Restaurant review

Owner needs to coach the waiters and fine-tune the dishes to fulfill eatery's potential

Entering Ssam, a Korean restaurant in the ghostly Sanlitun SOHO, is like stepping into a minimally decorated yet comfortable health clinic: Everything is aglow in a soft white. The counter running the length of the restaurant is white. The high chairs that look like door panels are white. The austere tables are white. So are the walls, the brick ceiling and the pipes criss-crossing it.

Against this almost sterile canvas, perhaps it becomes easier to focus on Ssam's unique twists on Korean food. Globetrotting owner and executive chef Andrew Ahn, who spent 15 years at hotel restaurants in Seoul, Dubai, Tianjin, Shanghai and Beijing before opening Ssam six months ago, calls his dishes traditional but creative.

Unfortunately for Ahn, the stark pallor of the restaurant also made it very easy to notice the confusion and puzzling service from the wait staff on a recent Friday night.

When our twist-cap bottle of red wine arrived, the waitress skipped what is essentially a tired formality: giving the customer a tasting. She also took the curious step of repeatedly putting the cap back on and twisting it tight. How would the wine breathe? Our requests to leave the bottle uncapped repeatedly fell on deaf ears. Strike one.

The steamed mussels with homemade fishballs, however, arrived without a hitch. This dish is actually more suitable for soju, the Korean rice spirits, but I learned this far too late. Nonetheless, the mussels were tender pillows of brine, steamed rare and to perfection. But the broth and the fishballs missed their marks, with the broth lacking any distinguishable taste other than salt and chopped green onions, while the fishballs were much too delicate in flavor.

But subtleness seems to be Ahn's modern take on Korean food and the chili with minced beef is evidence of that. Stuffed into what actually is a square cut of green bell pepper, the beef was so finely minced and seasoned so unobtrusively, it seems Ahn is trying to say: "Korean food doesn't always have to be loaded with chilies and heaviness."

Next came the braised pork neck wrapped in kimchee ... or wait, what is that making its way to our table? It was instead a plate of spicy braised chicken with glass noodles. Strike two.

I hate to waste a kitchen's efforts so we opted not to send it back, which was a good decision because it was a large helping of chicken thighs, chunks of carrots and potatoes over a mound of thick glass noodles. The sauce had hints of ancho chili and ssamjiang, sweet and tomatoey. Although this "normal home dish", as Ahn called it, is cooked in a sous-vide over low temperatures, the sauce just didn't quite marry with the tender chicken.

Strike three happened before the Korean roasted lamb with miso and chestnuts arrived and after nearly all the chicken had been eaten. A waiter gave us a bowl of large rips of greens, telling us that it was to be used with the chicken. Tear a piece of chicken off and stuff it into a leaf of romaine. What timing. Well, you would have thought it would be the end to the missteps but when the lamb was brought out, it also came with an explanation: the greens were really to be used with the lamb. Say what?

My bewilderment distracted me from the lamb, which as far as I can recall was very tender, cooked medium rare and tasting levels above gamey.

But Ssam is all about the ssams, which means "wrapped". They are staples of Korean food in which vegetable leaves are used to wrap a piece of meat or a portion of rice.

The ssam roll with salmon nearly saved the meal, with its barely broiled slabs of salmon hugging nuggets of ssamjiang-seasoned rice. The creaminess of the salmon, the slightly spicy rice and the sprinkles of salmon roe made for a fantastic combination.

Three days after the dinner, in a phone call to Ahn, he readily admitted that the service must improve but that he's also training his staff for several hours a week. He said that business has been slowly picking up in the empty wasteland that is Sanlitun SOHO.

"In a month or two, we will get better," he said. "And our service is slowly getting better."

With that said, I promised to come back to Ssam in three months to check up on Ahn and the restaurant.

This is a unique place with bold dishes and highly creative presentations, where waiters roll out an iPad loaded with photos of dishes to help customers with their orders. Unfortunately, the wait staff does little else to help with the dining experience, which bogs down a potentially special restaurant