Title: Feb 15, 2014
Author: jean komatsu
Last saved by: Owner

According to Chowhounders: Pollo Pollo in Pleasant Hill is part of the same family of restaurants. CH'er had the "Kill Me Spicy" chicken, and it was quite spicy. There's also an Ohgane in Dublin, making a total of eight restaurants between mother/daughter: Bowl'd, Bowl'd BBQ, Spoon, and Mixed Grain are run by two women. One is the daughter of Ohgane's owners, the other is her best friend who is close enough to be considered an unofficial member of the family. Daughter & ptr also opened Judoku Sushi at 3314 Piedmont Ave. in Oakland.

Bowl'd BBQ in Oakland, CA – update, lunch
Review date: Sept 2014
(previous reviews appended below)

We stopped in to have our usual lunch: seafood pancake appetizer to share, tofu seafood soup for Carlos, beef jap chae for me. The waiter gave me the choice of the lunch bowl or the dinner bowl – the dinner entrée is about a third bigger. 

I chose the lunch bowl. I think last time I ended up with the dinner bowl by mistake. Although it's more generous with the beef, it's too hard to finish with all the (free) dishes of ban chan plus sharing the pancake.

There was even less sugar in the jap chae than last time. I told Carlos it was as if time had rolled back three decades, when the Korean food was savory and spicy with only an edge of sweetness.

The ban chan was a good mix, with some new dishes finally showing up. There were the usual American broccoli florets, but there was also the welcome bitterness of sliced broccolini. The potatoes this time were in a yellow curry, the first time we've gotten potatoes any other way except for plain boiled or teriyaki-style. They were very tasty and we got a refill, but were a little confounded to find the refill was ice-cold out of the refrigerator. 

The waitstaff isn't well trained, but they are very pleasant and enthusiastic, eager to help. You have to work to get their attention, though; especially at lunch when it's almost empty and they get distracted by doing other things instead of keeping an eye on the dining room.

We like Bowl'd BBQ, and are pleased with their consistency. We'll have to hope they're doing better at night, though. This is a good-sized restaurant, expensively remodeled. I'm not sure they've been able to convince locals that this Temescal-based location is the Korean food of their dreams. Broadway, which extends from Jack London Square through Uptown and into Temescal, has zillions of new places to eat nowadays, and most of the popular ones have a full bar. 

Oakland's Koreatown is centered on Broadway, so Bowl'd BBQ has a lot of competition that the other locations don't face (its siblings are in Albany, Emeryville, Walnut Creek). It seems to me that the new Korean fusion places like Belly/Oakland and KoJa Kitchen/Berkeley are the kind of places that are most popular with wallet-pinched locals – and both of those are sited where they don't have similar competitors crowding them.

We like Bowl'd a lot. But it may be that their original intention of doing upscale fusion (when it first opened it was Copan, with a chef from LA) was really the better concept for this particular area. 

As it is, they don't stand out sufficiently from the crowd. The menu is all familiar restaurant dishes but with higher prices. What you receive reflects the better quality of ingredients and superior execution, but the menu itself is somewhat limited. 

It doesn't help that visually it's one of the ugliest menus I've seen in a while, a jarring note in a restaurant trying to stand above its many nearby competitors. You aren't sure if it's bargain fusion or upscaled traditional. We have yet to see anyone at lunch order the DIY BBQ items...and those tables with the massive vent hoods and propane cookers were not cheap to put in. 

Bowl'd BBQ is a little "betwixt and between." We hope they make it, as we approve of their food more and more. But it's depressing to keep going in there for lunch yet see at most there are only three or four two-tops occupied. No matter if all your waitstaff is relatives, that's not enough to be worth opening for anything but dinner.

Two people, lunch: one starter, two mains, with tip was $60.

Bowl'd BBQ in Oakland, CA -- update, lunch
Review date: August 2014
(previous reviews appended below)

Carlos voted to return to Bowl'd for lunch, saying he wanted to chase away a sore throat with some spicy seafood tofu soup. Bowl'd, like most of the Temescal restaurants, is fairly empty during weekday lunches, so we had no trouble commandeering a larger 4-top for our meal.

He ordered the haemul pajeon, seafood pancake, which came with a sauce so good we ordered a second cup of it. It was a simple mix of unsweetened chile sauce, rice vinegar, and sugar. The chiles were super-hot and with the vinegar, cuts through the oiliness of the pancake. Korean pancakes are made with rice flour, so there's a chewiness to the texture which is different than using flour or cornstarch. 

I ordered a fried chicken starter. The first time we came, I tried their fried chicken wings but they were "wet style", which I'm not fond of. This time I noticed they had a fried chicken without sauce, so I chose that. The batter was a medium crustiness, which pleased Carlos as he hates the current mania for over-thick, heavily battered chicken. 

Both of us were surprised to receive a massive amount of fried chicken for Bowl'd's modest current price of $14. These weren't itsy-bitsy chicken wings. This was half of a good-sized chicken, chopped into six sizable pieces. Two pieces of this size are considered a meal at the Colonel's zillion locations, and there was more chicken meat on this half-chicken than on some of the smaller whole-bird rotisserie chickens we've bought.

Even more impressive, the frying was completely on-point. The breast meat was perfect, firm but not in the least overcooked. This was very good fried chicken at a great value price point. It should be noted, however, that flour coating is fried lightly, in comparison to the real KFC: it's a soft golden brown, not a hard crispy-crackling dark brown. As a result, the batter doesn't really reheat well in the microwave; it needs re-crisping in a toaster oven.

We put most of the fried chicken and half the seafood pancake aside to take home. Carlos got his haemul sundubu jjigae, seafood tofu soup, but refused the rice, eating it instead with the ban chan. He really enjoys the pickled daikon shreds and kabocha squash cubes now that Bowl'd has reduced its sugar usage, and even requested seconds on those two.

I ordered the beef jap chae, and was surprised that this time I received a good amount of beef shreds. The first time I ordered this stir-fry yam noodle bowl in March 2014 there was hardly any beef, which is why I had ordered the fried chicken this time around! I really liked today's version, which was dry (I dislike soggy versions of jap chae), yet wasn't greasy – not easy to do, as glass noodles easily stick to the wok so most chefs overdo the oil. The vegetables were kept to a minimum, without the long lengths of green onion which Carlos and I despise. Bowl'd uses some finely shredded, well-cooked cabbage, and a few sprigs of baby kale. With a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds, it's a light but satisfying bowl. Although I enjoy Bowl'd's bibimbop, rice bowl, it's easily twice the size of the jap chae, so I have to be really hungry to order it.

Bowl'd's service is amateur – they have a bad tendency to take their eye off the dining room and get involved with other things – but they try very hard to please. When they wrapped up the leftovers, they included an extra container of the chile-vinegar sauce "because you liked it so much!"

We hope Bowl'd BBQ gets more foot traffic than we see when we come here. They're doing a good job, better than the competition. But whether Oakland diners will pay a little extra $$ for better quality, more carefully prepared food...we'll have to wait and see. 

Only a few Japanese restaurants in Berkeley and one Chinese restaurant in Albany have managed to convince East Bay locals that not all Asian food must be rock-bottom dollar to be a good value. But it continues to be an uphill climb, so Carlos and I can only hope the snail's pace at which improvement is happening, will start to speed up and gain critical mass eventually. We'd like to see Bowl'd succeed in Oakland.

Two people, lunch (with leftovers for a full meal): two starters, two entrées, with tip was $57.

Bowl'd Korean in Oakland, CA – update, lunch
http://bowldbbq.com/food-wine/
Review date: June 2014
(previous reviews appended below)

We stopped by Bowl'd for lunch. Now that they are both low-salt and low-sugar, we're enjoying their food much more. The ban chan are still a bit unimaginative compared to the competition – where's our fav chile-spiked salt dried fishies? – but the Dolsot Bebimbop (rice bowl for me) and the Haemul Sundubu Jjigae (seafood tofu stew for Carlos) are very satisfying. 

The food at Bowl'd, in fact, is so low sodium that no doubt quite a few customers take advantage of the soya squeeze bottle the waiter brings over with the food. We were fine with it, but it's a sea change from Ohgane, the long-time restaurant from the parents of Bowl'd's owners, less than a mile away. Ohgane is heavy on the white sugar, and we dislike their food intensely.

Carlos had the fried oysters, which are individually fried in an egg batter. There are six to a dish, and I kindly assisted him with half, LOL. Carlos enjoys their haemul sundubu jjigae, although it doesn't have quite the depth of PyungChang Tofu House a block away. But the custard tofu is always fresh, and the spice level is very good. Bowl'd brings the unbroken raw egg over in a dish, but will crack it into the tofu stew for you if you don't want to do it yourself. 

They'll ask what kind of rice you want; you have a choice between white or mixed grain (Mixed Grain is the name of Bowl'd's sibling restaurant in Contra Costa Cty). 

The dolsot bebimbop is a generous rice bowl, as it is everywhere. Bowl'd uses the true cast iron bowl that puts a crust on the rice as it sits. I had forgotten to specify I wanted my egg "raw" which in Asia means with a runny yolk and cooked white; e.g., sunnyside-up. I was happy to see that's the default at Bowl'd, although next time I might ask for two eggs instead – it's a big bowl of rice!

I chose the spicy pork this time, which is a modest heat of about 4-4.5 on our chile scale of 1 to 10. I don't care for Bowl'd's idea of pork belly, which seems to be just slices of pork butt, not real pork belly.

We miss Seoul House's ban chan, but Bowl'd has stepped up to a solid second place. It's our preferred Korean restaurant.

Two people, lunch: one starter, two main dish bowls, with tip was $49.

Bowl'd BBQ Korean in Oakland, CA  - update, lunch
Review date: March 2014
(previous review appended below)

Carlos suggested we return to Bowl'd for lunch. Although the owners' Copan fusion idea didn't last long, we're hopeful that their Bowl'd BBQ replacement does well with locals. The food is a better quality than the usual Oakland Korean restaurants, which have lately been falling into "the more sugar the better" trap. 

On our first visit in February 2013 we tried just a few items: the fried oysters in egg batter, the seafood tofu soup, and the beef dol sot bibimbop (rice bowl). We liked everything, and found the banchan acceptable although a couple of them were a bit sweet. But overall we enjoyed that first meal and so took this opportunity to try more of the menu.

Carlos decided to try the seafood pancake this time, along with an order of pot stickers. For his entrée he chose the oyster tofu soup. My choices were the KFC, the battered/glazed chicken wings that are the Asian equivalent of Buffalo Wings, and the Jap Chae, the clear yam noodle stir-fried with vegetables and beef.

The seafood pancake came with that great super-hot chile sauce I liked the first time. It has absolutely no sugar and the chile wallop is straightforward. The pancake had a little too many green onions, but there was a good amount of seafood in it. Carlos is fonder of this dish than I am, but I liked Bowl'd's version a lot. The pot stickers were a mediocre ground beef/vegetable paste mixture; I've never had a good dumpling in any Korean restaurant. Their fillings always seem very bland and tasteless to me, but Carlos was happy with these.

The KFC we divided on again. I honestly did not like Bowl'd's version of this dish. I couldn't even finish one wing, which might be a record for me. I love chicken wings, I love fried chicken, and I'm fine with a sweet chili sauce. But these were fried too hard and doused with way too much rice vinegar for my taste. The heat level was great, but I couldn't get past the vinegar smell and taste.

Oddly, Carlos is usually the anti-vinegar one, but he was fine with these wings. So we brought them home and he ate them for lunch. 

We were very happy with the banchan. There was a noticeable decrease in the sugar: the squash, for example, tasted like squash this time, and not like a cube of dessert, which is what it was like on our first visit. At least half the banchan had various levels of chile heat using hardly any sweetening, and the variety of the spicy dishes was excellent. There was a spicy garlicky fresh daikon, a medium-firm tofu, along with thin-sliced loofah gourd, pressed tofu skin, and tangy kim chi. The non-spicy banchan were reasonably good although most were very plain.

Our entrées were excellent. His oyster tofu soup had great flavor and was full of custard tofu. My jap chae was also done well, with no excess liquid (I hate watery stir-fries!) and lots of sliced or shredded vegetables. 

When the young waiter came by to ask if we wanted anything else, I complimented him on the decrease in sugar from our earlier visits. He replied that other customers had also complained about the sweetness, and the waitstaff had been telling the kitchen to cut back on the sugar.

Carlos and I were pleased to hear this, and if Bowl'd will keep this up, we'll be regulars here. We love hot food, but we don't like it with an overdose of sugar. That reduction in sweetness drops our chile tolerance down to medium-hot instead of hot, but in return there's a better interplay of flavors, with a clean taste we find more satisfying.

Two people, lunch: three starters, two entrée bowls, with tip was $53.

Bowl'd BBQ (formerly Copan; Copan review is attached)
4869 Telegraph Avenue @48^th St., Oakland, CA
http://bowldbbq.com/  
Review date: February 2014

We visited Copan in December 2013, which had an interesting Korean fusion menu under former Momofuku chef Eddie Jew (or Joo, depending on which article you're reading). We liked our meal and appreciated the higher quality ingredients.

But Jew and Copan's owners broke up quickly, and Jew went back to Southern CA. The owners are second generation restaurateurs (their parents own Ohgane, which we have tried twice, the last being February 2013). The Copan owners also have Bowl'd in Albany, Spoon in Emeryville, and Mixed Grain in Walnut Creek. 

They decided to copy Bowl'd's menu, but add the DIY BBQ and stone grilling options that the Copan remodel had installed. My niece Suko and her husband Peter, who are Bowl'd fans, tried this new menu soon after it opened, and liked it. The more upscale fusion dishes have been dropped, and the menu is now Bowl'd's 'tried and true with updated touches', using those better-quality ingredients.

As we continue to empty out our refrigerator prior to our midweek Napa trip next week, Carlos and I decided to come by for lunch as we were out running errands. For a Saturday lunch it was fairly empty. But this is the Presidents Day weekend and with sufficient snow at last for skiing and snowboarding, the off-work crowds are noticeably less. The Temescal neighborhood remains an area still a bit rough around the edges, but fine in the daytime and with sufficient free parking anywhere off Telegraph itself.

Carlos and I are sadly predictable about our Korean food. He goes for seafood in various forms, and I go for the dolsot bibimbap, the heated up version of a rice bowl, served in a cast iron or heavy stoneware bowl. Although pork belly is featured in various forms at both dinner at lunch, if my bowl is any indication, this seems like sliced pork shoulder (sometimes called Boston Butt or shoulder blade) than true pork belly. 

There was hardly any fat, meaning the pork was dry and somewhat chewy in texture. It was sliced very thin so one didn't need a knife. But if you've been avoiding pork belly at Bowl'd because you don't like the usual fatty cut, rest assured that Bowl'd is serving a downright dietetic version. That, or they found some really skinny athletic pigs, LOL.

You always receive a decent assortment of vegetables in a bibimbap, not counting the banchan one can add in. Bowl'd uses a tasty mix of good-quality ingredients, including: sliced black mushroom, shredded pink ginger, sliced zucchini, chopped gourd stems, and shredded takuan (pickled daikon, or icicle radish), along with a fried egg and the meat of your choice. The pork belly was a modest amount, and the kitchen gave me by request their "hot" level on the spicy pork belly, which worked out to barely a 4/10. 

There's some sugar here, but a very moderate amount. They are also light on the salt, however, which can make it a bit flat with a bowl of rice.

Carlos started with the fried oysters, which use the egg batter. These were surprisingly good. We've been disappointed lately with the fried oysters we've tried, and although I'm not normally a fan of the egg batter technique, it works very nicely with pan-frying the small oysters. The edges were a bit crisp, and it was a little oily, but overall we were pleased and would order this again. It comes with the Japanese yuzu sauce and an unsweetened chile sauce that I shouldn't have let them take away, because my rice bowl could have used it.

He followed that with the seafood soft tofu soup. He loves this – he'd love it even more if I'd make it at home, which I refuse to do, growing less fond of seafood as I get older. The broth was very good, and the waitress broke the raw egg into it upon request. 

The banchan are very plain here. On the good side, they're low in salt and a lot lower in sugar than at Ohgane, which overuses the Domino's to a ridiculous degree. There's a couple of them we like very much with our rice, such as the tangy/hot/non-sugared napa cabbage kimchi and the saltier daikon kimchi. There's a zucchini with sweet gojuchang (Korean chile sauce), along with spinach in a miso-sesame sauce, wilted beansprout salad, curried potatoes, mayo potato salad, agar-agar, chawan-mushi (steamed egg custard, but unsweetened), and the wilted parsley with sugar and crumbled tofu. There's also plain broccoli florets and a much-too-sweet kabocha squash dice that could qualify as dessert.

The free soup with the rice bowls is zipped up with a weak miso paste addition and some kombu (seaweed). This makes it better than 99% of free Korean soups, which still isn't terribly good or interesting.

Overall we liked Bowl'd BBQ. They take a little extra care with quality, the service was so efficient it went slightly overboard, and they use a lot less sugar than their parents do. Carlos and I agreed it's not the Korean food of our dreams, but it's better than almost any of their peers. We'll be happy to return here.

Two people, lunch: one starter, two mains, with tip was $51.

***********
Copan, the new Korean eatery from the owners of Oghane, has changed its name Jan 2014, having lost its Momofuku chef Joo who went back to LA. It’s now called Bowl’d BBQ and will be debuting a more Asian barbecue–centric menu.
***********

Copan Korean
4869 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA
East Bay Express: scan of Copan dinner menu  
Review date: December 2013

There's a slew of Korean restaurants along Broadway Ave. in Oakland's Temescal. We've tried a number of them: Koryo (June 2011), Sahn Maru (May 2011), Casserole House (last review Nov 2013), Pyungchang Tofu (Aug 2012) and Seoul GomTang (March 2013). Outside the Temescal there's Ohgane (Feb 2013) and Koreana Kitchen (March 2012), Yuyu Za Zang (April 2012) as well as Korean Village/Pleasanton (May 2013).

None of these have taken the place in our hearts of Seoul House/Oakland, our long-gone fav. Pyungchang makes an excellent seafood tofu soup, Carlos' favorite Korean dish, but little else is remarkable there. Casserole House gave us a couple of good dishes but over three visits the cooking was too variable and uneven to recommend. Ohgane drowns everything in sugar, even the ban chan relishes. None of the others in Oakland have impressed us enough that we would go back to them. We liked Koreana, but it's a little far just for a quick bowl of soup.

Ohgane is the only one of these that has branched into multiple restaurants. The owners' children have taken up the culinary reins and opened Bowl'd/Albany, with a more refined concept aimed at a slightly more upscale market. Bowl'd has done so well that they subsequently opened Spoon/Emeryville, Mixed Grain/WCreek, and now Copan.

Copan is located almost precisely in the middle of the Temescal's retail area. This is the old Sura Korean location, the Sura owners have decided to retire. The ceilings were popped up, gallons of charcoal gray paint slathered on the upper walls and ceiling, and a more modern vibe of chartreuse yellow lower walls and sandstone-patterned tile flooring was installed. There are eight DIY charcoal/stone grilling tables around the two long walls, but most of the tables are non-grill wood tops, comfortably sized. 

There is a fair amount of Japanese influence at Copan. The chef, Eddie Chu, hails from NYC's Momofuku Ssam Bar. There's also a cultural shift occurring: many Japanese restaurants are being bought by Korean and Chinese restaurateurs, as the Nisei/Sansei owners retire from the scene.

The menu is abbreviated at lunchtime, but all the major categories are represented. Some early reviewers have criticized Copan for trying to be "all things to everyone" and thus have only a few items in each category. This is true, but as there's a fair number of dishes I don't care for in Korean cooking, it doesn't break my heart or Carlos' not to see them on the menu. Not being fans of Korean boiled meat soups or most of their dumplings, we wouldn't be ordering them even if they were available.

Carlos does like the Korean pancake appetizer, so he ordered the seafood version. It was the usual slightly greasy-but-good pancake; a bit thicker of a patty than one typically sees. I had one piece, and he finished off the rest. He judged it as above average; not the very best he's ever had, but better than most. Copan, like its sibs Bowl'd, Spoon'd, and Mixed Grain, try to make the proper trade-off of slightly higher prices with better quality ingredients, instead of trying to capture the bargain hunters.

I ordered a more fusion-style dish of pork belly and kimchi. Before anyone tries to point out that pork belly and kimchi are two mainstays in Korean cooking, I hasten to explain that the fusion element is in the style of the dish, not the ingredients. The pork belly is thin sliced, coated with rice flour, and deep-fried. The slices are arranged on a bed of kimchi. The kimchi is housemade, and it's far better than what we got at the parents' Ohgane restaurant. Ohgane's kimchi and gojuchang (red chile sauce) were heavy with as much sugar as there were chiles. Copan, however, made perfect kimchi just the way we like it: moderate heat, nice fermented tang (think: sauerkraut with a chile kick) and absolutely not a speck of sugar. 

I could have done without the drizzles of mayo and wilted shreds of green onion on top, but it did look pretty, arranged all together on the plate. I was able to shove most of that to one side. As it cooled, the pork tasted more heavily of oil, but that's typical of Korean cooking. Although the country absorbed many of their Japanese conquerors' dishes, they have never really mastered that lighter, more delicate touch in Korean fried foods. The Japanese learned deep-frying from the Portuguese, and alone in all Asia they know that a lighter hand with the batter is always better.

Carlos ordered (of course!) the seafood tofu soup, selecting spicy for the heat level. It was more to the moderate side, no more than a 4.75-5 on the scale of 10. They offer a choice of white or brown rice, but although the soup is very tasty by itself, the broth is just not strong enough to stand up to a bowl of rice. It's fine when eaten by itself, however. 

The gojuchang is excellent and the tofu was as fresh and soft as one could ask for. There's a modest amount of seafood and a nice clump of enoki mushrooms in the bowl. The waitress brings you a raw egg in the shell and cracks it into the soup, which is precisely what should be done but so seldom is. There was a little bit of sand from the local small clams but eaten by itself without the rice, Carlos was perfectly happy with this. It isn't as good as Pyungchang's version of this soup but Copan wins overall: their other dishes, unlike Pyungchang, are also very good.

I ordered the beef jap chae. There's two versions of this, one a vegetarian side dish version. I chose the main dish jap chae. Copan makes a very good version. Again, not the best ever, but with better quality ingredients and more care than their competitors (including their parents). 

No one seems to use the thicker glass noodles any longer (sob! my favorites) but these thin noodles are nicely handled. They're neither greasy nor soupy, and although there are both white onion shreds and green onion shreds in the stir-fry, neither is added to excess the way too many Korean cooks use them. There wasn't a lot of beef – and what there was, was tiny and only fair in quality – but there was a good amount of reconstituted dried black mushrooms, some finely shredded carrot and a few leaves of wilted baby spinach. 

What brings Copan's jap chae to the fore is that they keep the sugar to a minimum, and with the tangy kimchi it's a great combination. Jap chae is always sweet, as it's simply a version of teriyaki-sauced noodles. But over the years it's gotten to the point where it's like eating an Asian dessert kugel, which is not at all what it started out to be. Copan's version is nicely balanced. It's a little sweet, but not overly so.

It also helps that the ban chan are well balanced. There were nine dishes, and only two were sweet: bean curd skins and wilted parsley (surprisingly good with salt/sugar added). The others were:
•	small slices dry curried potato
•	small cubes fried tofu in gojuchang
•	yellow glass jelly
•	pickled icicle radish in gojuchang
•	sliced zucchini in gojuchang
•	small cubes plain orange-fleshed squash
•	kimchi

We're not sure if our two favorite ban chans, the firm egg custard (what the Japanese call chawan mushi) and the tiny chile-laced dried fish, will ever show up in what is an Americanized second-generation Korean restaurant. Certainly if you like spicy food, you will have to show up as a regular and insist upon extra-extra spicy. Nothing we ate needed to be cooled off by eating it with plain white rice. On a scale of 10 Copan is a wimpy 4.5 at most.

Still, although Copan didn't do anything that made us exclaim "This is the best ever!", what they did show us was an overall consistency in executing a variety of dishes. Nothing whacked us over the head by being over-salted or over-sugared, which we appreciated. 

Korean food is "good country cooking". It isn't a sophisticated or particularly exciting cuisine. But this is a time when Chinese food has fallen so far it can't even see the basement when it looks upward with a telescope. Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese seem to be competing to determine who can dump the most sugar into any one dish. So finding a satisfying Asian meal that's a little bit sweet, a little bit hot, a little bit tangy, a little bit salty, but nothing too greasy, is enough to make it worthwhile for us to get in the car and search for a parking spot.

Just by taking a touch more care in execution and using ingredients that aren't bottom-of-the-barrel cheap, Copan won our attention. By keeping the sugar down, they won our respect. We both agreed it's worth visiting again to explore more of the menu. 

Two people, lunch: two starters, two mains, with tip was $53.