A quest into the gustatory heart of Seoul
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.
(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.
Grilled sirloin at the Gaon, one of the the city's most refined restaurants.
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