Adventures in Eating

We just returned from two weeks in Asia, where we thoroughly enjoyed the food.  Needless to say, I haven't been cooking, which is why the long silence here.  And now I'm so jet-lagged that both my appetite and my alertness are impeding my interest in cooking.  So, I thought I'd share some of the interesting things we saw, ate and learned in South Korea and Japan.  However, we now realize that we were both pretty jet-lagged while we were there.  It's been hard to piece together what we ate or even exactly what we did.  Next time, more pictures and notes.

Steve was participating in a Geriatric conference in Seoul, along with a Penn State colleague and several current and former graduate students who originate from Seoul.  The students, Kyungmin, Jel, Soomi, and Bora, were our enthusiastic guides to sights and dining while we were there for a week.  The second week we stayed in Kyoto, Nagoya, and Tokyo, and enjoyed the able guidance of Steve' longtime collaborator, Yumiko, in Kyoto and Nagoya.  We appreciated having someone to answer our questions ("what is that?"), and even more to help us sort through the many and varied eating options.  For example, the photo above is the plastic food display outside a restaurant.  These were particularly good plastic imitations, but some of them were almost comicbook versions of the food.  It also turned out that sometimes the food on the menu was different from the plastic versions in not insignificant ways.  Luckily, our friend Yumiko made sure to question everything and translate for us.

Here are some of the culinary highlights of our trip:  For our first meal in Seoul we went to a famous restaurant high up on a hill that actually had a wedding in progress while we were there, with the bride and groom in traditional Korean costume.  We tried various bibimbap, an iconic Korean dish that consists of mixed rice, vegetables, sometimes meat, and an egg.  You can control the heat by not adding as much kimchi and/or chili sauce, which was wise on our first day there after a 20+ hour journey and not much sleep.

We ended our first day at a Korean Barbecue restaurant, where we shared a private room and ate a dizzying variety of foods.  There was sashimi, and other appetizers, but the star of the show was the barbecued beef ribs which were quite delicious, and were cooked on a grill in front of us.  This is a traditional meal, with many small dishes where a balance is achieved between heat, sweet, and sour.

The next day we went to a Thai restaurant, called Thai Orchid.  This is an appetizer we shared.

And here is our group right before we dug into the food.  While the chef was Chinese, the food was very similar to Thai dishes we've had in the U.S.

We took one trip to the outskirts of Seoul, to a Korean Folk Village.  There we tried some traditional dishes,

including these scallion pancakes.

On our way back into the city we searched out Jel and Kyungmin's favorite warm weather treat, red bean ice cream.  We tried to find a popular restaurant, but they turned out to have an hour and a half wait, so we went to the Galleria, a luxury department store with a gorgeous food hall (just like the ones we love in London and Paris).

Red bean ice cream is shaved ice with sweetened condensed milk poured on it, some Japanese candies, and a red bean mixture that you stir into it.  It was quite refreshing, and quite different from western ice cream.

Here's the Japanese plastic version:

We also went to a Chinese restaurant, where our table shared Sweet and Sour Pork and Garlic Chicken that were quite different than they might be in the U.S., but quite tasty.  The chicken had a generous hit of peppers.  Then we each had a bowl of noodles, green noodles with red bean sauce, that were seriously hot.  These were the specialty dishes of this restaurant, but we were also told that this is how most Koreans would order at a Chinese restaurant.

On our last day in Seoul, Jel and Kyungmin took us to a market where Jel did some shopping for a dinner she was making for her parents that evening.  It was in the basement of a "shopping center," and there were dozens of food concessions.  Each concession specialized in a different type of food, sometimes raw materials, like a butcher shop or vegetable vendor, but more often, something that had been created by someone who specialized in that particular item, such as rice cakes, kimchi, vegetable side dishes, dumplings, etc.  It was absolutely fascinating, and the purveyors exhibited the skill associated with having great experience in the specific thing they made.  They all insisted that we taste their wares, and I have to say that most things were as tasty as they looked.

In Kyoto, we sampled Chinese dim sum and Tempura at Takashimaya, a luxury department store with branches throughout Japan.  It has a number of restaurants, which are all of very high quality.  The dim sum was freshly made, and just the snack we were looking for on our first day there.  The next day, we sat at the counter while the chef made our tempura, which was so fresh that we watched him catch the sardines and the eel that very shortly were placed on our plates.  The tempura batter was incredibly light, and the oil is kept at a constant temperature, so it is not greasy.  Takashimaya also has a food hall like the one in Seoul, so we spent a fair amount of time wandering around looking at the beautiful food.  Of course, only part of it was Japanese, the rest was an international mix, Chinese, and French being most prevalent.  In fact, the Takashimaya in Nagoya had an outlet of Fauchon, the pricey French bakery.

One day when we were touring the temples in Kyoto, we happened upon a tiny restaurant called Cafe Alba.  The sign said, in English, that they had soba noodles and preservative-free, organic ingredients.  Inside there were only four tables, and the chef made the noodles to order while we watched:

It was a blistering hot day, and the soba noodles were put in a cold broth.  Mine came with duck and vegetables:

We also had a sukiyaki dinner with Yumiko that was quite enjoyable.

We had booked a restaurant tour in Tokyo that turned out to take us to places we would never have found on our own.  The first restaurant specialized in "bar food," skewered and grilled things like
chicken wings and chicken breast with wasabi,

Japanese meatballs,

and whatever these things are:

The other restaurant we went to was a Japanese pancake restaurant.  I have to say that I had no idea such a thing existed.  There are a variety of "pancakes" on the menu, but the general idea is that you have a griddle in the middle of the table and they bring you a bowl with what you ordered.  The "batter" is on the bottom, and vegetables and sometimes some meat are piled on top.  The diner mixes up the ingredients in the bowl, then oils the griddle and pours the batter on.  You wait until the bottom is brown, then flip it over.  The one pictured below is called okonomiyaki.  It had a little bit of pork, but a lot of cabbage.  Once it is browned it is topped with a thick, sweet soy sauce, then (and this was a little surprising) mayonnaise and bonito flakes.

I know it sounds unusual, but it was delicious.

So we tried a number of new things, along with some new versions of familiar things.  We wish now that we'd done a better job of taking pictures of the food, and promise to do better the next time we travel.