FOOD IN ANOTHER ALPHABET 1

Food has proven to be one of the most overwhelming, confusing, exciting, worrying, and satisfying experiences of our adventures in Seoul. I hardly know where or how to begin writing about it—just as I hardly know what to order in a restaurant or for that matter what restaurant to go into when I’m hungry. I’m without vocabulary and many restaurants lack a vocabulary I can understand. Even the picture displays in front of eating places aren’t much help since I don’t recognize what I see. I could just march in and point at something … if I weren’t allergic to shrimp and anxious about their potential lurking presence.

When Nancy suggested we have dinner together after the Pride Parade we said yes instantly. Korean barbecue (gogi gui) was on our minds. We didn’t have to wander far through the lanes to find a restaurant where we were seated at a wooden table with a hole in its centre and a length of metal pipe dangling over it. A man placed an iron pot of burning charcoal into the hole, and a round convex grill on top. Seaweed soup, a basket of greens (red leaf lettuce and beautiful sesame leaves) and chilies arrived, with small side dishes, kimchee of course, seasoned chives and onions, ssamjang (a red paste) and garlic grilled in sesame oil; then came a plate with pieces of marinated pork.

Nancy started the pork sizzling. A server kept her eye on the process and after several minutes replaced the grill top with a clean one.

Nancy Kim minding the pork.

There's something about meals cooked at the table that makes for pleasurable conversation as you wait (think of fondues, for instance) and we settled into talk over beer and chungha (a delicious rice wine, the Korean equivalent of sake) while the pork cooked.

When the meat was ready we each took a piece and wrapped it in a lettuce or sesame leaf with whatever we wanted of the side dishes and devoured it. Yum! In no time the pork was gone and we were full. But apparently we ate only the appetizer portion of a standard barbecue meal. As we walked out into the twilight Nancy explained that no Korean meal is complete without rice--the next stage would have been a bowl of rice with an entree accompaniment.

The barbecue spread ...