Our first night off-post was the first night we went to a Korean restaurant. When it was dinnertime, we left the hotel, chose a direction, and walked that way.
We went past a few restaurants before stopping. "This one looks classy," Joe said, so we started to read the menu posted over the sidewalk. (Actually, we just looked at the pictures; the menu was in Korean.) While we were staring at the pictures trying to decide if we wanted to go in there, a man came onto the restaurant's porch and started setting up some sort of Hibachi grill. Then a woman came out and smiled and waited for us to say something, and we hadn't really decided if we wanted to eat there or not yet but we followed her into the restaurant anyway.
She asked if we wanted a table or a room. We saw the rooms to our right. They were walled off with thin wooden partitions covered in paper with flowers in it, and had sliding wooden doors with translucent panels. I got all excited because I wanted the most Asian-ey experience possible. We took a room.
We had to remove our shoes before stepping inside, because we walked on the knee-high platform where we'd be sitting. At first glance, it looked like we were entering a tiny room with an elevated floor where we'd be kneeling at our table.
The waitress seated us and brought menus. We stared at them. She came back and took our drink order, and we were still staring at the menus. When she came back five minutes later...still staring. She said in poor English to let her know when we were ready, and closed the door. She had left two small bowls of food on the table.
She shouldn't have brought the two little dishes. They just distracted us from our menus.
One dish held a vinegarey sauce with raw white onion chunks and two pieces of spicy pepper. The other dish was yellow, and the things in it were kind of shriveled and smelled like a beach at low tide and were cold and chewy and kind of fibrous, like cold chewy shriveled fibrous pieces of...I don't know...celery or something. It was some kind of vegetable, and before we got here everyone always talked to us about Kimchi, so that's what I assumed it was. We asked the waitress what it was. She had to think for a few minutes of what the stuff was called in English and, after a few moments, said "Yellow beet?" The taste wasn't bad, but I couldn't get past the consistency.
Once we identified the weird yellow things, we asked the waitress to translate a few items on the menu. We ended up ordering by pointing at pictures. I pointed at a picture with beef, smothered in a thick yellow sauce, over lettuce-like vegetables. Joe ordered something with chicken in it.
My meal was delivered first. It was beautifully presented. Small slices of beef were arranged in a circle over a bed of lettuce, with a flower made of beef on top; also, a slice of cucumber, some lemon slices, and a little tuft of what I think was sliced lemongrass. The dish didn't have a thick yellow sauce at all. The beef looked uncooked. The waitress left the room after placing the dish in the middle of the table. I looked at the red meat and then at Joe. "That's not what the picture looked like," I whispered. He shrugged and smiled like, what do you want me to do about it?
I picked up my chopsticks - this was the first restaurant we'd ever been to with no forks - and used them on a piece of meat. It was partially frozen. Not enough to be inedible, just enough to where you could tell it had been frozen or on ice. Cold, lightly-cooked beef. Mmmm.
It wasn't what I was expecting, but it wasn't bad, so I kept eating. Joe helped. Five or ten minutes later, when the waitress brought Joe's food, the Beef Tataki and its bed of lettuce in another vinegary sauce were almost gone.
Joe's food tasted like normal food. It was chicken deep-fried in a thick batter, over a bed of lettuce, with lemon slices.
We eat off each other's plates anyway, so it was pretty convenient that the waitress placed each dish in the center of the table. From what I understand, that's how you eat in Korea: Everything goes in the middle, and everyone eats from each dish. That's why there was a small plate for each of us on the table.
I had caught a brief glimpse of the clothing of the men seated in the room next to us. They were wearing business clothes. Their meal had been going on before we got there, and through the time we spent staring at our menus (ten minutes,) waiting for our food (twenty minutes and then another ten minutes,) and eating (maybe fifteen minutes,) the businessmen were loudly talking. After we'd put down our chopsticks and began to thoroughly inspect our little room, bored, we heard them still eating and talking. We'd been done for at least ten minutes. In the States, we would've paid our check and been getting ready to leave by that point. Instead, our room's thin door was closed and Joe had begun to make faces and poke things with his chopsticks. We felt like we'd been forgotten by the waitress. We came to the conclusion that meals here take much longer than they do in America.
Finally, we opened the door a crack to signal that we needed service. A few seconds later, the waitress came to the door. "Do you have any dessert?" I asked. She smiled and looked away for a second, figuring out what I was saying, I think. Then, sounding unsure: "Like...ice cream and cake?" "Yeah," I said, "Except...like...Korean." They didn't. I was sad. But we asked for the check.
When it was time to leave, we climbed out of the room and put our shoes back on. We hadn't left a tip on the table. In Korea, apparently, you don't leave tips. I read that, generally, the only workers in Korea who collect tips are strippers. So don't leave money for your waitress.
Walking out of the restaurant, I asked Joe if he was still hungry, 'cause I was. We both were. We stopped at a 7-11 on the way back to the hotel. I'll tell you about that in the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment