The Grossly Biased Guide to the Berkshires

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.