Urban Belly is a cozy pan-Asian fusion restaurant located on California Ave in Chicago, IL, and they have been praised left and right by local food critics including TimeOut Magazine. Now normally, I tend to find the reviews in TimeOut very helpful – though they are generally too nice to every restaurant in town, the articles helps me find restaurants that I would never have discovered on my own. In the case of Urban Belly, however, I was disappointed to the point of wondering whether the reviewers had been paid off.

So the rave about this place is that it serves fusion-style ramen and fancy appetizers like lamb and brandy dumplings. It also helps that the chef, Bill Kim, used to be a chef at one of those high-class, fancy-food-only restaurants that I could not care less about. TimeOut will tell you that he was some sort of a saint for abandoning that cushy position to bring his awesome cooking “to the masses,” and to a degree, this is true. Entrees average at about $10, and appetizers, considering the ingredients, are also on the cheap side. To an average American, this would be a great way to have some “genuine (in the loosest sense of the word)” ramen.

It’s genuine because the noodles are pretty close to what you would get at Japanese ramen bars, but I think any Asian would agree that their dishes are just plain overpriced, if not blasphemous. Their pork belly ramen does sport a great piece of pork belly, but it sits in a pho-like broth (not quite pho), and a lot of their ramen puts kimchi into that faux-pho (ugh) broth. All this does for me is to muddle up the flavor profiles and remind me of what Koreans would give to their dogs by combining everything on the table. It’s unique for sure – you could not get such a hodgepodge anywhere else, and I can see people wanting it from time to time. But any more than 10 bucks is way too much to pay for it, when you can get the real thing at Japanese grocery stores all over Chicago for around 7. The perpetual shortage of seating is also not worth it.

To be fair, the dishes are well thought-out and I must praise the chef for managing to make their ramen not taste like garbage. If I want pho, I’d go get pho. If I want Kimchi stew, I’d make it at home. And if I wanted ramen, there are definitely better places to go. But if I wanted to be able to mix all those in my mouth as if I were a sink drain, then Urban Belly is the way to go.

And with the success of Urban Belly, the chefs opened another joint in Humboldt Park called Belly Shack, with the same mix-it-all philosophy but a different direction – sandwiches. It was recommended to me a few days ago, and upon finding out that it’s heralded by the same chefs, I decided to check it out this weekend. And I must say, the food there is much better than Urban Belly. I had the Korean BBQ Kogi sammies and the Togarashi fries (special), and I was blown away – by the latter, mostly. The sammies are nothing special, and again, overpriced. I was served a quartered pita bread with Kimchi and Bulgogi doused in what they called the “ssam” sauce, though it was quite far from actually ssam sauce. All the fillings tasted great in the pita, but the whole time I could not help but think “I could make this at home for $3″. What made all this worse is that my mother had the same exact idea 10 years ago – “What if we opened a sandwich shop? We could put bulgogi and kimchi on bread!” Terrible idea not to act on, ma. The fries, however, were amazing, probably because I love Japanese food so much. The mayo-based dipping sauce seemed to have enough dashi in it to put the entire Madison Square Garden to sleep (yes that’s an MSG joke…sorry) and the Togarashi introduced a whole lot of umami to the potatoes. In fact, it was exactly the same recipe as that of classic Korean chips called Korebop, which makes it a lot less impressive. The food here was worth going back to once in a while, but I really wish they would stop charging out their asses. Moral of the story? If you’re Asian be ready to be open-minded and to lower your standards, because the only surprise you’ll get is that everyone else is surprised by this food.