Victor Sack wrote:
> A quest into the gustatory heart of Seoul
>
> By Matt Gross
>
> International Herald Tribune
>
> SEOUL: Sometime after midnight on a Sunday, the streets of the
> Myeongdong neighborhood in Seoul were quiet and cold. The young shoppers
> who flit from Adidas to Tommy Hilfiger to Club Monaco had gone home to
> study for December exams, and restaurant workers were setting barrels
> full of leftovers onto the curb to be picked up by early-morning garbage
> trucks. The city was going to sleep.
>
> But over near the subway station, in a little orange tent, or
> pojangmacha, a good night's rest was on no one's mind, least of all
> mine. Inside, a semipermanent kitchen was working overtime, cranking out
> hearty, salty, spicy dishes to warm the air and fill the bellies of the
> drinkers around plastic tables.
>
> On every table stood bottles, tall ones for beer and petite emerald ones
> for soju, the Korean spirit made from sweet potatoes.
>
> Suddenly, from one corner of the tent came a crash! Bodies and bottles
> tumbled to the ground, and for a moment all conversation halted. One
> fallen tippler pulled himself back onto his stool, and a grim-faced
> waitress rushed over to wipe the blood from his head and bandage the
> wound. Then it was back to normal. I sipped my beer and plunged my spoon
> into a bowl of kimchi jigae, a rich stew of pork, tofu and kimchi, the
> pickled cabbage that is Korea's national dish. I had been in Seoul 30
> minutes, with plans to eat my way through the city, and already, I felt,
> I was getting to the heart of things.
>
> In the last two years, South Korea has spawned one major trend overseas
> - Pinkberry, Red Mango and other cheery frozen yogurt parlors - and at
> least one minor one: the fried chicken joint Bon Chon Chicken, which
> arrived in Manhattan last year to much acclaim. Meanwhile, Momofuku's
> David Chang has rocketed to the top of best-chef lists, thanks in part
> to his clever reinterpretation of traditional Korean dishes and
> ingredients.
>
> To understand where these trends were coming from - and, I hoped, to
> discover the next ones - I spent a week eating the weird and the wild,
> the tasty and the comforting, and, more than once, the sublime. Oh, I
> also ate lots and lots of kimchi.
>
> (If you don't like kimchi, you might as well stop here. Everything comes
> with kimchi: spicy or mild, salty or sour, crisp or soft, with mineral
> notes or the briny aroma of dried shrimp. The variations are endless,
> but all have one thing in common: ubiquity.)
>
> Let's begin with the familiar: barbecue. There is perhaps no food more
> accessible, in any culture, than meat grilled over an open flame, and in
> Seoul you can't walk down a street, whether in the über-trendy Apgujeong
> neighborhood or a grayer district like Dongdaemun, without inhaling the
> invigorating fumes of charcoal fires.
>
> When four friends and I arrived at Hongik Sootbul Kalbi, a barbecue spot
> in the frantic dining-and-nightlife zone near Hongik University ("Meat
> Street," one friend called it), the first thing our waitress did was
> hand over a huge garbage bag - for our coats, to protect them from the
> smoke.
>
> And boy was there smoke! It wafted up from dozens of small, round metal
> barbecue tables, turning the air so opaque I could barely make out the
> enormous wall mural featuring caricatures of Korean celebrities - and
> Michael Jackson. We clustered around a table, and soon the house
> specialty arrived: chunks of well-marbled pork neck. The meat came
> pargrilled, to cook faster, and my friends spread kimchi around the base
> of the grill, where it slowly fried in the rendered pork fat.
>
> Soon we were wrapping pork chunks in red-leaf lettuce leaves - along
> with spicy bean paste, shaved scallions and kkaennip, an anise-flavored
> leaf, similar to Japanese shiso, that I found addictive.
>
> Sariwon, a calm, family-friendly restaurant, employs special extractors
> on its grills to keep the air perfectly clear. And yet high technology
> does not trump high taste: Sariwon's kalbi, or beef short ribs, were the
> most tender and succulent I ate in Seoul. Better yet, Sariwon offered a
> lengthy wine list that mixed New and Old World bottles, and at
> reasonable prices.
>
> The best place for serious pairings of food and wine might be the Gaon,
> the city's most refined Korean restaurant.
>
> The menu consisted of Korean classics, gussied up with premium
> ingredients and presented on stunning custom ceramics. The Gaon's kimchi
> jigae put the pojangmacha version to shame. The flavor was so pure and
> intense, the crimson broth so creamy, it reminded me of tomato soup
> (albeit one whose depths hid rich nuggets of pig's feet).
>
> For revolutionary food, one must hit the streets. At a stand in busy
> Myeongdong, I tried the tornado potato, a single spud carved into a
> helix of starch, then skewered, deep-fried and sprinkled with salt and
> powdered cheese - an Iron Chef-worthy innovation.
>
> Just down the road was Balena, a storefront that whips up spaghetti with
> spicy chicken and steak-studded xpenne, and crams them into ice cream
> cones, to be eaten on the run with a fork.
>
> The strangest thing I ate, however, was far from newfangled. It was at
> Noryangjin, a cavernous marketplace that stocks stingrays, squids,
> oysters, snails, crabs and a host of scaly, slimy organisms that I had
> no name for.
>
> But at Jinnam, one of several restaurants on the market's second floor,
> I knew the name of my lunch: sannakji. Commonly referred to as live
> octopus, sannakji isn't really alive, but the raw tentacles writhing on
> the platter might lead you to think otherwise. Rather, it's just some
> lingering electrochemical reaction that causes those thin strands to
> curl, stretch and attach their suction cups to your lips and gums as you
> try to ingest them. Rumor has it that people occasionally choke to death
> on sannakji, but a quick dip in sesame oil keeps the suckers from
> adhering too tightly.
>
> The most surprising thing about sannakji? It tasted good - clean and
> meaty - and once I'd gotten over the discombobulation that comes from
> eating something that most definitely does not want to be eaten, I was
> chopsticking tentacles into my mouth as if they were octo-popcorn.
>
> More commonly, I ate at restaurants like New Andong Zzimdak, which
> serves a single dish: boneless chicken pieces sautéed at your table with
> mung-bean noodles, vegetables, and gochujang, a red-pepper paste that is
> to Korean cuisine what butter is to French. This is easy food, slightly
> spicy, with an unexpected sweetness from caramelized gochujang. Like
> most Korean food, it comes in massive quantities and is meant to be
> eaten by large groups of friends (mine included Joe McPherson, who blogs
> about food at ZenKimchi.com), who pour one another beer and soju and
> snip the long noodles with scissors.
>
> Promiscuous eaters should wander around Kwangchang Market. Kimchi stalls
> offer samples of myriad chili-flecked varieties, including one of
> kkaennip, the shiso-like leaf that was part of almost every meal,
> wrapped around grilled meat or embedded in silver-dollar-size pajun.
>
> For me, herbaceous, anise-y kkaennip came to symbolize authentic Korean
> flavor, and when I'd returned to New York, I asked for some at Kunjip,
> my favorite restaurant in Koreatown. The waitress looked at me oddly,
> then shook her head. Then she smiled and ran to the kitchen, returning
> with a "special kimchi" of crisp, juicy baby daikon.
>
> "Kkaennip" was a shibboleth, a password into the world of heretofore
> unknown herbs and nameless crustaceans, of kimchi fried in pork fat, of
> hours-long meals with newfound friends - of all the gustatory pleasures
> of Seoul.

I LOVE Korean food. Thanks for posting this, Victor.

--
Jean B.