
Manna House, 205 Main, Greenfield MA
The restaurant only seats fifteen. From Greenfield’s main street it looks twice as big as it is, but a closer inspection reveals that only one of the two windowed storefronts is actually seating. (The other one is the restaurant’s small kitchen, which connects with the seating area through a curtain.)We ate rice cakes (white sticks of pounded rice, the size and shape of hearts of palm but with a glutinous rice consistency) drenched in bright red-orange sweet-spicy sauce. And a scallion pancake with squid in it, which was enormous, light and crisp, somehow not-oily despite being a round fried thing the size of a large dinner plate. And dumplings, little flat half-moons both chewy and crispy. And job chae, glass noodles adorned with pickled onions and long stripes of thin sweet potato, atop a bed of rice. And two kinds of kim chee: mild and crispy bean sprouts, and cabbage that had the unmistakeable sparkly fermented taste of a pickle that’s homemade.
We barely talked at all through dinner, too busy making ecstatic noises. Ethan told our waiter — also one of the two proprietors; his mother was through the curtain, cooking for us — that the rice stick was as good as any he’s had in Korea.
Manna House has a beautiful huge picture window, above the small dining counter, and as we ate we watched twilight fall over Greenfield. The place is small and spare: no liquor license, not even a bathroom (at least, not as far as we could tell.) But it’s clean and sweet and the food is phenomenal. I’m already jonesing to return.

1 response so far ↓
1 Courtney // Sep 19, 2008 at 3:09 pm
Could you tell the owners to please please please open a branch in the southwestern Berkshires? I live in Sandisfield- and about 500 of our 762 residents are dying for some Korean food. I know a bunch of people with separate Kimchi fridges. If they build it, we will eat there!
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