening at number 18 ― fenugreek ― because the fish masala (16,000 won) had arrived.
The best Indian food, according to the ancients, is supposed to create balance among the three doshas, or humors of the human body, as defined by Hindu medicine ― known as Ayurveda. The doshas are vata (wind), pitta (bile, not bread) and kapha (mucus).
Indians eat lots of basmati rice because it is considered to be saatvic, or pure, and hence it balances all the doshas.
Other foods are either rajasic, which stands for action, or tamasic, which means they are likely to cause sloth, ignorance or gluttony. These three are the gunas, and they represent the evolutionary process through which the subtle becomes gross and vice versa
Spices are very rajasic. Indian dishes rarely include garlic, because this staple of Korean and Italian food is thought to be tamasic, a category of food that the Ayurvedic encyclopedia defines as something “old, decaying and distasteful,” which, I must admit, does sound a bit like my first impression of kimchi.
The trick is to have a good balance of rajasic and saatvic elements with little or no tamasic ingredients. For instance a MacDonald’s cheese burger is almost entirely tamasic and will not lead to enlightenment.

By contrast, Lim’s fish masala had plenty of rajasic and saatvic elements and I felt my spirit beginning to soar as I combined it with the perfectly cooked basmati rice.
The final dish was a serving of tandoori chicken (14,000 won), which had been marinated in yoghurt and spices for almost 36 hours.
This dish is usually served with a color akin to lobster. I was a bit taken aback when Sari’s version arrived looking like another mud patty but, once more, this was the fault of my English upbringing. To enhance the flavor of the chicken Lim only adds freshly-ground spices and refuses to use any artificial coloring. The result was a tandoori chicken that ranks among the best I have tasted.
The other feature of the dish was a salad composed of apples, lettuce, grapes and thin slices of celery. All of these are saatvic foods and they were coated with a dressing that Lim says is based upon a recipe his father-in-law obtained from an Indian prince. This maharajah salad was a nice counterpoint to the tandoori’s spices.
Sari has an extensive wine list and other diners near my table were enjoying some expensive vintages. I stuck to Asahi beer (8,000 won) and an Americano. Like Sari’s furniture, Lim’s espresso machine came straight from Italy and the coffee he uses is pure Illy, Rome’s best export after Tuscan olive oil. Now that’s what I call enlightened.

Sari
English: Spoken fluently by Lim Jong-hyuk
Tel: (02) 318-4249
Address: Second Floor, 151 Posco the Sharp, Sunhwa-dong, Jung-gu
Parking: Available
Hours: 12 to 3 p.m., 6 to 10:30 p.m.
Dress: Smart casual
Web site: www.sarikorea.com

By Daniel Jeffreys Deputy Editor
[danielj@joongang.co.kr]
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