강미 | learning korean오징어
오징어 먹었어요.
Not on purpose, of course (for those of you who know me). But it wasn’t as bad as I expected.
In my area, there are three restaurants that serve Korean food. One of them advertises itself as serving Korean food. The food isn’t terrible, but it’s not Korean, either.
Another is a Japanese restaurant owned by Koreans who list a few Korean items on their menu. It’s all right, but I missed the egg in my 순두부 last week.
Today I decided it was high time to visit the Seoul Garden Restaurant ("with a licensed Korean chef"), a restaurant that opened this past summer. It serves both Korean and Japanese food. The location wasn’t promising, as it’s located in what may have been the restaurant section of a rundown motel. The menu, however, was. I had just been telling 인선 that I hadn’t eaten 돌솥 비빔밥 since I left Korea, and there it was.
Like most Korean food I’ve eaten here, it wasn’t quite what I expected. It was plain rice served with soup, a whole fish, and an abundance of 반잔. The deep-fried noodles were unfamiliar, but so was the fish staring at me, and I was eating that. Well, I was eating the deep-fried noodles, too, which were chewier than they looked, but they were good. It wasn’t until I sensed a slight fishy taste that a light began to glow, and I asked my waiter what it was. “Dried squid,” he said. “오징어?” I asked. “Yes,” he said.
I’m not a vegetarian, but there are many forms of meat that I don’t eat. These days it’s more out of force of long-standing habit and a well-developed aversion to those forms. However, in certain circumstances, I would eat almost anything put in front of me without a peep. 오징어 joins calamari and prosciutto as meats that I would not normally eat, but which I no longer fear (truthfully, prosciutto should never be feared, but embraced).
Posted by kangmi on November 12, 2004 at 7:58 PM6 comments
