Kimchi rising
Pushed by a Korean initiative to increase its profile, the distinctive 'day-to-day' cuisine of fermented foods is attracting American devotees
Americans are eager for any new food or unfamiliar ingredient. They fall in love easily, become instant authorities, spend their time searching for the best versions.
What might once have been relatively unknown can become a supermarket staple. Which explains sushi at your neighborhood Stop & Shop.
Now the Korean government wants to position its cuisine so diners worldwide will know kimchi, the spicy fermented cabbage, and specialties such as bibimbap, made with rice, bits of meat, and highly seasoned vegetables (see related story). Last month, the government announced an initiative to expand the number of Korean eateries outside the country to 40,000 within a decade. "We are approaching this thing from the perspective of trade," says Inchul Kim, a Korean consul in Boston. "One of the government policies is to get a wider market for agricultural products and food."
"Food and all this stuff is tied into economics and politics," says David Kang, a professor of government at Dartmouth College.
Korean food seems poised to become the next emerging cuisine. The fact that it's relatively unknown makes it alluring. The Korean television drama "Dae Jang Geum" ("Jewel in the Palace"), in which food plays a central role, is gaining a cult following on DVD. Next spring, a large Korean supermarket chain with locations in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago is opening in the region. And a big wave of second-generation Korean-Americans, children of South Korean parents, who might have shunned traditional dishes in favor of pizza and burgers, are now adults and discovering their own heritage.
Korea was once largely agricultural. Agrarian societies eat what they grow, and Korean cuisine hasn't evolved in this post-agrarian age. It's what Kang calls "day-to-day food." To get through winters, fall vegetables were tossed with salt, rice vinegar, chili paste, fish sauce, and garlic, buried, and left to ferment in clay pots. These and other pickled or highly seasoned little dishes, called banchan, appear at every meal; in restaurants they're set out together. Also at restaurants are barbecue tables, at which diners grill their own short ribs, beef, and other meats. Several generations of a family are often together. "If you hear children's voices and crying at the restaurant it brings good luck," says Su Yung Lee, 24, who works at her mother's Westborough Korean Restaurant.
Foods are eaten in certain combinations to keep the body healthy and in balance, and dishes tend to be vegetable-heavy and spicy. "We have to have garlic, red pepper, and soy bean paste [miso]," says Lee.
What distinguishes the cuisine, says Korea-born Seunghee Cha, 28, is the variety of kimchi-style dishes. "We are the culture of the fermented foods," says Cha, a New York University graduate student in hospitality industry studies.
She sees Korean mom-and-pop stores in New York offering hot American classics in a lunch buffet along with a dish like tteokbokki, rice cake sticks in a spicy sauce (see related story, Page 22), and she won't eat it. "They're adjusting food for Americans," she says. Cha has no time for dishes she considers inauthentic.
She writes a column for a magazine published by Korea Food Service Information, which was instrumental in codifying 100 Korean recipes for "The Beauty of Korean Food," the English title of a book also translated into Japanese, Chinese, and French. "If you make kimchi," says Cha, "everyone makes it the same everywhere in the world."
Her approach is more conservative than that of Kang, the 43-year-old Dartmouth professor, who was raised in California and whose mother made kimchi in plastic tubs in the refrigerator (sometimes it overfermented and exploded, he says). On the East Coast, he may go to a restaurant owned by Koreans, who offer their own traditions along with Japanese and Chinese specialties. "That's a function of what will sell. Koreans have a slight inferiority complex," he says.
If anything reverses that, it might be the "Jewel in the Palace" TV series. It's an authentic overview of Korean culture and food, says Kim, the Korean consul, who adds that it's just a coincidence that the government's global outreach is occurring around the same time the show is gaining a following internationally. "Jewel" is the story of a cook in the ancient royal palace and has episodes devoted to soy sauce and learning the elements of taste.
Local Korean-Americans seem to go to great lengths for traditional foods. The specialty food store H Mart is moving into Burlington because so many Boston-area residents were shopping in the New Jersey location, says marketing manager Jimmy Kim. The 50,000-square-foot space will house a banchan section, to buy kimchi and other cooked dishes, and a food court. Kim, who came from Seoul 10 years ago, thinks it will be another five years before Korean cuisine takes off among non-Koreans. What will boost it are relaxed travel regulations - visas are no longer required to travel between Korea and the United States. That will open a cultural and economic exchange, he says. "Next year will be a good start."
Cha, the NYU student, who attended Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa and cooked for parties at the Korean ambassador's residence there, thinks Korean food needs a celebrity chef. She's nominating Youngsun Lee, owner of the 8-month-old Persimmon in New York's East Village.
"I'm pretty honored," says Lee, when told of the plan. His spare restaurant offers a $39 prix fixe. "The food itself is traditionally based, and here and there I use local ingredients," he says. But rather than serving everything at once, which is customary, he explains, "my idea was to present it as a course meal," in which dishes are sent to diners one at a time.
"The presentation is Americanized, the taste of the food is Korean," Cha says.
Youngsun Lee worked with the celebrated New York Korean-fusion chef David Chang of Momofuku and other popular spots. Alan Richman, food columnist for GQ magazine, likes the European system at Persimmon. "I've never been to a restaurant where presentation made such a difference," he says.
Kang says the generation of Korean-Americans called "1.5's" will be the ones to promote their own cuisine. They were born in Korea and are truly bi-cultural, he says. He was born here, with language skills he calls "kitchen Korean." Mothers spoke to children in Korean; they answered in English. But now the younger generation is deeply interested in their culture.
"We all take our friends to have Korean food, get them to try this stuff. That's how you're getting the mainstreaming of the cuisine - the Korean presence in the US being large enough and successful enough to support these restaurants."
Korean food is informal, spicy, and inexpensive. Critic Richman watches the trends. His verdict? "Spicy is in, casual is in, Asian is in, experimental is in.
"Korean has a definite shot." 