Whew, it’s been a rough few weeks, between the beginning of my school year and what feels like a million personal projects on my long road to self-improvement, so updates have fallen by the wayside. Finally, this weekend I had an entire Saturday with nothing planned and therefore decided that I would NOT leave the house for any reason, so help me god (spoiler alert: I left the house multiple times, but shhhh). I was devoted to not leaving the house for dinner. GrubHub made this simultaneously very easy and also needlessly difficult because it’s so hard to find a GrubHub participant with even middling reviews. I think in this town, you can have convenience or you can have tastiness, but you can’t have both.
I finally settled on Bab because it had half-decent reviews and a wider variety of options than most other things. I went with the daegu dumplings to split, the chili chicken bowl for me, and the short rib for the hubs.
The dumplings were actually okay. The skin was light and crispy in a different way than a lot of fried dumplings. The insides were a mystery although they did include glass noodles (or what I think was glass noodles…) They came with four regular dumplings and then four unfilled, yet fried, dumpling skins, like large, greasy chips. I can’t determine if these were part of a presentation that clearly didn’t translate well to delivery, or if someone just straight-up forgot to stuff the dumplings. I’m not sure it matters to my perception.
I ordered the chili chicken bowl with the southwestern veggies and specified that I wanted it extra spicy. This means simply that they included an extra container of gochujang. Thank god they did because, although the chicken was pretty decent by itself, it wasn’t super flavorful and it certainly wasn’t spicy. The rest of the bowl just was what it was–a couple slices of avocado, some red onion, and undetectable kimchi. It tasted like nothing. It was edible, in an airplane food type of way.
For my husband I ordered the short rib with the house veggies. Once again, same sparse fixings, same crucial container of gochujang, same sad egg. But this time there was a new twist: the beef was completely inedible. He passed on all of it and I even tried to tear it off the bone with my teeth like a caveman because I have no shame and still…nothing. Gristle. Char. Horrific badness. Don’t be fooled by what looks like ample meat; it was at least 50% bone and another 44% meat stuck to the bone.
Price: $20 per person.
Bottom line: Another GrubHub selection bites the dust.
Ward Five Foodie 