SEOUL -- Sukhee and I are waiting for steamed chicken. It doesn't sound like a terribly exciting thing to do on one's first day in a city, but here in Seoul, where the dish in question is a specialty of the Andong region, I am promised it is memorable stuff.
"It's not really that simple," Sukhee offers when I voice my plain-poultry skepticism. "You'll see."
Slender and with close-cropped hair, Sukhee has lived here for all of her 29 years. We met through mutual friends. She sports a scarf like a Parisian, giggles with endearing frequency, and shares my belief that the way to get beneath a culture is to start eating. She is supposed to be helping me unearth the kind of Korean cooking only a local might know about. But we're sitting in the upscale shopping and business district of Gangnam-gu in the kind of minimalist restaurant where black and white seem the only colors in existence and cellphones chirp like birds. Yet, the menu here lists but one main dish: jjim dak.
It arrives on an enormous platter -- easily food for four. It is all autumnal tones of crimson, burlap, and deep orange. They are of the same palette one sees on women wearing the traditional Korean hanbok. On a bed of translucent sweet potato noodles sits a whole chicken, cut into small pieces. Surrounding the meat is a gaggle of stir-fried carrots, potatoes, water spinach, onions, zucchini, and chilies. The sauce and the chicken have a winey depth, like coq au vin, and also a spicy dynamism, like Thai food. Hints of black pepper, caramel, and capsicum swell up in alternate bites.
Like all Korean food, jjim dak is eaten with side dishes meant to enhance the flavor. Here, that means a bowl of water kimchi, daikon slices afloat in a stark-white liquid that is alive with acidic heat and veggie crunch. Taken on the heels of the jjim dak, it's a pas de deux in the mouth.
I look at Sukhee to share my delight.
"It's a good dish," she says after a pregnant pause. "Good, but traditional."
. . .
There is nary a historical experience that hasn't affected the Korean palate. The founder of the country was the mythic offspring of a god and a bear named Tan'gun. Legend has it the bear wanted to be human and went to its god with that request. The god gave the bear 20 cloves of garlic and told it to go away for 100 days. When it returned, the bear, now a woman, mated with the god, and Tan'gun was born. Anyone experienced with eating in Seoul knows that garlic use has multiplied exponentially in the centuries since.
Sixteenth-century invasions by the Japanese contributed the now ubiquitous chili to the Korean kitchen. Close proximity to China yielded a love for noodles. Colonial years under Japan bore the beloved soju tent, seen propped up on roadsides (with red-faced men inside propped up on sweet-potato vodka). Ditto street-stall adaptations like kimbap (Korean sushi) and twigum (Korean tempura). There are even curious haunts called hofs, clearly inspired by German expatriates and their beery cafe culture. Hofs are neighborhood institutions open until 4 or 5 a.m. that serve draft beer, fried chicken, greasy chips, and sweet chili sauce. Look for a cartoonish picture of a bird and a mug.
Korean food is rugged, honest, and comforting. It's not unlike the cooking in other parts of the world with extreme weather and rocky coastlines (think Ireland, Normandy, New England), where there's a similar emphasis on stews, seafood, grilled meats, preservation, and saltiness.
The food of Korea, however, goes beyond those cuisines in its abundance and range. The flavors are direct hits: salty and spicy and sometimes stinky in their retort to scorching summers and bitter winters. The food is a gastronomical knockout, and the sheer number of traditional dishes is more on par with Thailand or China.
. . .
More than 10 million people take the subway, eat lunch, and putter their way around Seoul on any given day. Centuries-old palaces, stone gates, and leafy parks lend dignity to the increasingly modern cityscape of 12-lane roads and lithe, glass-encased skyscrapers. Despite one of the best underground systems in Asia and the north-south division of the Han River, it can be a bewildering place to navigate. There are 25 districts and 527 neighborhoods. Subway stops and their numbered exits are often used as locators. Nameless alleys trickle like veins off the main roadways, and it is here that much memorable food is found. Fax machines, I'm reminded by several residents, are popular because people are always procuring directions from restaurants and friends. Everything seems to be near a KFC or Coffee Bean.
There's a vigorous strain of dish-specific dining in Seoul. Almost everyone seems to know what they want, when, where, and with whom. Said dishes speak to the type of fiercely flavored and impressive cooking that Koreans label "normal." Goryeo Samgyetang in Jung-gu, one of the city's busiest areas for work and mealtime, specializes in the soup of the same name. It is made by stuffing a small chicken with sticky rice, jujubes (the fruit, not the candy), and ginseng and boiling it until the water and its contents transform into an aromatic broth worthy of the "elixir" tag. One need merely spoon-tap the fowl to watch the contents spill like treasure into the bowl.
Myeong-dong Gyoja in the Myeong-dong shopping district, a popular hangout for teenagers and university students, has walls the color of café au lait and is famed for its kalguksu, a thick, hand-rolled noodle made from wheat, afloat in a hearty chicken broth. Mandu are Korea's version of dumplings, sold in every neighborhood. Look for a steamer sitting outside a foggy window. At Manduhyang in Gangnam-gu one can watch as several ajumma (literally "aunties," who preside over most decent places) pat, stuff, and pinch the dough from its raw state into plump mandu.
Grilling meat is a serious craft in Korea. Bulgogi (barbequed beef), galbi (beef short rib soup), and samgyeopsal-gui (grilled side of pork) are eaten on a daily basis.
"This is our basic weekday meal," announced my friend Michael while we supped on ansihm-gui (grilled tenderloin) near his apartment. The meat was tenderized in a marinade of local pears, garlic, green onions, and soy. Dinner in Seoul is often do-it-yourself, so we grilled the sirloin shards tabletop and dipped them in seasoned sesame oil to taste.
"It's sort of the secret to every one of these places. Simple, yes, but it's what makes the flavor of the meat stand out," Michael said, after snaring the last grilled mushroom cap. It was the color of caramel by that time.
Beyond the realm of barbecue and one-dish wonders lies hanjeongshik. These are pricey and atmospheric places where foreigners (mostly) come to sample Korean food of royal descent. Dishes march out in platoon-like numbers -- 30, 40, 50 -- and are presented with an eye to order and color. The stately Yong Su San in Samcheong-dong is of interest, as its owners mine their North Korean heritage for inspiration. The result is palace-style cooking full of intrigue and color, less salty and quite nuanced. House specialties include pulgimchi, a variation on the famed kimchi, with a tangy citrus flavor and chunks of tender octopus; and naengchae, a jellyfish salad with shrimp, beef, cold vegetables, and a spicy mustard sauce that hinted at wasabi.
. . .
Good, but traditional. That Sukhee described a dish like jjim dak this way says a lot about the way Koreans relate to their homegrown foods. Bulgogi, sundae (sausage made of fresh pig intestines, cooked with fresh vegetables, noodles and spices, all stuffed inside the intestines), ttok (a type of rice cake): Such everyday fare is considered all well and good but the soju-soaked nationalism usually ends there.
"You like Korean food?" I was often asked with puzzlement by locals. Seoulites will buy nothing but Daewoo, Samsung, or Hyundai. They have a museum, at COEX Mall, devoted entirely to kimchi. Yet they display no civic pride in presenting their cuisine to the world.
Threatening to change the way Korea perceives food -- and perhaps how the world perceives Korea -- is the W Seoul. This chic hotel import from the United States is housed in a striking blue glass structure on Walker Hill, designed by Aaron Tan of RAD in Hong Kong. It is a lifestyle playpen with a spa featuring lofted teak decks and whirlpools above the Han River, media rooms with circular beds and shock white/lipstick red color schemes, and a lobby with a multilevel gallery of Moroccan-style daybeds and egg-shaped chairs suspended from cords that reach to a ceiling nearly 100 feet high.
It is the chef, David King, who seems to be making the biggest statement. His is not a Korean-based cooking, per se, but a sort of reverse fusion in which he roots into Oriental cooking and helps evolve it in global presentations and classical techniques. King cooks intelligently and tends toward earthy flavors and well-placed hits of spice. It is worth staying at W just so one need not move while making the rounds at King's various restaurants.
Try any of the hotpot dishes at Kitchen, such as one that blends spiced chicken sausages, preserved lemons, and pureed turnips. Head to Namu for a suave vetting of Asian cooking as a whole. One of the little-known traditions in Korea is the country's own take on sushi. King's response to this is salmon that is salted, cooked until crispy, and rolled with its own wafer-thin skin, pickled lime, and ginseng.
I spend my last afternoon yearning for something non-Korean. That's when I spot Lotteria. It is lined with chrome, yellow and red detailing, and appears to be a local take on a burger franchise. I go inside to order something, and what I find is kimchi, bulgogi, and shrimp -- all that is beloved and Korean -- up on the McDonald-esque menu board.
Minutes later, I'm sitting down with a kimchi patty, encased in buns made of rice, and a bulgogi burger. The kimchi creation has salty overtones and chili reverberations, and is loaded with vegetables. The burger coats my tongue with the sweet-lush tinge of bulgogi sauce. All around me are Koreans. Children surf the net at a free corner station. Local pop stars croon on TV.
Lotteria is my last taste of Seoul and yet perhaps the most perversely revealing. The Hermit Kingdom, it seems, can survive fast food and still remain staunchly Korean.
Rob McKeown is a freelance writer based in Asia.
