It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Korean bulgogi. We make bulgogi short ribs on the grill during the summer, we eat the shit out of some bulgogi burritos any time we’re visiting my brother in Austin, TX, and if it’s on a menu somewhere, I usually order it. So when we decided to order takeout from North Point Chopsticks in Glenview this weekend, I knew I had to try it.
And just a note, you should never judge takeout by how it looks… that picture up there makes it look like just a pile of hot garbage, but it didn’t taste like it…
North Point Chopsticks – Glenview
North Point Chopsticks is located off of Waukegan Road in Glenview, just south of Willow road. It’s an Asian restaurant that reminds me a lot of Joy Yee’s… especially with the sheer amount of items on their menu. I just assumed they were using random numbers for their menu items when I saw it get into the thousands, but it turns out they actually have over 1000 items on their menu. But that is a little misleading since all of their various bubble tea are listed out individually… and they have tons of them.
With so many items on the menu, I thought for sure I was going to have a terrible time choosing something, and most likely ending up with something I didn’t like, but the Popular section on Grub Hub is your friend. Instead of spending forever combing through all of the menu items, the Korean Beef (Bulgogi) over Rice, was right there, begging me to put it in my mouth. There was no need to keep reading, I knew what I was going to order. And even with my weird dietary restrictions these days, I didn’t care, I was putting bulgogi all up in my mouth hole that night. Hell, I’m pretty sure the Taco Bell I just ate for lunch didn’t conform to the low FODMAP diet either, but oh well… so far so good.
So we ended up ordering the food for delivery, not takeout, as there were a lot of us there and nobody really felt like leaving to go pick up the food. We used Grub Hub, as we normally do, and were presented with an estimated time of 60-70 minutes. This is actually pretty typical for Grub Hub so it wasn’t that big of a deal, and usually it doesn’t take that long.
Fast forward to about an hour later and the doorbell rings. It’s someone from the actual restaurant, not Grub Hub, delivering just our bubble tea drinks, but no food… Apparently the Grub Hub guy came by to grab the food and bring it over to us and the restaurant forgot to give them our drinks so they drove them over themselves.
The thing is, Grub Hub picked up the food, then the restaurant realized they forgot the drinks, so they jumped in their car and drove it over… but they beat the food to the house. So that was super weird… Not sure where the Grub Hub driver went; maybe he had another drop-off before coming to the house for us, but it was a little odd that the drinks showed up separately, before the food.
No worries though, about 5 minutes later the Grub Hub delivery driver rolled up with our food and we were good to go… or so I thought.
Bulgogi Korean Beef over Rice
Immediately after taking the food out of the bag I knew there was going to be a problem. My wife kind of gave me a look and said ‘uh, oh’…
In addition to my delicious, delicious bulgogi beef sitting on top of a bed of fluffy white rice, was almost an entire onion, chopped up and mixed in with the beef… shit.
If you’ve read any of my recent posts on here, you know that I’ve working with the low FODMAP diet in order to figure out some digestive issues, which have been very successful, but what I’ve discovered is that I can’t tolerate onions most of the time. So to open up my food, that I was actually looking forward to, and finding it covered in onions, was a shock right to the stomach… It sucked, but I was determined to still eat it. It was a risk though, cause I knew we had plans the next day to go try and go down to the Shedd Aquarium for the day, and my wife would not be too happy if my stomach flared up and we had to cancel… but it was a risk I was willing to take for bulgogi, so I began the daunting task of trying to remove all of the onions that were mixed in with the beef.
It took a while, and I’m sure I didn’t get them all, but I managed to remove what looked like almost an entire cut up onion from the bulgogi so I could eat it. Now if you follow a low FODMAP diet, then you know that just removing the onions still leaves you susceptible to issues since the onions were most likely absorbed by the food they were cooked with, so this was still a risk. But I pressed on and ate pretty much all of the beef, and most of the rice. I would have ate all the rice (since it also tasted like sweet, sweet bulgogi), but there were just too much onion mixed in that I didn’t want to take the time to try and remove it.
Even with the massive amounts of onion, the bulgogi was absolutely delicious and I’m glad I took the time to surgically remove the onions from the dish. It definitely reminded me of the bulgogi short rib we had in Chinatown a few weeks ago, but just a slightly less quality cut of beef. But that didn’t matter, it was delicious.
It was so good in fact, that we’ll definitely be ordering from North Point Chopsticks again, but from now on I’m always going to ask for no onions, even if the menu doesn’t say anything about onions…. Yep, that’s right, the menu said absolutely nothing about onions, it only mentioned bulgogi beef over rice… Obviously, had it said onions, I would have asked for it without them, but since it did not, I didn’t think there would be any, but clearly I was wrong. So from now on I’m taking a play from my brother in-law’s book, and always putting ‘no onions’ in the notes on GrubHub when I order something new, even if the menu itself makes no mention of onions in the dish. It’s probably the best way to ensure that no onions end up in the dish and I don’t have to spend 30 minutes picking them out.
So overall if you’re looking for a great place to order Asian takeout or delivery from, and you live in the Glenview area, I would highly suggest taking a look at the North Point Chopsticks menu. Again, it’s a huge menu, but don’t get overwhelmed, just go with the bulgogi beef if you can’t decide. But if you don’t like onions, or can’t eat them,
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