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05/08/12 - Revel in Fremont

We have been big fans of Joule and its fusion Korean cooking for a while now, so we decided to check out Joule's sister restaurant Revel. We went for lunch, but the dinner menu is the same or at least similar. It offers much simpler food than its sophisticated sister, but in the same vein, Korean fusion comfort food. This means wonderful noodles with oxtail ragout and even more wonderful dumplings stuffed with beef short ribs or, for vegetarians, cauliflower, chick peas and yogurt. The latter are curried and reminded us of wonderful samosas.

There are also the amazing savory pancakes. Think excellent egg foo yung, not iHop. We tried two, one with pork belly and kim chi, and an even more spectacular one with asparagus, feta cheese, almonds and kalamatas olives. The pork belly was just wonderful, but in the Korean fusion tradition. The later pancake was Korean-Mediteranean and would not have been out of place in a Greek fusion restaurant. The cheese and olives came through nicely and set off the seasonal asparagus.

403 N 36th St., Seattle, WA 98103 206.547.2040
We only tried one of the salads. We had to balance all the other dishes a bit with some greenery, so we ordered the salad of argula with thin slices of corned lamb. The arugula was great, and the corned lamb was wonderfully spicy. It was a great combination.

To be honest, we liked every dish we tried at Revel. Interestingly, our two favorites were the Greek - we'll call it that - pancake and the samosa, which combined ingredients and spicings from two widely varied cuisines with Korean techniques, and married them perfectly. We'll have to keep our eyes open and see what the folks at Revel come up with next. Until then, we'll be coming back for neo-traditional comfort food.

We should note that the restaurant is a bit noisy with a lot of hard reflective services, and it fills up for lunch and probably for dinner. We were able to converse once they turned down the music a bit, but this could be a problem for some. Despite this, we plan on coming back for our next fix.

Revel, poorly photographed

Keywords: seattle, restaurants