Public Displays of Cooking

A note: it has been a long hiatus and Fiji totally got the short shrift in this blog, but perhaps I’ll try to do a retro one for it if I grab some time, because Fiji really, really, really WAS amazing.

There is so much to love about South Korea, but I have to say that one of my favorites has been the food. I’d had bibimbap before and, since I liked it, never really branched out. Turns out I was missing SO much. CS is not always the most adventurous eater, but even he has explored a wide variety of new foods here (and he’s really digging the meat. One thing that strikes me about the food here, though, is all the cooking. In the night market in Myeongdong (above), vendors whipped up exciting portable bites right in front of you. In the local markets there were food aisles where stall after stall served up Korean favorites and were seemingly organized by genre (the noodle/dumpling soup area, the tteok-bokki (spicy rice cakes…sooooo good) area, etc.), all of them cooked right before your eyes.

But then there are also all the other food experiences where YOU are the cook. We have been to a whole variety of restaurants where raw ingredients are brought to the table, something hot is lit (a conduction stove, a gas grill, a charcoal fire), and you just sort of cook your dinner while glancing around at the other tables trying to figure out if you’re doing it even a little bit right. Our first foray with meal prep was bossam, a pork belly dish. The meat actually came cooked (phew) but it arrived on a platter with a whole bunch of other ingredients and I had to Google what to do (you grab a lettuce leaf and fill it with meat and sauces and vegetables, wrap it up, and then just shove the whole thing in your mouth…or at least that’s what the internet said).

Next came whole chicken soup, which, as far as I could gather, wasn’t really soup but a kind of hot pot. In the middle of the table was a conduction stove and they brought out a pot with chicken chunks (all on the bone, but, like, not in what felt like a logical way). Then you just started adding stuff (rice cakes, potatoes, noodles). A video beside us showed a guy ladling broth over his chicken so I did that as I looked around but then I just sort of put the noodles in. Then I started pulling them out and serving them to CS and the guy came back and was like, “Nope, too early,” and I put them all back in. Then there was some next level chopsticking where I tried to eat chicken off of random bones. Though we were lost much of the time, it was still very good.

The next night, we decided to try out Korean barbecue. Thankfully, the proprietor took pity on us in this instance and just sort of cooked everything for us after we picked out our cuts of meat. It was amazing and after she walked away, I took a turn at turning the onions so that I felt I had participated.

Next up, after we left Seoul for Gyeongju, we tried a different kind of barbecue with beef and scallops in a slightly fancier venue and it was all cooked in front of us with nary a suggestion that we even try. CS gave the beef a big thumbs but has determined that scallops are pretty meh. These scallops were, indeed, pretty meh, but the cooking was fancy! (And the meal came with beef tartare, which I pretty much adored).

Our most recent foray into public cooking was by far the most challenging and bewildering, though. CS said he wanted meat for dinner last night and we saw signs on this restaurant showing all manner of raw beef and so I thought, “Hey, that’s meat!” As we attempted to climb the stairs to the restaurant, we were beckoned into the building across the narrow alley: the butcher shop. I gathered that we were supposed to pick our raw meats there at the butcher and then carry them over to the restaurant ourselves. As we started mulling, large groups of Koreans start arriving and happily choosing their cuts and so, afraid to miss out, we quickly grabbed two and three comically large mushrooms and carried them next door. A table was already set for us with the characteristic small dishes that accompany many Korean meals and a man pointed at one of our plates of raw beef and said we should start with that one and put in in this sauce for 5 minutes (I assumed before cooking, but, man, who knows). He then left us to fend for ourselves for the rest of the meal. In the middle of our table were hot, glowing coals and a vacuum hose hanging over the top to suck up all the smoke from the grilled meet. On the table were also tongs and scissors. I glanced around me several times and watched Korean men grilling meat for their families, cutting the seared beef with scissors to make more bit size pieces so I just started copying them. Calum Saints informed me that my first several were burnt (they were not…they were seriously amazing), but I got better as time went on, though I never fully worked out what to do with my giant mushrooms (I just cut them with the scissors too and burnt them on the coals…we didn’t finish those).