Korean food is one of my favorite things, if not my favorite thing about living here. There is a joyful culture surrounding food and dining. Korean cuisine is communal, most meals are shared and nobody minds eating from the same dish. Unfortunately, cooking is a dying art form here, much like in the US, because of the fast paced lifestyle demanded of workers. Also you don't have to tip- anywhere, which was really hard to adjust to when everything is so delicious. Tipping is only done for very large parties or catered events and can actually offend the restaurant owner because it implies that you pity them or have more money than them. I don't have any pictures of Korean snacks and junk food, but they are worth mentioning too.
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| This was our first meal in Korea, in Seoul. Funny story. We walked into the first restaurant that looked good and pointed at something we wanted from the menu. Claire had dumpling soup, which I knew the Korean for, and I decided to try something I had never heard of, Soondae. Soondae is a traditional Korean sausage of pork, rice noodles and onions, wrapped in intestine, "natural casing." Sometimes the soup has lung, liver or tripe but this one didn't. It was a delicious and full fledged first meal in the country. Every time I tell the story to a Korean they laugh. |
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| This restaurant serves Tonkasu, Japanese-Western style cutlets. Here you see two cutlets with curry on the right and basically hot and sour sauce on the other, rice, 3 kinds of pickles and kimchi, cabbage, macaroni salad, and miso soup. It costs about 7 dollars. |
The market at Sokcho, big and fishy.
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| This is Claire after a wind whipped day hike to a temple. We're at a Chinese restaurant. We got tofu, here called Dubu. I think it was Ma-Po Tofu, which you can get in the US. Koreans love Chinese food like Americans, and they adjust it to their tastes exactly like us. Korean-Chinese food always has raw onion and bright yellow radish kimchi with black bean paste, like thick fermented soy sauce for dipping. I think the yellow of the kimchi is artificial, which is unhealthy but whatever. |
Coffee and Latte from a hand-drip place in Seoul.
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| Falafel sandwiches from a place in Hongdae. We sometimes go out of our way to eat Western food, just because it's a nice change of Korean food. |
Draft Asahi and Japanese food in Gangneung. Korean beer is pretty bad and comes from one mega-company. I miss American microbrews a lot. There are some in Seoul but we don't' go to Seoul very often.
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| This is a meal on the ocean city Yang-yang. Their specialty is a kind of squid sausage, also called Soondae. It's squid stuffed with seafood and rice, onion, and fried with egg. The kimchi and side dishes are more ocean variety too. 3 different seaweeds. Amazing. Claire had Jjigae, a really spicy kimchi stew. |
In Uijeongbu we got basically a spicy pasta salad, I don' remember the name. The other thing is a giant savory pancake. Both were amazing.
This is ddoeokbokki, a snack food. Rice dumpling in sweet spicy sauce, plus a salad. Great.
Sweet cookies and cakes of every form are huge here. This was a balsamic macaroon, sort of odd but great. Claire said the baker here seemed happy that I could read the Korean menu but I didn't notice. I love practicing Korean.
Big dumpling from a street vendor.
Markets from all over:
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| Another Chinese Korean dish, a mound of fried rice with egg cooked separate, Korean style. Also came with Ja-Jang, black bean sauce which is really popular. It also came with seafood soup- huge meal that only looked like fried rice on the menu and cost about 4 dollars. |
And lastly, these are some of the meals I cook at home. I don't have an oven here, which stinks, but I've adapted. I got some tahini and legumes delivered, can't find those here. So I make vegetarian stuff, hummus, curry, tofu, salad.
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