Tofu House

Cuisine Korean
Price $$ (16-30)
Rating 5/10
Last Visit Dec. 24, 2019
Location Other: Reno
General Notes

Tofu House is a pretty nice Korean restaurant situated in the southern part of Reno. The menu and offerings are more or less what you would expect from a traditional Korean restaurant in America. I generally enjoyed my experience here, but many of the dishes were a bit bland for my taste. All in all, pretty decent, but most of the items could be slightly improved in one way or another. Perhaps they were just badly understaffed that day (the servers were rushing around like crazy).

Positives

> The staff is super friendly and really on top of things. I came here on Christmas Eve, and it was espcially busy (there were a ton of people like myself who had just finished skiing). Service was kind and prompt.
> The menu itself looks excellent. In particular, I'd love to try the Korean Fried Chicken (aside from some Korean tapas restaurants and restaurants that specialize in Korean Fried Chicken, I rarely see this on menus) and Seafood Pancake.

Negatives

> Some of the dishes are relatively bland. In particular, we ordered two stone pot rice dishes, and I strongly dislike it when it comes without any sauce or seasoning. I ended up adding lots of gochujang, soy sauce, and a bit of salt, but it still didn't quite match up in terms of flavor with a lot of other stone pot rice dishes I've had in the past.

Dishes Tasted
  • ★★☆☆ Bulgogi BBQ -- 12oz marinated beef with mushroom, scallion, onion, zucchini, carrot on a hot iron plate. Decent flavor (slightly too sweet for my taste but otherwise good), although the beef could stand to be a bit more tender. Perhaps this was due to the fact that there was a bit too much sauce and it ended up boiling the beef a bit afterwards?
  • ★★★☆ Potsticker -- 8 pieces of dumplings stuffed with pork and vegetables. Fried nicely and tastes great.
  • ★★☆☆ Ddeokbokki -- Rice cake, fish cake, potstickers, boiled egg, ramen noodles, onion, and cabbage in sweet chili sauce. About average; not particularly good nor bad. The rice cakes were not quite as chewy as I would have liked. The flavor is decent but seems to be missing some kind of umami punch. Note that although this falls under "appetizers", it's actually a pretty big dish.
  • ★☆☆☆ Seafood Stone Pot Rice -- Assorted seafood, various vegetables, Korean glass noodle, white rice. Pretty bland due to a complete lack of seasoning and sauce - I unfortunately wasn't able to recreate the amazing flavor profile that I've had at many other restaurants. Kind of a shame, because I typically really like stone pot rice dishes. There was also a ton of shittake mushrooms, which I really didn't like (not only for the flavor, but texturally it simply doesn't pair well with seafood).