Culinary mini-adventure: Korean food.
Jan. 28th, 2003 03:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynOn a non-Og note, last night was pretty cool. I went from the office, where I'd been gritting my teeth for a certain portion of the day (what do you mean you have no proof we acknowledged those donations? They were acknowledged back in December!), to Hoboken, where I left my car. It was something of a surprise to find that there was nearly no traffic on 280, or even coming back out of the Holland Tunnel; normally by that time of day it's as clogged as a Scotsman's arteries. I parked the car in a garage at 5:30 and got a PATH train over to Manhattan, where I settled into a pattern of circling through the Manhattan Mall. There's nowhere to sit in there these days except the ground floor, and they're doing renovations down there, so no one can really get in. It's a pathetic excuse for a mall - not even a bookstore - so in the end I wandered across the street, bought a notebook, and came back to the mall where $1 bought me some mozzarella sticks and a place to sit at McDonald's. This is where I waited for my friend Kin-Hon, who was going to see the Shaolin thing with me.
Kin-Hon turned up around seven-thirty, just as he said he would; he'd brought another friend of his with him, although I didn't catch the other guy's name. Vietnamese, nice guy, some kind of ceramic artist. We wound up going to a Korean restaurant on... oh, I think it was 32nd street... for dinner. I've had Korean food maybe twice in my life. Once was at a restaurant that had to have been authentic, because no restaurant designed to pander to Americans is going to put barbecued intestine on their menu, much less call it intestine. That was three or four years ago. The other time, more recently - two springs ago - was a restaurant in Wisconsin where I was forcibly reminded that one really ought to make sure one knows what the hot sauces taste like before using eight or nine of them at the 'make your own food and have the chef cook it' bar. We also made some variation on bulgogi in one of my CIA classes, but that was about it...
I don't remember the name of the dishes from last night. I know that they put out glasses of corn tea before the food arrived, which I almost mistook for hot water because I hadn't been listening to the waiter. Fortunately, Kin-Hon's friend picked up his glass first and asked 'what kind of tea is this?', thus sparing me the embarrassment of asking why the water was hot. (It was in an orange-brown glass and looked clear by comparison. I thought it was water.) I was then warned that corn tea causes gas, but told the guys 'I'll survive' and drank it anyway once it cooled down a bit. There was kimchee on the table; I got asked if I was able to eat spicy things and if I knew what it was. I recognized the tone of the question. It's the one used by well-meaning sushi lovers to ask 'you know about wasabi, right?', so instead of 'nuclear horseradish' I said 'yeah, that's Korean for 'pull my finger'. Cue the approving laughter. The white girl's at two for two.
Ordering was interesting, because half the menu (the first half, not the left half of the page that is otherwise in English) was in Korean and Kin-Hon tried to act like he knew how to read it. About the time he claimed that one of the lines said 'today's special: cow eyeball', I picked up the spoon at my place and asked his friend if I could please smack him for lying to us. In the end we found the English section of the menu, and the results were:
Something in the scallion pancake family that apparently involved bean sprouts, scallions, eggishness, and one or more root vegetables
Squid. Very obvious squid. Like, squid tentacles artistically arranged in the middle of the plate, and squid body rings around the outside of the plate.
A bowl of mostly vegetables and rice, with some shredded beef and about an equal amount of shredded mushrooms. This may have had a name on the order of 'bi-bee', but I didn't get to write it down.
And the raw beef. That was actually pretty good. It was marinated first - don't remember in what, but it was a pretty deep red when it arrived and it didn't taste particularly salty or sour. There was a great deal of garlic on it, and lots of shredded pears, and they mixed in a raw egg when they brought it to the table. That wasn't half bad and I am proud to say that I didn't even catch the wimpy part of my brain pausing when I picked up the chopsticks and reached for some. (This would be the bit that panicked at Chengdu 22 when faced with 1/8 in. of solid pepper flakes on the Sichuan beef.)
There were other vegetables - carrots, cucumbers, etc. - and four or five sauces in small bowls, but I only got to try one or two. We didn't have much time before the show. Myself, I liked it. The raw beef was the best part, as the pancake thing was on the very bland side and the pears made the texture of the beef dish way more intriguing than the beef/mushroom/veg in a bowl. I do have to mention that the corn tea did not seem to give me any grief, so either it was a wimpy pot or my gut handled it differently than his and his friend's. Kin-Hon kept apologizing for it not being really decent Korean food, but it's not like I would have known the difference between good and bad. Overall it went pretty well and I don't think I'd mind trying it again.
Kin-Hon turned up around seven-thirty, just as he said he would; he'd brought another friend of his with him, although I didn't catch the other guy's name. Vietnamese, nice guy, some kind of ceramic artist. We wound up going to a Korean restaurant on... oh, I think it was 32nd street... for dinner. I've had Korean food maybe twice in my life. Once was at a restaurant that had to have been authentic, because no restaurant designed to pander to Americans is going to put barbecued intestine on their menu, much less call it intestine. That was three or four years ago. The other time, more recently - two springs ago - was a restaurant in Wisconsin where I was forcibly reminded that one really ought to make sure one knows what the hot sauces taste like before using eight or nine of them at the 'make your own food and have the chef cook it' bar. We also made some variation on bulgogi in one of my CIA classes, but that was about it...
I don't remember the name of the dishes from last night. I know that they put out glasses of corn tea before the food arrived, which I almost mistook for hot water because I hadn't been listening to the waiter. Fortunately, Kin-Hon's friend picked up his glass first and asked 'what kind of tea is this?', thus sparing me the embarrassment of asking why the water was hot. (It was in an orange-brown glass and looked clear by comparison. I thought it was water.) I was then warned that corn tea causes gas, but told the guys 'I'll survive' and drank it anyway once it cooled down a bit. There was kimchee on the table; I got asked if I was able to eat spicy things and if I knew what it was. I recognized the tone of the question. It's the one used by well-meaning sushi lovers to ask 'you know about wasabi, right?', so instead of 'nuclear horseradish' I said 'yeah, that's Korean for 'pull my finger'. Cue the approving laughter. The white girl's at two for two.
Ordering was interesting, because half the menu (the first half, not the left half of the page that is otherwise in English) was in Korean and Kin-Hon tried to act like he knew how to read it. About the time he claimed that one of the lines said 'today's special: cow eyeball', I picked up the spoon at my place and asked his friend if I could please smack him for lying to us. In the end we found the English section of the menu, and the results were:
Something in the scallion pancake family that apparently involved bean sprouts, scallions, eggishness, and one or more root vegetables
Squid. Very obvious squid. Like, squid tentacles artistically arranged in the middle of the plate, and squid body rings around the outside of the plate.
A bowl of mostly vegetables and rice, with some shredded beef and about an equal amount of shredded mushrooms. This may have had a name on the order of 'bi-bee', but I didn't get to write it down.
And the raw beef. That was actually pretty good. It was marinated first - don't remember in what, but it was a pretty deep red when it arrived and it didn't taste particularly salty or sour. There was a great deal of garlic on it, and lots of shredded pears, and they mixed in a raw egg when they brought it to the table. That wasn't half bad and I am proud to say that I didn't even catch the wimpy part of my brain pausing when I picked up the chopsticks and reached for some. (This would be the bit that panicked at Chengdu 22 when faced with 1/8 in. of solid pepper flakes on the Sichuan beef.)
There were other vegetables - carrots, cucumbers, etc. - and four or five sauces in small bowls, but I only got to try one or two. We didn't have much time before the show. Myself, I liked it. The raw beef was the best part, as the pancake thing was on the very bland side and the pears made the texture of the beef dish way more intriguing than the beef/mushroom/veg in a bowl. I do have to mention that the corn tea did not seem to give me any grief, so either it was a wimpy pot or my gut handled it differently than his and his friend's. Kin-Hon kept apologizing for it not being really decent Korean food, but it's not like I would have known the difference between good and bad. Overall it went pretty well and I don't think I'd mind trying it again.
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Kimchee? Hot?
Date: 2003-01-28 08:26 pm (UTC)I guess eating Sri Lankan food has just rendered all other "hot" foods moot. I can eat the hottest Ethiopian food without blinking. I can chow down on the vindaloos without breaking much of a sweat. I can have Sichuan hot pot that leaves the locals here gasping for breath without blinking.
And Kimchee is pretty damned mild in comparison to these.
(I did find a Jiangxi specialty from Fuzhou that I would say qualifies as hot, but it's more the "creeps up on you as you eat more of it" style of hot than the sheer blinding agony of some Sri Lankan dishes.)
Re: Kimchee? Hot?
Date: 2003-01-28 08:41 pm (UTC)