Dinner with friends

I spent part of this afternoon working on grading with some of my friends. We all met in a coffee shop in Seoul and graded for a few hours, then we decided to go get some dinner. One of my friends grew up in Korea, but she moved to America when she was 9. She speaks Korean, so she was trying to figure out where a good restaurant was. We finally decided to go into this little meat place.

Eating out is really different than it is in America. It is most common to order big dishes of food that the whole table shares. One of my favorite types of restaurants are the meat restaurants. Basically, you have a grill in the middle of your table and you order plates of raw meat that you then cook.  Another major difference is that all Korean meals come with 반찬 (banchan) that are small side dishes. 

Some restaurants have Western style tables and chairs, but this particular one didn't. I'm still not used to sitting cross legged on the floor for an hour or so. It can get kinda awkward... The food was really really good though! We ordered a plate of beef, a plate of pork and some 부대찌개 (bundae jigae).

부대찌개 translates into something like "army base stew". After the Korean war, meat was difficult to come by, so Koreans took surplus SPAM, hot dogs, and other such things and mixed them into the traditional Korean stew base. The stew we ordered also came with a block of ramen noodles and a slice of American cheese. It wasn't my favorite kind of Korean food, but it was ok. 

Hello John! (You can see the tips of Nayoung's chopsticks... She was sitting beside me, so she didn't make it into the picture) All of those little white bowls are banchan. You take the meat and there are several different things you can dip it in and eat it like that. Or, you can take the lettuce leaves and fold it all up in that and eat it. Both ways are really good!

Some of the banchan we got tonight were buckwheat pancakes with wasabi, bean sprouts and caviar on top, fermented pumpkin, several squid/octopus dishes, kimchi, and several others that I don't remember...

They brought out this portable gas stove to cook our stew on. You can also see the plate of pork waiting to be cooked and the block of ramen noodles with the cheese slice.

This is the budae jigae cooking at the table. 

One of the best parts about this meal was it only cost about $10 per person! It was pretty awesome!