I used to be a big fan of the Oja Noodle House (689 Yonge Street). It reminded me of the cheap “snack bars” in Korea, and indeed, it is always full of Korean kids in the evening, in to get a quick bite before studying at one of the many English Institutes in the area.

I used to sniff at the Spring Rolls next door. Who would ever want Pan-Asian Fusion Food when they could get the real deal, for less, dirty tables included?

And I’ve brought many a hungry ex-expat there to dine for $6, I tell you that.

And as I’ve mentioned before, the jja jjang myun is some of the best in the city.
But after Sunday, no more. No more ever again.

I don’t know what they are thinking, but they’ve changed their recipe to an inedible mess. I nearly had tears in my eyes, it was so bloody awful. Don’t they have any Koreans back there in the kitchen? I’ve never had jja jjang myun screwed up so badly.

And I will never again.

Farewell, Oja. You will be missed.

Kokuryo restaurant in Toronto (649 Yonge St.) now has Makkoli. Photographic proof:

I stopped in last night, but the place was too packed and there were no tables available. I’ll investigate further and report back what I find, perhaps as part of a larger exposé on the burgeoning mini-Koreatown growing at Yonge and Isabella.

I love Pho 88 (map). In this pho-mad city, no pho is more delicious, no service speedier, no portion bigger. So when they closed down for renovations I had a difficult time. I tried a few others, but they weren’t the same.

2 weeks ago I stopped by again and it was open. Gone are the shitty low-rent Asian tables and chairs. Gone are the friendly but brisk waitstaff. Gone is the Asian un-décor. As the new waiter put it: “It was all a bit ghetto.”

It’s black and stone and teak and ultra-stylish. I couldn’t believe I was still in Chinatown. The wait staff are all young and good-looking and speak english very well. They’re still pretty fast. It’s still full of Vietnamese, and now a lot more “foreigners.” Apparently the ownership changed, and my guess is that the crackdown on the Dragon City food court and it’s health problems prompted them to redo the place and step up their game.

It no longer has that authentic roadside low-rent Vietnamese feel to it any more, but the food is still great, it’s still dirt cheap, and it has an authentic downtown L.A. Asian chic feel to it now.

Take your friends, they’ll think you’re cool.

Mongdoori is a new site, kind of a bloggy message board jobsite operation that you need to be invited to. It’s an interesting idea, but maybe too elitist for its own good.

They’ve scraped some wacky racist cartoons from the notorious http://cafe.naver.com/englishspectrum.cafe which I can’t seem to access either. I’m not too sure what all the secrecy is about but if you want to see what cartoonists who hate foreigners are up to, check out parts one and two.

Dig the big noses!

Note to prospective English teachers: yes, racists exist in Korea. Just like your home country.

Found somewhere on the internet:

You don’t hear the phrase “Soviet Korea” very often. I’m not sure it’s entirely accurate. But the picture is kind of funny, so who’s going to split hairs?

Personally I hate obfuscated URLs, ones like http://www.restohof.com/comments.php?job_id=25450. There is evidence that Google hates them too, and will give you a crap pagerank if the URL is too weird. At the very least, it’s better to have some nice keywords in there instead of “job_id.”

How to fix them?

One way is to dip into the arcane world of .htaccess files and mod_rewrite. I see you’re falling asleep already.

But wait!

You could hire someone to do it for you, or you could use this tool I found. it will write all the rules you need, you just plunk them into your .htaccess file and rejig your links, and your URLs will be nice and purty. Which is exactly what I’ve been tinkering wround with for the last 2 days.

Stay tuned for pretty links at Restohof.com, coming soon!

Good jja jjang myun has always been a problem in Toronto. Quite frankly, local purveyors of the black bean paste noodles should be ashamed of themselves (with the notable exception of Oja).

I’m happy to report that the Reign of Terror has ended with the opening of Corean Chilli in Koreatown (Google Map). I happened to stumble upon it yesterday afternoon, just barely open with workmen still finishing the storefront, and it was well packed with Korean students and hipsters stuffing their faces. Always a good sign.

The noodles are great. Someone took their time on these. The sauce is very good. Easily the best in the city. The price is right. $6.50 with a 2-for-1 deal going until the end of the month.

Sorry, no pictures, but I’m definitely going down again, so see you there.

As you might remember, we used Creamaid to help launch the main Restohof site. How did it go? you might be asking.

When I signed up for it, I imagined that I would entice ESL teachers in Korea with blogs to write about Restohof, to check it out, and give it a review, good or bad.

That was my first mistake.

So working with US$100, I figured to make it worthwhile for an ESL teacher I would pay them $10 per post. Not great money when privates go for US$40 an hour or more, but maybe enough to attract some bored ESL bloggers who wanted to help me out.

After posting the offer, I was immediately plunged into an underworld I didn’t know existed, that of the self-employed paid blogger. These people are out to make money from their blogs and monitor Creamaid and others for new postings, and are very quick on the draw.

Before I started I wondered if anyone would write. But after setting it up, within minutes I had 8 submissions.

These were not the people I expected. They were not ESL teachers, for one.

My second mistake was to make my “mission statement” way too clever:

Restohof.com has launched!

We’re not saying all school directors in Korea are crooked, but uh, some of them are. Ok, a lot of them.

At the same time, some great, smaller schools have a hard time getting noticed in the din that is the ESL teaching industry in Korea.

And pity the poor teacher in the West, trying to find a job from half a world away. Who to trust?

Restohof.com grabs jobs from popular ESL job boards and lets the ESL community rate them for veracity, duplicity, and tomfoolery.

The older generation assists the new, and thus the cycle closes only to begin again shortly thereafter.

Help us get the word out.

Seeing how a great many of the self-employed bloggers are not native speakers of english, some of them didn’t know what to make of this. I should have written this much more clearly, telling the bloggers what I expected them to do. Namely, write about my site. And link to it.

There are some Americans who are self-employed bloggers, but the majority appear to be Asian teenagers. China. The Philippines. Singapore.

So now, the game changed. Instead of expecting to get links and traffic from ESL teaching bloggers and their readers, I was looking to get links from these one-step-above spam blogs to improve my Google ranking.

To this end I installed the Google toolbar and checked each submission to see what kind of pagerank they had.

Now, if you don’t know much about pagerank here’s what you need to know: it’s one of the tools Google uses to determine how good your site is and how high it should feature in Google searches. Pagerank is a number between 1 and 10 and the higher it is the better. A new site starts at 1. Getting it up to 2 or 3 can be a real battle. But if a site with a higher pagerank links to you, it increases yours a bit. So I was hoping I could catch some of the fire of my blogging buddies.

Most of these bloggers are used to getting $1 or $2 or maybe $5 per post, not the astronomical $10 I was paying. So they flooded me with submissions and it was hard to keep up. And truth be told, some of them could barely write English. The Creamaid interface is good, and the boys say they are improving it, but in my case the rejection notification was not varied enough. I was given a few different choices as to why I was rejecting a post, and the author of the post never saw my notice. They couldn’t figure out why they didn’t get $10.

It would have been nice if I could tell them: you spelled the name of my site wrong, and didn’t even link to it. But I couldn’t.

Also, the system only allowed me 10 posts in the system (my $100 divided by $10 payments) which was a hassle. Some submissions I wanted to keep in case nothing better came up. But the system cut me off at 10, so anyone wanting to submit after that point was denied.

Keeping a lineup of 20 or even 30 would have been better.
So how did it work out? Well, I got more than 10 posts linking to me (even the rejects linked to me). And my blogging friends taught me a few tricks.

If I had to do it all over again, I would have made the mission statement clearer, and I would have offered $5 per post, and I would have paid everyone.

My pagerank? Still 1. But there are other reasons for that. Fodder for a whole other post.

It’s taken a while, but we’ve got the discussion boards out of development and have released them to the public.

“So what?” you say. “Another message board.”

Yeah, I guess you’re right. But this one is another experiment in so-called “loser-generated content,” using the same rating engine that drives the rest of Restohof.

This means that you can classify threads as truth or tripe, and the best ones will rise to the home page, and the worst will be relegated to their own special page. The goal is to create a user-modified discussion board that is driven by the community at large.

Want to see the best? Go here. Prefer to dwell in the sludge? Go here.
Don’t like something? Set it as tripe. Something good in there? Truth, baby, truth!

The old way is to whine about it, and maybe sic the moderators on an offensive post or poster. The old way is to request a “sticky.” The old way is to hope that the moderators will listen to you. Forget about all that, now you can be in charge. The site is yours.
Even better, what you write and how often you write is linked to your profile. Do well, and your votes carry more weight. Don’t do so well, and your word counts for a bit less.
We had a lot of fun discussing it, testing it, and making it.

Hope you enjoy using it.

Have fun!

Dano was great! Although the absence of makkoli was missed by many, including myself. I suppose the community has grown up and the festival gone legit, which I should respect, but having some rice wine on the grass, listening to the singing contest for hours, was great, too.

And I wasn’t the only one to notice that attendance seemed to be down this year.

But I loved it, and will definitely go back next year.

See you then!