We Ate Duck

A common type of restaurant here in Korea are the "beef & leafs." (No, not "leaves," "leafs.") When they bring the menu, you choose the meat you want. The server brings out the raw meat and then cooks it in the table in front of you, because the table has a gas-powered hole in it for cooking things.

Beef & leaf menu

Before the meat comes out, though, the server brings you a whole bunch of other foods which serve as appetizers, side dishes, and leaf-roll "sandwich" fillers. Below, around our main dish in the center, you'll see a little bowl of jalapeno slices, another of bean sprouts, one of bean paste, two with stuff in them that I don't know what they are, a thing of pickles, another thing of bean paste, another thing of jalapeno slices and garlic, kimchi (the rectangular white things with red stuff on them,) and two other things which I don't know what they are. Oh, and in the upper right-hand corner, a basket of leaves. Every side dish has unlimited free refills.

At this restaurant, we were shoeless, sitting on the floor at low tables on a screen-optional porch. The weather was beautiful and the sun shone on our spot.

There was a loud gathering of Korean women in the back and a man sleeping on the floor a couple of tables over.

And there were kitties outside the porch waiting for scraps. There's tons of feral kitties in Korea. A lot of them are of the tailless variety (like Manx cats.) The ones that do have tails, their tails are all messed-up-looking. The first few I saw, I just assumed their tails had been broken, but nope, they can be just genetically like that.

Once your meat is all cooked, you pick up a leaf and put it flat on your palm, use chopsticks to fish some rice out of your bowl, put the rice on your leaf, then put some of the cooked meat and/or side dishes on the rice. Sometimes the meat burns your hand through the leaf. Then you wrap the leaf around it all and eat it and stuff falls out everywhere unless you're awesome like me and use TWO leafs.

When we first got to this restaurant and read the menu, we saw that one of the menu items - the most expensive one - was duck. We ordered that, fully expecting a whole bird, probably one that was looking at us from the plate. But it was already cut up and unrecognizable and ready to cook and it turned out to be delicious.

Other beef & leaf restaurants we've been to left us still hungry, but this one was very filling. I think it's our favorite restaurant experience here so far, even better than the taco buffet we like in Seoul. It was just so comfy and beautiful and we were starving and there was so much food. And I got to feed the fatty parts to the kitties.