Ehwa

Ehwa Pear Blossom (5182 Yonge Street, North York, Ontario)

(416) 229-6719

Recently, I began realizing that various restaurants in little Koreatown had cheap beer or beer plus meal specials. In particular, I had heard that Ehwa had a combo deal that offered a plate of food with five beers or a jug of soju. Naturally, it seemed like a good place to visit.

Right when we walked in, I spotted several flat screen TVs hanging from the ceiling playing Korean pop music videos. Cheap beer and pop music videos with lots of dancing? It seems like a place for young people.

Nice menu:

We were a little sad that we couldn't find the cheap beer or beer combos in the menu so we decided to ask the waiter about it. Turns out, they have it on a separate sheet and didn't initially provide us with one because it's all in Korean. D'oh!

It's possible to match up the words on the combo list to the ones in the menu to try to figure them out, but we didn't realize that the words in each of the sets were actually just more options. The waiter was kind enough to translate each item in the Mookhyang Set. Or was it the Chungsol Set? 

The five beers are any of the domestic beers which includes Alexander Keith's, Canadian, and so on. We went for the Keith's and a plate of spicy BBQ chicken.

The beers come in a bucket of ice.

Ehwa seems to have different complimentary appetizers than what I've seen from other Korean restaurants. On the left is corn in some sort of cream, and on the right is mashed potato mixed with stuff.

I wasn't a huge fan of the corn.

Of course, there has to be kimchi. I wasn't used to seeing the fries in Korean restaurants, though.

Mel's food:

I didn't hear her complain about it. 

Second round of beer combo:

We told the other waiter to simply just pick one of the plate options for us in the Korean-only list. Frankly, we just wanted the beer. To our delight, he chose the skewers for us, and they were delicious. The sauce they use is a bit sweet and reminds me of hoisin sauce mixed with something.

The spicy BBQ chicken:

It's a large plate of meat and Koreans don't joke when they say spicy. The flavour was strong and the chicken was good. Props to the cabbage pieces underneath that absorb the sauce.

Because five beers each for me and Jo isn't enough, we each also tried a Hite. I think it's a Korean beer ($3.50 each, I think).

It was fizzier than the Keith's and tasted really light. As a result, it goes down very easily. It also has a little can opener symbol in the lower right corner of the label that changes colour (like the Coors bottles) to let you know when you've got a frosty one.

Daily bread:

Total damage: $25 to $35 for my share? I don't know... I just kind of threw down money at the bill.

Look out for Professor Crunchy's take on this place. Cheers to Jo for sharing pics for this post!