Even if you don’t like kimchi, you can find plenty of Korean foods to tempt your palate. I am not a fan of kimchi, a spicy “relish” usually made out of cabbage or other greens, but I discovered I just love most Korean food.
Our daughter Kate was our culinary guide in Korea. She speaks Korean and just spent 18 months there serving as an LDS missionary. Three weeks after her return, we flew back to Korea together.
In Korea, food means love, Kate explained. If someone loves you, they feed you. They feed you a lot. If you are eating at someone’s home, it is bad manners to stop eating before the food is done. Even if you are full, you finish. Hopefully your friends will pitch in and help! In a restaurant, finish the main dish but it is ok if you don’t finish the side dishes. I felt like I would pop at one home we dined in; Frank and Kate stopped eating so I felt responsible for the rest of the meat. Not hungry the next morning.
Time for a culinary tour of Korea! Our first stop was Seoul, where we were introduced to
‘toast.” The line for toast is usually long in the morning. Toast is not just bread and butter, it is more like a fancy grilled cheese sandwich. On my first one, I actually had hash brown & cheese. Kate got ham and cheese. The steaming hot sandwich smelled amazing and the tasted even better.
Kate introduced us to Korean BBQ our first night in Korea. We almost couldn’t find the place the concierge suggested, but thanks to Kate’s language skills, we found it tucked away on a side street. Expensive, ($17 for 100g of meat), and we
had to cook it ourselves on the round grill in the middle of the table. Wow, a little sticker shock there. Samgyeopsal was delicious, and they serve all kinds of little sides with it. Greens and kimchi, of course.
Where there is a festival, there is food. At the cherry blossom festival in Jinhae (a 2 to 3-hour high speed train ride from Seoul), the festival was in full swing. Fire-eaters, food tents and hundreds of thousands of cherry blossoms! We had our first tornado potato there—Kate’s favorite street food. We ate it so fast I didn’t get a picture of it! Basically it is a fried spiralized potato and dipped in sugar. Mmm.
That night we had Korean pizza. The sauce and crust are different, but good.
Our third city, Busan, (the ‘b’ is pronounced like a ‘p’) was Kate’s first area on her mission. We stayed in a residential section of town where we mainly saw Koreans. They openly stared at us. There, I discovered haddeok, my favorite street food. It is a pancake stuffed with caramelized brown sugar and other spices, then pan-fried to perfection. When I smelled them on a chilly Busan night, I pointed to it and said “I want one of THOSE!” They’re served in a little paper cup, and really should come with a wet wipe, because of the gooey-ness factor.
Lunch with Korean friends in Busan was an event. We were ushered up to a room on the 2nd floor of the restaurant, where the server started bringing steaming dishes of deliciousness. Bugogi (marinated pork), glass noodles, tempura veggies, seaweed soup, kimchi, other spicy side dishes, radishes and greens galore. What a treat! We sat on the floor on cushions, traditional-style. Even though we ate and ate, we weren’t overly full at the end of the meal, because dining is a long process. Easily 1 to 2 hours for a traditional meal. Once our meal was done, the table was literally covered with little bowls.
