Best Restaurants: Ha Ahn
In an AsiaTown strip mall, this family-run Korean restaurant offers homestyle dishes and sushi.
Ha Ahn, a Korean spot that also serves sushi, is a family affair: Jungsoon Cho cooks the homestyle Korean dishes, while her husband Doohwan makes the sushi. Their daughter, Hana, is the head server.
“Our place is more personable than other Korean restaurants,” Hana says. “A lot of family and friends come in here.”
Each meal starts with a half-dozen complimentary banchan — traditional Korean small plates that include house-made kimchi, bean sprouts and wonderfully chewy, fermented fish cakes.
When it’s time to order, you can’t go wrong. Start with the seafood pancake ($12.95), a huge, pan-fried savory cake rich with squid, mussels and clams, and the soondubu jiggae, a soft tofu soup ($11.95) that jiggles with silken tofu and your choice of pork or seafood in a luscious red broth.
From there, try the tteok-bokki ($10.99), a thick stew of rice cakes and fish cakes served in a spicy house-made gochujang sauce with a hardboiled egg.
No meal would be complete without galbi ($18.95), flank-cut marinated short ribs served on a sizzling cast-iron platter, each bite both sweet and deeply savory.
“It’s a mom-and-pop shop,” says Hana. “This is what [my parents] were dreaming of doing, with my mom being such a great cook. It’s a dream come true for them.” 3030 Superior Ave. E, Cleveland, 216-664-1152
Click here for the full list of 25 Best Restaurants.
Click here for the full list of 2019 Silver Spoon Award Winners, as selected by the Cleveland Magazine readers.
