Neighborhood Gems: Juk, corn dogs & bingsoo at Siroo & Juk Story and 2 Hands!

Welcome to our NEIGHBORHOOD GEMS series featuring emblematic meals from around the world. This series shines a light on local restaurants and is designed to bring together inquisitive foodies and dishes that are unique and oh so worth a trip on roads less traveled!

Join us for a culinary adventure as we head to Siroo & Juk and 2 Hands (Anandale) to try a variety of traditional Korean porridges, corn dogs and shaved ice desserts.

Juk is the Korean term for a type of thick rice porridge or congee, similar to risotto but much softer and easier to digest. It's a staple comfort food in Korea. Juk can be made with various ingredients like abalone, chicken, eggs, or pumpkin, and is known for its soothing and restorative properties. Korean juk is deeply embedded culturally as "food for healing," where it is traditionally prepared and served to comfort, similar to how chicken noodle soup functions in Western cultures. Juk is not just a comfort food but also a symbol of care, and its medicinal qualities are so revered that the bright red patjuk (red bean porridge) was historically believed to banish evil spirits, especially during the winter solstice.

Bingsu (or bingsoo) is a popular Korean dessert made from finely shaved ice, or flavored milk ice, topped with various sweet ingredients like condensed milk, red bean paste, fresh fruit, mochi (rice cakes), and ice cream. The base of bingsu is often a fluffy, snow-like pile of shaved ice, sometimes with a milky or flavored ice base, that is then covered with sweet toppings to create a refreshing and customizable dessert. Bingsu originated in the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), when royal court officials enjoyed finely shaved ice with sweet toppings like fruit and honey, making it an ancient royal treat before becoming popular with the public and evolving with new flavors and textures over time.

Korean corn dogs are a deep-fried street food made with a skewer of a sausage, cheese, or both, coated in a thick, yeasted batter, and rolled in a crunchy topping like panko breadcrumbs or diced potatoes before being deep-fried. Unlike American corn dogs, the batter for Korean versions is typically a sweet, chewy dough, not cornmeal. After frying, they are often finished with a sprinkle of sugar, creating a popular snack known for its sweet and savory combination of flavors and diverse, crispy textures.

From The Washington Post (Siroo & Juk Story):

Known by many as Siroo — and only Siroo — this Annandale shop takes its name from the earthenware pot used to steam rice flour into a loose dough, which in turn is machined and manipulated into a wide variety of Korean rice cakes called tteok. It should come as no surprise, then, that Siroo is known for its dizzying array of tteok, including baram tteok, these hollow half-moons of dough filled with sweetened red bean paste, a thick and waxy treat that suggests chewiness is a pleasure all its own.

But Siroo is not just a Korean bakery. It also has an alter ego borrowed from the home country: Owners Sung Lee and Serena Kim are franchisees of Juk Story, a multinational chain that specializes in the Korean porridge known as juk. Lee and Kim are, at present, the only franchisees in the United States.

Juk has become, like Chinese congee, a meal in itself, available any time of day. The options at Juk Story in Annandale run the gamut from plain rice to spicy bulgogi octopus, each served in bowls large enough to double as conical rice hats.

All the juk recipes here come straight from the mother ship back in Korea, which suggests the bowls have passed countless taste tests, proving their worth not only across Korea but also across borders into other Asian countries.

The porridge at Juk Story conformed to a general rule followed by juk junkies: A pair of chopsticks, when poked into the porridge, should stand up straight. My spicy bulgogi octopus juk was a fulsome bowl, thick and combustible, its flavors complex enough to hold my attention all the way until the end. The chicken cheese juk, by contrast, was a hearty mixture of shredded breast meat, broccoli and cheese, but it had all the refinement of a jalapeño popper.

Siroo and Juk Story is a complex organism, not easy to explain in the context of a short review. It’s a counter-service shop where you can order anything off the electronic menus overhead, regardless of the concept, or purchase rice cakes, kimchi or any other item available on the shelves and tables that divide the space into an indoor maze.

But the operation also has a split personality. Its juk bowls are conceived far, far away. Yet its rice-cake snacks are made in-house, under the direction of Serena Kim, who developed the recipes. Its cupcakes and macarons — playful specimens that frequently push the boundary of sweetness — are the creations of pastry chef Hyun Ok Han. Its bingsoo, the popular Korean shaved-ice dessert, rely on a machine that grates the blocks of milk, water and sugar into the kind of fine powder that Colorado ski resorts would kill for.

Whenever I visited the strip-center shop, I always spotted couples, or a pack of teenage girls, huddled over one of Siroo’s gorgeous handmade tables (they’re like glass-covered shadow boxes filled with dried flowers or ornamental hand fans), sharing a mountainous portion of shaved ice. Some treated the dessert as a shared intimacy. Others treated it as a colorful monument to indulgence, the perfect object to generate desire and jealousy on Instagram. Personally, I couldn’t get over the powdery texture of the green-tea bingsoo, a treat that melts to something more watery than creamy.

Some of my favorite dishes had nothing to do with rice cakes or juk. The khaki-green seaweed kalguksu, or noodle soup, punched above its weight, its broth as briny and sweet as Prince Edward Island mussels. I was also delighted with the banchan serving of kimchi that accompanied every order of juk: It pulled no punches, putting the fire and funk right in your face.

But the dish that I hanker for, above all, is Siroo’s tteokbokki, a generous plate of rice-cake tubes slathered in a housemade sauce that uses gochujang, the incendiary Korean chili paste, as its base. These tiny cylinders are chewy. They’re spicy. They’re even a little sweet. They’re further evidence of Siroo’s genius with rice cakes.

NoVa Magazine (Two Hands Seoul Fresh Corn Dogs):

The Korean corn dog is more substantial than an American one, but also infinitely more creative. Even the basic one, called the Seoul Classic Dog at Two Hands, is more than just batter and sausage. Instead, it’s a meaty beef frank surrounded in a comparatively fluffy corn coating that’s rolled in sugar. Essentially, it’s a cruller with a juicy hot dog in the middle.

But Two Hands doesn’t limit itself to mere sausage. The six different dogs can all be made with either a hot dog, stretchy mozzarella cheese, a combination thereof, split mozzarella and cheddar, or a rice cake at its center. The result? Near-infinite options. I personally favor the half-mozzarella-half-hot dog combo and chose that filling for my two additional corn dogs.

Those were the Spicy Dog and the Potato Dog. The Spicy Dog is legitimately hot with a coating of what the menu calls “Nashville style spicy seasoning,” but which I found suspiciously similar to the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos powder on my Dirty Fries. The Dirty Fries are actually tots covered in the mashed up Cheetos and Two Hands’ prolific Dirty Sauce, a spicy mayo concoction. The Dirty Sauce is also squiggled on the Potato Dog, my favorite of the three for its crispy, airy cubes of potato sunken into the jacket of batter.

Check out the Siroo & Juk Story menu here
Check out the Two Hands menu here

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If you are unable to join us in September, we hope you'll stay interested and join us for a meal in the future. Looking forward to catching up with you for a feast at Siroo & Juk Story / Two Hands (Anandale)!