Peter Green

Thanks, Doddie! I wonder if the Korean stores in Vancouver will have those? Our kids have always loved squid, in all its shapes and forms.

March 22 – What's in a name? An afternoon’s start, again. By the time the days baseball game was done, we were already feeling rather peckish, so we called up the usual suspects and arranged to meet a few blocks away down Horyongno, to the west of Nambu where we were sojourning. Strangely, not having lived to excess the night before, we were having haejangguk – hangover soup. The place itself (as you can tell from the sign) is specializing in ttang and guk. And that, of course, got me onto my latest quandary. What’s the difference between a ttang and a guk? Both of them describe a soup. When I called around just now to some of my references, I drew the following response. “They’re very different, except when they’re the same.” To be fair, the first response was “a ttang should be all about the broth. You would have boiled down bones for a very long time to get the right consistency to the fluid. A guk could be something that you just throw water into and bring it to a boil.” But then, consider kamjattang, the headline item here. We were having haejangguk, but really, outside of the potato (kamja) there wasn’t much difference. Likewise, the sundae guk we’d had the other day had had just as much care put into the broth as any ttang. I think the differences lie more in the words. “Ttang” (and someone correct me if I’m wrong) is a Chinese reading, whereas “guk” is a very Korean word. Same same but different. I can work with that. Our “soup” was a very pretty thing, a broth to die for, and, coincidentally enough, big red hunks of ham from the legs floating around in there. I say coincidentally, as I’d just been expressing my longing for ham in a different post the other day. Life’s like that. Notice that they’re doing “healthy rice” here. They’d added in pad (the red beans used in the sweet filling in mochi – boiled down with lots of sugar) for colour and a bit of a different flavour. That raised another question: what’s the Korean word for mochi? Calling around and waking people up, I came up with chapsalddeok, but was cautioned that that could refer to a lot of different things. Chapsal is really just glutinous rice, so, when pushed for a definitive answer, I was told “chapsal mochi”. So, I’m right back almost where I started from. For drinks, we were back to the frog Good old Jinro soju. Chamiseul – “real dew”. I wrote a lot last time about soju, and the culture surrounding it, so I’ll leave that for you guys to go back and review. And then there’s beer. Just the thing to use to wash down soju. Cass, who’s motto is “sound of vitality”. Funny, I thought those were just beer burps. Around this time, with the bowls close to done, the rice almost finished, and the happy late afternoon buzz coming on, that Jason realized that he’d seen this place before. It’s an interesting phenomenon. Cinema induced déjà vu in your dining. In Korea there’s food everywhere, and that includes in the films. So odds are, sooner or later you’ll be eating in someplace you’ve never been to before that’s oddly familiar. It’s either that, or a flaw in the matrix. Cheers.

March 21 – Eating With The Bosses I first came across Star Chef through Zenkimchi's excellent blog. And then I read up on it as well on equally impressive FatManSeoul journal. Both of these are outstanding sites for details on Korea, not just on the food, but also on the culture and the life, which is what really adds flavour when you’re overseas. (These two are just the tip of the iceberg, of course. There's a wealth of material out there on Korea, in both English and Hangul, but I'll leave that to your own investigations.) (There’s a question! Are there any North Korean food blogs? I can see the entries now “March 20: hungry……March 21: hungry again…”) These two journals cross pollinate quite a bit, as both share the same passion for food and Korean culture, and everyone gets along well. It’s a big city, but a small one at the same time. So, when Joe (Zenkimchi himself) told me he, EunJeong (his chief of research and attitude), two of his other colleagues, and FatMan would be hitting up Chef Kim’s Star Chef….. Well, you know where this is going. Joe met us at the Maebong station, across from the derelict Bennigan’s, and walked us back down the same golmok we’d been in just a few days earlier for pork neck. (Use that as a direction marker. If you get to the happy porcine family waiting to be consumed on your right, you’ve gone too far). I’d walked right by the place the other day. It just goes to show that, no matter how much you try to take in everything in s strange town, things are going to get by you. We were without reservations , but we just managed to crowd into the front table by the window. The rest of the modern, clean space was either packed out already with diners, or flagged with little reserved tags. Clustered about the table, the seven of us started working over the menu. Fusion is a fair term for the food. Nothing wrong with that. The dishes are a mix of Korean, Chinese, and European influences. The names are fanciful enough, which makes sense when I learn that Joe-Zen (that has a nice, Southern ring to it) was responsible for the English menu. He had a lot of fun with this. While we were working through the menu, a starter dish of brocolli with fried garlic came out to the table. There was a lot of garlic in the air with this dish, which is just fine in Korea. A very simple thing, but it works well. I was slow on the camera, and only just managed to get a shot in before Scud snagged the last piece(s). It’s good to have children. You always have someone to blame. Our first plate – a bulgalbi and grilled mushroom salad - was a bit of fusion, albeit mostly in the presentation. The flavours were strongly Korean, with the roasted ribs giving up that carnivore spirit, and the mushrooms, lightly grilled, with that smell of the forest. Toss in some more garlic on top, and the greens, rather than being wrapped about the meat, are now just in the toss. Good, solid Korean meat flavours, but with a presentation that could work well at a more Western setting. I could do this. Salads, in my opinion, are always good things. That is, as long as they have large amounts of meat in them. The second arrival at the table was the octopus salad. This came with a Mediterranean tone - rather than Korean - with oil, olives, balsamic, and artichoke hearts in there. The octopus itself was soft, easy on the teeth with that Greek marinade that I remember from days in Kitsilano as a youth. The two salads make a nice contrast. The oiliness of the octopus, with its heritage from the West, and the cleaner, meatier flavours of the Korean meat salad. To start, they complement each other well. We’d been drinking beer, quite a bit of it, as everyone was in that midst of shared bliss where good food is involved. Hence my typically horrid shot of the Million Won Samgyeopsal Jjim (steamed pork belly) was too blurry for publishing. This was accompanied with overfermented sour kimchi ( let’s get the right olfactory element here, shall we?). This was a thick dish, the pork finished in a thick gravy, and really called out for rice to lengthen the sauce and set off the tang in the old kimchi. But rice just fills you up. Obviously, with beer and food, we were talking. A lot. Our discussion centered, as expat conversation often does, on where to find things. Empenadas, for instance, can be found at Carib, in Itaewon. And a certain amount of discussion involved the recent shooting of Andrew Zimmern’s Korea episode, which Joe had done the foot work for. (I found the seafood segment with Star Chef's Kim HuNam on Youtube if you're interested) The Delicate Clam Soup lived up to its name. Fresh greens, small mushrooms, and clams, their mouths agape beneath a Sargasso Sea of green onions. The broth was extremely soft, but highlighted with peppercorn. This is one of those times when you just concentrate on the fluid. Korean clam broths have a certain something about them that can make you forget the traffic and the yelling and all the other noise of modern Seoul, and just take you to a quiet place. Uh!?....Where was I? Sorry, food coma hit me. I had to try the ramen. Big, fresh mussels, and noodles that didn’t come from a Shin Ramen packet. Some not-so aged kimchi to keep me honest. Again, the broth on this was really worked up, with a deep, rich flavour. I was so overcome with happiness with this that I even allowed Scud to share some. We talked more of food in Seoul, what there was and where to find it. I really needed a makeoli jib soon, listening in on everyone’s favourites. Fatman had one that sounded excellent. After a tea tasting, Fatman had been dragged by the tea shop owner to the neighborhood jib over near Anduk. Three types of makeoli. How can you go wrong. Food shooting is pretty well accepted here. Koreans seem to be surgically attached to their huge Canons, and are shooting just about everything. Some places have become a little ticked off, as they’re getting people coming into their restaurants, taking pictures, and then leaving without eating. That does seem to be pushing it. But if you’re a custome, they’re pretty accommodating. There’s one okonomiyaki place that doesn’t allow pictures, but that was the only one the collective crowd could think of. The “Amazing Fish” came out, a whole mullet, deep fried and crispy, then hit with a sauce and fresh greens. This was a very Chinese dish in presentation and in flavour. Well executed, and the mullet (it’s not just a hair style) is a pleasant fish. I like fresh herbs (coriander here) tossed onto my fish at the end. It lightens everything. FatMan describes the sauce as “Japanese crack sauce” – mirin, ginger, soy and citrus. And the fresh coriander snaps me awake. This is Korea, and there’s fresh coriander! Yoonhi didn’t know what coriander (or cilantro) was until well after she’d left Korea (and left Canada for that matter). Jason and I had been discussing this earlier, the lack of certain items – herbs particularly – in Korea. You can buy dried stuff (thank you, Costco), but fresh herbs and vegetables are either part of the culture, or you just don’t get them. It seems strange, as you drive outside of town and see miles and miles of greenhouses, but Korea is very much about “going with the mob”. Chef Kim, however, has addressed this in part by having (I’m told) his own farm (or at least his family having a farm). This allows him to self-source, and have more control over the ingredients he has available. After the fish, the tangsooyuk came out, the traditional sweet and sour (the meat being beef). This is a staple of any Korean Chinese meal. The battering was very good, staying crisp even with the sauce. Very nicely done, although we were filling up by this point. The Orgasm Sausages (thanks to Joe for that name) had just fallen off the list of what we could manage to eat. But, when the table next to us had an order delivered to their table, the smell drew us in, and they were kind enough to tolerate our muscling in and shooting their food. We weren’t quite crass enough to eat any off of their plate, but it was a close run thing. Okay, you get enough foodies in one place, and things can turn ugly. But everyone was laughing, so that’s a good sign. FatMan talked about the North of Seoul, particularly the area stretching up from the palaces into the hills. I’d driven through it before, finding to our surprise that a lot of the roads had been opened up – the area around the Blue House had long been restricted access. As with Star Chef, there were funky, modern places opening up in that district that used to house Seoul University. But we’ll talk later about the sea change coming to the Korean food scene. Talk revolved back to the subject of non-Korean eats. It doesn’t get talked about much, but Korea is the number one destination for migrant labourers at this time. Plummeting birth rates over the last few decades, and continued expansion of industry has quietly led to a shift in the “face” of Korea, although it’s not an aspect that the casual tourist (and I’m pretty casual) comes across. There are places popping up, generally at the ends of the rail lines, where the masses of Southeastern and Central Asian workers are living and eating. If you go looking you can find Filipino Sunday markets, Thai eateries, mainland Chinese, Uzbek kebab joints, and plenty of Turks. That’s at the working level. There’s also a small Francophone part of town, the Japanese enclave is over at Icheon (the neighborhood, just on the other side of the river), and you’ll find bits of Canada spread all over (true to our national culture, it’s mainly bars). And speaking of Canadian culture, we (at least all of us round eyes) were looking forward to cheese. How can you not be excited by congealed mammary fluids? The Koreans do eat cheese, kind of. It’s a question of whether or not you include “processed cheese foods” as cheese. Velveeta is a staple in budaechiggae, and I’ve found it to work well in ramen (with tuna fish) as well. It fattens out the broth. (And me, as well) Here Chef Kim does a nice plate of cheeses, the soft white cheese coming from his own kitchen. And the serving is generous, quite a bit more than you’d find in many of the other places in town. Service had been excellent, I must say. As FatMan said, “Table side service. Cute waitresses, hunky waiters….what’s not to like?” And the head waiter stood out. He kept an eye on the tables, handled the smoking issues discretely when they arose, and made certain that all of the customers were happy. It was obvious that he’d been trained well somewhere. And then, of course, there’s the main attraction. Chef Kim – Kim HuNam – had been hard at work in his kitchen during this time, only able to escape for a quick hello earlier. As things quieted down later in the evening, he stopped by to chat and I asked a few questions on his background. He’s been cooking for over twenty years, starting back in 1983 when he was 15 years old. He did a long stint at the Silla Hotel, and then, in 2004 went to the States, and worked in New England for a couple of years. That not only helped with the language skills, but gave him important cross training in Western methods and outlook. Back to Korea a couple of years ago, and he opened Star Chef. And he’s been packing them in since. Myself, I consider this an important marker. When I was talking with Mr. Young at Seoul’s Cordon Bleu a couple of years ago, much of our concern had centered about the need for Korea to “reinvent itself”. Tradition in Korea permeates everything, and if foreign cuisine was to gain a respectable foothold, then something drastic needed to happen to open up the taste buds of the nation. Something drastic has been happening, though, in the form of the youth that are returning from their study years in Canada and elsewhere. They’ve developed a taste for different things, and some of them, like Chef Kim, have gone that extra step and have made the decision to be part of the change. Don’t get me wrong. Korea, as I said, is a land of traditions, and things are going to continue as they have been. But there’s a point now where something different has the chance to survive - and, possibly, thrive - on the side. And, hey, something is clicking, as Chef Kim has done well enough to already retire his bank note on this place. Me? I could eat here again. I probably will.

When are we not in a binge-eating, salty-sweet kind of food craving?

Wait a minute. . .where the heck are you eating now? I thought you had left Korea and were now eating your way through England or China or somewhere like that (ya, those are really similar countries. . . ). ← At this time I am happily in the comfort of my home, beans and oxtail slowly cooking in the crockpot while I try to get my mind around where I've been and what I've eaten those last two months. I never do well with real time. Next - Eating with the bosses Slowly, I'll catch up to real-time.

Okay, Sandra and Peter just came back from the sundaeguk joint, and asked on my behalf about the seeds: "it is a mixture of perillia leaf seeds and pepper and dried shrimp." There, sooner or later we'll dig out the answers.

Does anyone have a picture of the packaging on those peanut butter squid things? I can have some carted back.

Are we becoming too paranoid about things? What happened to the community? There are plenty of times when people in the restaurant business are just happy to have people who appreciate what they do - and who will talk to them about it - will just share a taste of this and that? If you do something really, really well, you want a witness at some point. For goodness sake, we're talking about a bit of cocktail up a straw! Be true to yourself. (Motive - the hardest thing to prove to a judge, the hardest thing to find for yourself)

Yes! Everyone is talking about around here.And, to give full credit, go to goremy.com (and you can buy the CD on iTunes, or at least that's what they say at the end of the song).

So far it seems a fair compromise between the overly rigid and the wild, wild west. Comparing the proposed list with the Food Critics' Guidelines referenced earlier, it's a lot more practical for the casual writer. Most of the bloggers out there aren't going to invest in a Ruth Reichl set of disguises and false identities. (Come to think of it, if I were to assume a false identity and start using credit cards under other people's names, I'd probably be inviting a visit from those friendly folk at Homeland Security.) The basic soundness test for such things is "is there anything here I don't do anyways?" If everyone (or at least the majority of the ethical) are following this, then it defines what we consider as our "ethics".

Would it be ethical for a restaurant or equipment supplier to pay for an ad on a reviewer's site? Should a reviewer touch a place that is doing advertising with anything he's associated with?

Is it necessary to link to a book, rather than just providing the title and author (properly spelled, of course?). Technical journals don't require this, and it does seem like it will just be directing business to the major resellers, rather than letting people go looking for themselves, and hopefully supporting the local bookstores.

My last run through Cowtown was over a year ago, but I must say I enjoyed the town and the food culture that's developed. It's a fairly tight crowd, like most Canadian cities, with everyone seeming to have worked with everyone else at some point. Good eats and wine at Rouge, cocktails at Raw, and cheese and wine at Divinos all come back immediately to mind. I'll look forward to hearing about what's new.

Ham! I love ham. And, for a reason I cannot fathom, it's something you hardly ever find in restaurants nowadays. The carveries seem to focus on prime rib, leg of lamb, and pork loin, but that cheerful red meat of the ham is getting rarer and rarer. Beautiful shot.

March 21 – The Afternoon Eating in Seoul is a drama. And, like all good soap operas, you need interior shots, and exterior shots. Interior, we concentrate on the set tableaux of the meals, our cast of characters gathered about the table. In Korea this is (more often than not) a much more active piece, with the transmutation of the flesh conducted in front of you, rather than removed to some hallowed chamber. But, as boisterous as these scenes can be, it’s really the street where we see the dynamics of food. Seoul and Bangkok share equal place in my heart (or stomach). Both revel in their food, and see no reason to contain it within fixed walls. Walking anywhere in these cities, you see produce, food, and drink spilling out onto the pavement, meeting the needs of the populace. By Yangjae we almost fell over the fresh fruit dealers. Strawberries, crimson in the afternoon sun, just waiting for someone to claim them and take them away to a good home. How can you not smile when you look at fresh strawberries? Walking along the street, you realize that there’s little need for a greengrocer. Most of your everyday needs – fruit, potatoes, eggplants, onions, garlic – is going to be taken care of. And if you just want take-away, there’re pistachios and corn and oranges and things in pots (no, I didn’t look). Heck, just mussel up to any collection of boxes and you can put together a meal for the night…..if you were one of the minority of Koreans that actually cooked at home and didn’t just go out all the time. As Jason has said, Koreans eat out (or order in) more than almost any other group. You can make a small fortune in the restaurant biz most places (just start with a big fortune), but Seoul is an odd place in that it’s hard to do badly in the food industry here. We took a bus from Yangjae to Dongdaemun, the shopping zone clustered about the old gate on the East side of the city. En route, we passed what may (at this time of pandemic) be one of the most unfortunately named wine shops around. We took a quick break here. They had hoddeok. Hoddeok are wonderful. Simple, and wonderful. They’re soft rice cake that’s filled with brown sugar, and then closed up and fried. You just bite in, and experience the soft goodness of rice cake, with that faint backdrop of sweetness running through it from the sugar. That is, until you hit the fluid molten sugar portion that has a tendency to spill out like napalm on your unexposed skin. Scud squeals really well, I must say. Nearby was more food. Pizza like melts in shallow muffin trays, freshly griddled for you. Unfortunately, I was too full from the hoddeok to take advantage of this stand. Peanut Buttered Roast Squid. As I look at this now, I kick myself for not forcing some of this dish into me. Peanut butter and squid is probably one of those perfect flavour combinations that will dominate the world food market in the future, and here I am missing out. Darn. And they sell both the squid bodies, and the tentacles as separate orders. Double darn. Next: Dinner – Zenkimchi and FatmanSeoul (No, it’s not a song by the Clash) Note: edited for compliance

It's an aspect of Korean food culture that if something's good, then there are suddenly a horde of "versions" out there on the market. A whole chain from someone else's ddeokboki recipe is quite a success story, though. What we see a lot of is the copycat - one restaurant does something really well, and builds a following, another vendor moves next door to them and sets up shop with a similar name. That way they'll either get the unwary, who aren't 100% sure of their destination, or else they get "shrapnel" - those who don't want to wait for a table to open up in the real place.

Cool! Now we need to get down to Seua Sibed Dua for the ingredients, and then we can start up a thread on making your own yaa dong!

March 21 – Duck and cover It was a brave new morning. Well, actually, it was getting more like early afternoon. But the sun was up! That’s something. Jason was busy today, and so Sandra took charge of us, making certain that we got out of the apartment and accomplished something useful. Like lunch. We headed up towards Yangjae again, meeting Sandra and then moving from the station to the restaurant. Sandra was taking us to one of the places she liked – Yetnal Nongjang – Farm of Olden Days is one way to read that. This was something different from what we’d been doing in that they didn’t constrain themselves to one particular dish, but covered a fairly wide variety. The more high tech and wired Korea becomes, the more apparent is the nostalgic yearning for the look of the old days, even if most of the people coming to these places are so young that they’ve probably never been on a farm. But I won’t complain about that. It’s a global phenomenon. I’m just happy that, in their quest to preserve a touch of the feel of old Korea, that I can share in. Okay, maybe the farms of long ago weren’t full of extractor fans and wide screen TVs for the K-soaps, but if they’d had them back then I’m certain they’d have been part of the rural setting. Our banchan was attractive enough. Baekju kimchi, a salad of bean sprouts, a cooked soft cabbage dish…… potato salad, more kimchi, mul kimchi, and fixings for the duck,…. which you’ll see happily grilling away there with an onion, a trace of fat already dripping off. Duck was the primary choice for Sandra and Scud. Myself, I’d seen something different. Albap – fish eggs in a sizzling bibimbap. The crunch and pop of roe with nori, spring onion, pickled yellow dakuan, cucumber, and hot, crisped rice is a difficult thing not to enthuse over. The duck, once grilled was wrapped up with the usual lettuce and gaenip. The sauce was one of white onions in a tangy vinaigrette. Okay, we did order 3 of the duck. I wasn’t about to miss out. By the time we were wrapping up the last of the duck (ori) the fat container was getting dangerously close to the brim. We’d watched its progress with apprehension, but were relieved to see that this exercise in brinkmanship (brinkduckship?) had worked out perfectly. I live for these moments of small peril. Next: On the Street

I'm often quite happy with a quick stir fry, working the leftover flavors into some fresh vegetables or noodles. touch up with the sauces at hand, and a meal is ready fairly quick. And, if it's protein, you can always do up a quick curry. Most of the time, though, I just pack out the leftovers with rice for my lunch at work.

Sheena, I may have been shorting myself. You're quite right, it's a very Korean thing to give priority to the broth, and treat the solids as an after thought. While I follow this with chiggae and soups, I hadn't thought about it with the odaeng fluid. And, yes, the wholesome goodness of MSG is not to be belittled. "MSG or Ajinomoto - it's a matter of taste"

As a caution, outside of the Europe and North America, it's a good idea to check on restrictions with individual countries. This would apply to checked luggage as well as hand carry. One that stands out in my knowledge is Bahrain. They're particularly fussy there about blades of any respectable size coming through, even in checked luggage. In the past, I'd argued a set of German kitchen knives through, but they're stricter now. However, they're very good about returning the goods when you leave.

9:50 in the morning, and I've been slowly going deaf for the last three hours in what may be the most and least impressive of business lounges. I'm sitting in Dubai right now, in Emirates lounge. Like much of this city, they've taken massive as their model, and have put together a lobby that, if not for the food, drink, chairs, and games, would be a carbon copy of the concourse. Man, it's loud here. The food suffers, too. I'll try to edit in pictures later, once I've a decent connect. What could be a very good kitchen has, by the sheer size of the operation, been turned into a canteen. There's a decent enough selection of Indian food (chickpeas, parattha, sambal, and some other bits), and good Western food (croquettes, you gotta love croquettes...and salmon bagels), but the scale of the operation makes you feel like you're back at university in the dining hall. But that's merely a preface. I should, if all goes well, arrive in Beijing sometime before midnight tonight, and then get to my apartment in the wee hours of the day. Very wee. It strikes me now (sleep deprivation hits me hard) that this whole trip is a massive recap of past studies. Thailand is a constant, but Laos, Korea, and China have all been redone, and done this time with no sense of urgency or need. A repeated trilogy of food, if you would. I'll try to focus upon that, the tastes I've had before, and the ones that are new. For now, I'd better get to my gate.

March 20 – Stepping Out For dinner, we though we might try a different country. We were off to Canada. (The Boy, however, opted to stay back home with the systems and make do with the next-door food court, and the crackers, cheese, and cokes in the fridge) It wasn’t really an embassy party, but rather the embassy had put up their place to host a buffet/drinks thing for the Canadian alumni, sponsored by the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (Korea). As a social networking thing, it went well. There are an awful lot of Korean Canadians in Seoul, and (according to the ambassador) there are over 50,000 Korean students in Canada right now. The place was packed out, and there was an awful lot of “Hey, I haven’t seen you for ages” going on. You'll see this reflected in the number of Canadian-themed bars, and in a growing recognition of Vancouver and Toronto (along with, of course K-Town in LA....but then again, isn't LA the fourth largest Canadian city?). Big Rock has an excellent bar south of the Han, and there's RMT on this side of the river (more soon). Strangely, there was little Canadian content to the food and beverages. The wines were a German chardonnay and an Italian Barbaresco; and the food was a disheartening example of catered Chinese (I cannot abide deep fried food that’s allowed to sit for an hour or two). On the bright side, however, they had Danny Jung on the saxaphone (a well accomplished sax); and they had brought in an Edmontonian micro-brew from the lads at Rocky Mountain Tavern. We’ll see more of RMT later. It’s a Canadian expat venture which started up on Itaewon, that notorious strip of villainy and cheap thrills. This group of canucks wanted a nice place to have a beer, and figured they might as well make their own. The brew wasn’t bad (and it takes a lot for me to say nice things about Edmonton), and it made up for the shortcomings of the food. Quite a lot of it, actually. Now, I’ve slagged it as a dining event, but as a party, it was a lot of fun. I, of course, benefit from the age thing, as most everyone there is a lot younger than I am (and shorter). But that also means that the discussion fits better with me, given as its generally centered on Heroes, The Watchmen, and other important elements of modern culture that my generation doesn’t seem to enjoy as much anymore. We finally started feeling real hunger pangs setting in. The decision was whether to go back for the soggy sweet and sour pork and the uninspired fried rice, or should we go somewhere else? Somewhere else was the obvious answer. First, we had to decide where to go. That meant we needed a bar in order to make a decision. Those are never far in Seoul. Half of us popped downstairs into the sort of bar you would recognize from any number of Korean ganster or Japanese yakuza films. Big booths. Lots of space. And no customers. The other half had dropped into the McD’s upstairs for fries. Downstairs, we ordered food. I’ve said it before, but I’d better say it again. If you go into a Korean bar, you have to order food. It’ll cost you, and you may not be hungry, but you have to order it. We had a plate of sausages. That seemed like it could cover our protein deficiency. The others showed up, and we ordered more beer in order to facilitate our decision making. “Where to” is actually a pretty tough question. One crowd held for going over to Rodea on Apgujeong. But then someone said that Nori People had disappeared (still, I could do the bacon wrapped hot dogs!) Another faction held out for Hondae (where Club Night is held once a month), a funky area of clubs and bars clustered around the university. Plus, one of Jason’s friends had a place up there, which gave us a crash point. But it was, perhaps, too far away from the Han River. “Anything beyond Itawon is North Korea to me.” That was the phrase that did it. Remember that “that notorious strip of villainy and cheap thrills”? Itaewon I rather like it myself. It’s a lot more fun at night than in the harsh truth of daylight, when it’s awash with cheap knock-offs and U.S. military from the base. First, we hit up one of the ATMs that would actually access our North American banks (similar to Japan, top up on cash when you can), and then we fell upon a large, third floor bar that will remain nameless, due to certain issues that may or may not exist regarding green baize tables in conjunction with playing cards. As an aside, Korea does have a number of casinos. Urban legend has that these are the best places to buy cars, as people hawk everything to get back into a game. Anyways, we grabbed a booth and, as explained, we ordered food to go with our drinks. First up were grilled chicken wings, bathed in hot sauce to the point that there was a black-red crust on the wings, and a burn that started off slow, and then overwhelmed your mouth. And then we had something….cheesy. Or at least white and gooey. I think it might have been kind of like natchos….maybe. Hey, at this point of the evening, be thankful I hadn’t lost my camera. Some of the folks split off at this time onto hard liquor and cocktails. For my part, I stayed with beer. By about three a.m., I was thinking it was time to move on. I dropped some cash on the table, and wandered out onto the Hill. First things first, some oden on a stick, and a Styrofoam container of ddeokbokgi (I’ll let Yoonhi worry about my spellings). Now that I didn’t have to order food with drinks, I was hungry. Again, you get the best ddeokbokgi on the street, say I. The oden, well……I remember now why I don’t order it very often. Some kimmari would have been nice, though….. I considered my options. I could grab a taxi home. I could rejoin the gang. Or I could check out some of the other bars. I flagged a cab to take me South. Live to drink another day, say I. Jason phoned to check up on me while I was in the cab. “I’m fine. Don’t worry.” The cabby dropped me a km from my stop. I didn’t realize it until after I was out and he was gone. And then it started raining. Oh well.

Sheena, The quick response I just got back is that it's crushed sesame with "other powders". Peter will stop by soon and ask them for details, though. The more you know....

Peter - I've been following your posts with great interest, thanks so much for taking the time. Me and my wife will be visiting Korea for the first time this summer, this is all very edifying! ← Thanks, Sick! I heartily recommend Korea, but a small caution, the summer will be humid. However, that makes it a great time for cold noodles (nengmyun), water kimchi, and other dishes the Koreans have designed for the summer months. Cheers, Peter