The Critics Ate Rotisserie Chicken and Bibimbap This Week

The Boston Globe’s Nestor Ramos visits Rachel Klein’s RFK Kitchen in Needham for his latest review. The menu “delivers the kind of sturdy fare you’d expect at a good neighborhood place, while offering enough ambition and invention to become something more,” he writes. The salads and appetizers stand out, including the squash soup with tasso ham and the Boston bibb salad with a “plate-licking-good” dressing. The restaurant’s patented rotisserie chicken is “moist and flavorful, with perfectly golden skin,” Ramos writes, the golden cioppino is handled deftly, and the main courses are “sturdy.” Dessert hits home with comforting options, Ramos writes, recommending the cream puffs and the “Just Like Mom’s Cookies.”

The Globe’s Catherine Smart stops in at K Restaurant in Peabody for some hearty Korean dishes. There are classics like ddukbokki (springy rice cakes), Korean barbecue, and gun-mandu, or dumplings with a crispy skin. Smart writes that it’s “tempting to eat a whole order of 10,” but recommends the half portion alongside dolsot bibimbap, which comes with steamed rice and a topping of veggies, tofu, or meat, plus a fried egg. The kimchi stew “eats like a warm hug,” and the LA galbee (barbecue short ribs) “is hard to stop eating.” For Smart, the restaurant embodies “family, food, and warm fuzzies, plus hard work.”

• If You Lived Here, You’d Be Eating Now [BG]
• Cozy Peabody Restaurant Aims to Be Bibimbap Ambassador [BG]