Chung’s Rainbow Korean Restaurant could use a visit from Doraemon

A few years ago, my friend Carol Ann traveled to South Korea to spend a couple of weeks visiting a friend. She came back loaded down with trinkets and souvenirs and couldn’t stop raving about the food: “It was very fresh, lots of vegetables and thinly sliced grilled beef served with lots of interesting and spicy condiments.”

I can’t remember what she gave me from her stash of Korean booty, but I can tell you what it wasn’t: Doraemon, the Japanese manga character from the future (22nd century), which is disappointing because I’ve developed an affection for it since dining at Chung’s Rainbow Korean Restaurant in Overland Park.

Each of the tables in this tiny restaurant boasts a yellow-plastic Doraemon tray and two clear-plastic Doraemon dispensers — one filled with white vinegar, the other with soy sauce. On the night I took Bob and Nadia to dine at Chung’s, Bob picked up the yellow-plastic tray to read about Doraemon and informed me that Doreamon and I share the same birthday! The difference, of course, is that the “catlike robot” (according to the tray) is from the year 2112 but frequently travels back in time. For all I know, Doraemon was in the restaurant that very night.

“Maybe Doraemon is in disguise and sitting with the ‘Sex and the City of Seoul’ girls over at that table over there,” whispered Nadia. She nodded toward a trio of stylishly dressed Korean-American women sharing a bowl of gan ja jang. One of them was wearing a Carrie Bradshaw-ish pair of silver Manolo Blahnik pumps. “But they might be really good knockoffs,” Nadia noted.

That was the first compliment Nadia had given to anything at Chung’s since we’d walked in the front door. OK, it’s not a pretty dining room. The walls are painted concrete blocks, the floors are inexpensive white tile, and the whole place is lit by industrial-quality fluorescent lights. “It looks like a bathroom,” Nadia said with a grimace.

It has always been an unattractive venue. Over the last decade, I can think of a half-dozen restaurants, including a Chinese restaurant and a Russian bistro, that have come and gone in this strange, L-shaped space. Chung’s Rainbow Korean Restaurant may be the most appealing, if only because of the childlike enthusiasm that has gone into the rest of the décor: Featured dishes have been photographed, cut out and pasted onto colored paper with hand-scrawled names, then framed and hung in various spots around the dining room. There’s something both endearing and frightening about that. Compared with Overland Park’s two other Korean restaurants — Choga, which is literally across the street, and Chosun Korean BBQ at 126th Street and Metcalf — Chung’s comes off as dowdy and a little depressing.

If the food had been comparable to its rivals, the ambience at Chung’s really wouldn’t have mattered. I don’t pretend to be an expert of this distinctive Asian cuisine, but from the standpoint of taste, visual appeal and service, Chung’s Rainbow doesn’t come close to Choga. A friend of mine — a huge fan of Chung’s — vehemently disagrees. “Chung’s is like a small-town, mom-and-pop restaurant. It’s comfort food!”

I wish I could have found more comfort in the fried dumplings filled with minced pork in a chewy won-ton wrapper, but they just weren’t that good. Much better were the steamed dumplings served on a sheath of cabbage in a bamboo steamer basket. And I learned my lesson about this restaurant’s seafood version of hae-mool pah-jun, the traditional Korean fried-pancake delicacy made with a thick flour batter, chopped carrots, onions and squash: The menu neglected to mention that this savory flapjack not only is made with shrimp but also is chock-full of squid (which Nadia tirelessly picked out) and some pallid-looking mussels. The all-vegetable variation, yah chae jun, was much tastier.

Our server, a high-school student, was attentive but needed to be reminded to bring plates for sharing the starters and to hunt down more paper napkins. And he was just as confused about parts of the menu as I was. But he dashed around the room, doing a pretty impressive job juggling the needs of all the customers in the joint.

Bob is a fan of bulgogi, a sautéed beef and rice dish, and Nadia chose the other popular dish from the Korean repertoire, bibimbap. I’ve seen several incarnations of the latter dish but none quite like Chung’s, which was essentially a steel bowl heaped with a leafy salad topped with a dollop of grilled beef and the biggest fried egg I’ve seen outside of a Looney Tunes cartoon.

Because it was a hot night, I liked the sound of the bibim naeng myun: cold noodles topped with a spicy chili paste. As promised, the dark-brown noodles really were ice-cold. In fact, they were still covered with crushed ice. The bland chili paste, meanwhile, lacked the requisite contrasting heat.

As we walked back to the car that night, Bob made a final observation. “Did you notice that all the music played on the sound system was Korean disco music? I’m sure one of the songs was ‘Funky Town.’ “

I knew I’d have to go back with Carol Ann, who was eager to sample Korean fare again. Like Nadia, she found the aesthetic quality of the restaurant lacking. “It’s charmless,” she said. “I hope the food is good.”

Happily, she loved her soo jae bee soup, with its thick, flat and supple homemade noodles in a fragrant broth filled with squash, carrots and onion. She also nibbled on the spicier condiments brought out before the meal, including half-moons of marinated neon-yellow radishes, fiery kimchi and peppery cubes of fermented daikon.

I had mixed feelings about my kan poon tofu, a pile of crispy deep-fried tofu cubes and fried sticks of chewy rice cake smothered in a sweet soy-based sauce. It wasn’t a very exciting dish, but I got through by concentrating on the alternating bites of crunchy tofu and red-hot kimchi.

Meanwhile, we watched our lanky teenage server deliver, with great aplomb, an ice-cream sundae covered with fresh kiwi and other sliced fruits to a family seated at the center table. He never mentioned dessert to us, which was probably just as well. After two meals at Chung’s Rainbow, I wasn’t expecting a pot of culinary gold. Maybe Doraemon will come back from the 22nd century to help.

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