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Korean Food: Fan-diddly-tastic9th June 2007 Korea is far and away the best place I have ever been to in terms of food. As I amble I around Incheon I pass locals selling their deep-fried wares at street stalls, and restaurant after restaurant selling all sorts of local delicacies: Everything from fern stalks, to chestnuts to live octopus still wiggling on your plate. Shabu-shabu is a fantastic dish, best enjoyed communally with friends. Super thin strips of beef are shoveled into a broth-like brew that is kept bubbling by an under the table gas-burner. Everyone fishes out their own beef-strip after a couple of minutes or so. Super tender beef strips infused with broth taste good enough to make a vegan switch. The process is repeated with noodles. The waitress then takes the wok to one side where she coats its side with a sweet rice mixture that soaks up the remnants of the broth. This secondary rice dish serves as desert. Then
there is the seafood. A coal-heated grill is placed at the center
of your table and shellfish after shellfish is slow grilled on top.
Onces the juices of the shellfish start to flow, the juice
is tipped into a spicy tomato brew that bubbles away on the top of the
grill. You can either soak the shellfish meat in the brew for a
while, or have it as is. The waiters constantly hover to ensure
everything is running smoothly and crack, pour and dip the seafood as appropriate.There is also the very traditional restaurants where you sit on the floor. "Traditional Dining" seems to imply "More dishes than you can imagine." Judy - one of the local Korean teachers - order us a meal at one of these restaurants. Plate after plate of food seemed to forever arriving. Dishes like: Grilled Mushrooms, lightly sauted fern stalks, spicy squid, cinnamon drinks, rice water, grilled garlic, super tended beef wrapped in leaves, kim-chi (spicy cabbage), chewable wood (kinda lice licorice), sherbet candy, dried apricots... the list just goes on and on! I was not sure what many of the other dishes were. I only knew that they were delicious. My usual run-of-the-day meals is either Bee-Bim-Bap: a mixture of vegetables, rice, a fried egg and hot sauce. Or Kim-bap: Vegetables and rice wrapped in seaweed - very similar to Japanese sushi. The Western chains artery cloggers are here too: McDonalds, Pizza Hut and KFC. I'd like to say that I turn my ample nose up at them, but they were a place of refugee to begin with. When you're faced with a city where you don't even know the alphabet, one tends to be drawn towards to the familiar. Nothing says familiar to me like a Big Mac. I'm miss the Philippines and Africa. But they both get blown away by Korea in terms of food.
(c)
2005, 2006 and 2007 Malcolm Trevena. |
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