Chicken and beer have become serious institutions in South Korea. Korean style fried chicken started showing up around 1970, when cooking oil became more affordable. In the 1980s and 1990s, chicken “hofs” that served deep fried chicken and beer popped up everywhere. This was likely due to early forced retirement for mid-level managers in Korea Inc.’s chaebol conglomerates. Chicken hofs were sold as turnkey business solutions. Since so many opened on every corner, Koreans started going to them because they were there. These days, there are more chicken franchise locations in Korea than there are McDonald’s in the entire world.
The chicken hof has gone through phases. I’m a personal fan of the 1990s style. Small free range birds with papery breading and strong Asian aromatic flavors. Or as one chef I shared chicken with said, smelled like a cinnamon doughnut. The more modern style is closer to American fried chicken, dipped in a flour breading with all the nooks and crannies. There are a few franchises I like from this vein as well.
To sauce or not to sauce?
People debate whether Korean fried chicken needs sauce. I like to just get plain fried with some Yangnyeom Sauce on the side. “Yangnyeom” just means “seasoned” or “flavored.” In the Korean chicken realm it’s a sweet, garlicky, sticky, slightly spicy sauce.
Other popular flavors are soy sauce, buldalk “fire chicken,” and my other favorite, garlic chicken. This was invented in 1997 in the blue collar neighborhood near Daerim Station. Chopped garlic is stewed all day. After frying the chicken it’s baptized in this garlic mixture. Pure heaven!
How to know if it’s good
My rule of thumb is this. To tell a good chicken place, look at the people inside. If it’s full of beautiful young women taking selfies, likely isn’t good chicken. If it’s full of middle-aged men who look like life has kicked them in the teeth–GREAT CHICKEN!
Here are some consistently good chicken franchises and spots. Add your favorites in the comments.
How to use this list
Chicken places come and go quickly. Most of the places on this list are franchises. To find a location near you, copy the Korean name and paste it into Google Maps, Naver Map, or Kakao Map.
The Authentic Chicken & Beer Pub Crawl
Don’t take the risk. Join us for a fun immersive romp for loads of chicken and lots of beer. Click to check the dates and prices.
This classic style chicken has been around since 1986. They are brined for 24 hours before being coated in a spicy powder, breaded, and fried. You can get their mild version. You can also get their spicy version with spicy sauce. It’s a good satisfying challenge.
Everyone knows my love for Two-Two. It’s one of the oldest franchises and the first taste I had of Korean fried chicken. The birds they use are bony, but that means they aren’t factory raised. They actually have flavor. The crust is thin, delicate, and has that Chinese five spice and cinnamon scent that I always associate with Korean chicken hofs. This chicken screams for beer.
This is the one most Americans think of when talking about Korean fried chicken. The thing is, Kyochon is the only franchise I know of that does it this way–batter dipped rather than rolled in flour or starch. The batter is garlicky with a slight sweetness. The crust shatters and stays crispy a long time. If you order it “yangnyeom” style, they meticulously paint the sauce on each piece individually. Caution–the breading really seals the contents inside. Expect a hot geyser of chicken juice to burst out in your first bite.
Pronounced Bee-bee-kyoo. It’s the king of chicken franchises in Korea. They follow the American style of frying, but their flavor is unique. Claiming to fry their chicken in olive oil, they obviously feel like they have to chase KFC. They boast over 20 herbs and spices. BBQ’s flavor is unique and hasn’t been copied. You can smell a BBQ a block away.
They specialize in classic style, but they also make a mean pa dalk, boneless fried chicken thighs served in a sweetish peanut sauce and shredded leeks. The other half of their name refers to golbaengi, sea snails. For some reason they think that chilled spicy sea snail noodle salad goes well with fried chicken.
It sorta does, TBH. Reminds me of trips to the beach in my earlier times in Korea.
It’s been going through a re-branding to appeal to a younger crowd (note the two logos).
I have been so excited about this. It’s been my new favorite, and I can’t get enough of it.
Chickens are spit roasted over wood. Then they’re served on a sizzling platter of crispy rice. Usually it’s served with this sweet hot mustard and radish stem kimchi. Every time I take anyone to one of these places, the chicken is gone like velociraptors entered the building.
This style of chicken is called nureungji tongdalk 누릉지통닭, literally “scorched rice fried chicken.” It comes from Gangwon Province and has been growing in the Seoul Metro area. Gyerimwon is but one chain. Most all the places that serve this that I’ve been to have been outstanding. You’ll know it by the rotisserie chickens in the window, the ream of oak logs out front, and this heavenly smoked chicken smell.
Always start off with the original nureungji tongdalk. Then play with other variations, usually smothered in cheese, curry, or some other sauce. This will be your new favorite chicken and beer pairing.
Hanchoo 한추
Style: Batter
Not really a franchise. It’s a popular spot in Gangnam. It’s popular for being popular, but it has its fans. They serve fried chili peppers with their chicken, which is their schtick. I’m putting it here because people I respect like it. I personally had bad ju-ju with the owners when we were arranging a TV show to shoot there. One of them said they didn’t want more foreigners in their restaurant. I know where I’m not welcome.
Going into oven chicken territory, Goobne (GOOB-nay) has been getting popular lately. And it’s good. Even though Korea’s gone through many “well-being” food fads, for some reason chicken hasn’t registered. A Korean co-worker of a friend of mine said that since the fried chicken she was eating was Korean, it was healthy.
Goobne has promoted itself as a healthy alternative to fried. All I know lately is that when we order it, it’s stripped to the bone like those Winged Devourers did on “Beastmaster.”
Dishonorable Mentions
Just to shake up the anthill, there are a couple fried chicken chains I’m not too fond of.
The modern style of Korean fried chicken just has no flavor, no soul. It is not much different than bland versions of American style fried chicken. The only thing that makes it Korean is that you can get it tossed in sauce.
Basic rule: avoid chicken places with gimmicks. Miniature tongs, finger condoms, beer served in Pyrex measuring cups.
Saenghwal Maekju appears as one of the newer chains capitalizing on the popularity of craft beer. Don’t expect much from the craft beer itself. It’s mediocre. The chicken is even worse. The other menu items–worser worser worser!
Seriously. Gelato on stale tortilla chips. I ordered this thinking, “If they have it on the menu, maybe they’re on to something. You know, like dipping salty fries into a Wendy’s Frosty.”
Nnnnope. It’s as if a five-year-old took over as menu consultant.
Cilantro Kimchi: A Forgotten Korean Recipe with Deep Roots
You’ve probably heard the claim: Koreans don’t eat cilantro. Many food blogs repeat it like gospel. They say cilantro—also known as coriander—has no place in Korean cuisine.
But what if that’s not true?
The Hidden History of Cilantro in Korean Food
Let’s look north. In North Korea’s Hwanghae Province, there’s a traditional Korean recipe known as gosu kimchi (고수김치). “Gosu” is the Korean word for cilantro. This dish features fresh cilantro fermented with radish and spices—just like other kimchi. That’s right: cilantro kimchi exists and it’s Korean.
Before the Border Split
Before 1953, Kaesong was part of South Korea’s Gyeonggi Province. After the Korean War, it became part of North Korea. Kaesong is famous for its cuisine. It was even the capital of Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty.
Food from Kaesong—including cilantro recipes—faded from view after the war. Much of North Korea’s food culture remains undocumented or hard to access.
Refugees Remember Cilantro Kimchi
Joanne Choi, a Korean-American blogger, shared her father’s memories of cilantro-rich dishes from Kaesong. She called cilantro “comfort food” for him—something he missed deeply. Sadly, she couldn’t find any cookbooks or recipes from that region, even in Korean bookstores.
Clues from North Korean Tours
In 2008, a travel blogger visited Kaesong and noticed something surprising: cilantro on the table. It stood out as unusual compared to food in the South. That detail backs up claims of cilantro being part of the northern diet.
South Korean Buddhist Temples Keep the Tradition Alive
Cilantro hasn’t disappeared entirely. In South Korea, Buddhist temple cuisine preserves many old recipes. At Sanchon, a famous temple restaurant in Seoul, cilantro is praised for enhancing flavor—especially with meat-free dishes.
The Language Tells a Story
Here’s another clue: Koreans use the native word gosu for cilantro. They didn’t borrow the word from English or Chinese. That suggests it’s not new—it’s been on the peninsula for a long time.
Where This Cilantro Kimchi Recipe Comes From
This version of gosu kimchi comes from a North Korean source—yes, really. The original website is blocked in South Korea, but I found the recipe through archived content and compared it to a South Korean version: Gypsy’s Gosu Kimchi.
Only the North Korean version provided detailed measurements. That’s what I based this recipe on.
A larger variation of many traditional Korean pancakes, Tofu Steak was trendy for a while in dieting circles. The “steak” in this sense is supposed to resemble the Korean and Japanese versions of Hamburger Steak. It’s basically Tofu Meatloaf.
You can use any seasoning you like with Tofu Steak. I like to use Montreal Steak Seasoning. My sauce of choice is good ol’ British HP Sauce. For Americans, it tastes similar to A-1 Steak Sauce.
Valuable Tip
Get the firmest tofu you can. We call it Buchim Dubu 부침두부. It should have rough manly pockmarks in it.
This is the stuff gangsters eat when they’re first freed from jail.
Ex-con eating tofu after his release (from Ask A Korean)
Here’s a picture of the package I used this time. Most Korean and Asian markets will carry Buchim or Jjigae tofu. Just any really firm tofu. If you’re not sure, show this picture or the words to a Korean staff member at a Korean market.
This Korean vegan recipe–oh, why do I even bother saying it’s vegan? It’s just good.
I had it for the first time during my second year in Korea. San Maul, which is still my favorite restaurant, tucked in the southern foot of Mt. Gwanaksan.
Dotorimuk
The star of the dish is the acorn jelly. Honestly, the dressing can be used for so many things. That is also a Korean vegan recipe.
I don’t have a recipe for making actual acorn jelly itself. You’ll need acorn powder. My hunch is that if you can find acorn powder, you can find acorn jelly. It’s at most Korean markets.
Valuable Tips
To make slicing the veggies easier, I use my trusty slicer. You can get yours here.
You can make the Sesame Seed Powder by grinding them in a coffee grinder or pummeling them with a pestle and mortar.The Acorn Jelly breaks easily, so it works better to arrange them on the plate and then dab them with the dressing.
To make it more like the version at San Maul, which I’m trying to replicate here, do the following.
Use red leaf lettuce.
Substitute the Sesame Seeds with Wild Sesame Seeds (Deulkkae 들깨) Substitute Sesame Oil with Wild Sesame Oil (Deulkkae Gireum 들깨기름)Substitute the Sugar and Rice Syrup with Korean Plum Extract (Maesil Ek 매식엑)
Looking for more?
Check out our post on Korean Diet Foods for more inspiration and Korean vegan recipes.[zrdn-recipe id=85]
I think the ice has melted now. Pretty safe to say that. But who knows with that hellish winter that stuck around too long like me at a wine party. Hopefully the list we did on winter survival foods helped a bit. Now it’s time to cope with the heat and the rain.
Eun Jeong and I pow-wowed on this list. As with the winter list, she had reservations on a few items that Koreans don’t consider traditional foods for this time of year. But for a lot of us, these are the foods we cling to that makes the blistering Korean summer bearable. Let’s pop open the ice chest and share the goodies.
10. MulHwe 물회
This chilled sashimi soup and its “bibim” cousin Makhwe 막회 come all slushed out in crushed ice in a refreshing just-spicy-enough broth. Put the frosty stainless steel bowl to your mouth, and it’s like drinking from Arctic waters–if they were filled with gochujang and thinly sliced fish.
9. Patbingsu 팥빙수
I think of Patbingsu as a frozen dessert bibimbap. Shaved ice gets loaded with sweetened red beans, various fruits, candies, pillowy marshmallow-like ddeok plus whatever other additions can be fit in there, like sweetened condensed milk and ice cream. I like mine with a lot of fruit. Just stir it like bibimbap and devour. Watch for patbingsu headaches!
8. Bindaeddeok and Dong Dong Ju 빈대떡과 동동주
These are for a lazy afternoon when the sun is baking or when the rain is beating down on the steamy ground. A crispy, toasty, almost corn scented, Bindaeddeok (mung bean pancake) with the house made rice brew Dong Dong Ju satisfies the inner ajosshi. Enjoy this in the open air or under a shelter isolated by the sea of rain.
7. Samgyetang 삼계탕
This is the obligatory Samgyetang ranking, considering it’s the top traditional cure for summer’s electrolyte depletion. Assuming it was bland compared to other Korean foods, I stayed away from it for years. But one hot day, Eun Jeong was greatly craving it. For me, the chicken isn’t the star. It’s the ginseng and the goodies inside the chicken. That combined with the Insam-ju–soju inflused with ginseng–and the tastes bring me to a cool moss-blanketed forest floor. If you can handle picking through the bones of an entire chicken, this isn’t a bad dish for late summer.
6. Hwe DeopBap 회덮밥
From avlxyz on Flickr
I understand the old guideline that raw fish is meant for the winter. That was good advice before the days of reliable refrigeration. Even though Hwe DeopBap has the name “DeopBap,” it’s treated more like a Bibimbap than just raw fish on rice. It’s rice, lettuce, veggies and some type of raw fish that you mix with vinegared gochujang (Chojang 초장). It’s cooling and would make a great lunch during a day at the beach–or a great lunch that would make you think you’re having a day at the beach. I particularly like mine with some crunchy fish roe sprinkled in there.
5. Strange Korean Ice Creams
Summer brings on new waves of discounted Korean ice creams. We’ve seen the tomato popsicle, the controversial corn ice cream (love it), sweet potato ice cream and the suggestively titled “Big Screw.” There’s that clever watermelon ice cream popsicle with chocolate-covered sesame seeds. The milkshake in a pouch. The popsicle with gum inside the popsicle stick. Sports ice. Pistachio ice cream cones. Fish-shaped BungeoBbang ice cream. Pineapple bars. Melon bars. Red bean popsicles. The Dwaeji Bar.
Summer makes me fat.
4. Oi NaengGuk 오이냉국/Oi Muchim 오이무침
These are almost in the same category. I love the tiny bowl of tangy chilled cucumber soup that comes as banchan with many summer meals. I also look forward to Eun Jeong’s Oi Muchim, which is by far the most popular recipe on ZenKimchi. Thinly sliced cucumbers dressed with onions in a sweet and spicy vinegar dressing. The taste of summer!
Those cucumber dishes are best accompanied by a charcoal barbecue. Not traditionally considered a summer food in Korea, I’m pretty sure the rest of the world considers grilling meat a summer treat. I can’t wait for those steamy heavy nights sitting outside, watching the people go by, grilling galbi and samgyeopsal with some icy draft beers.
2. Fried Chicken and Beer
Speaking of beer, summer is the ideal time for the Korean chicken hof–bars that specialize in Korean fried chicken and beer. It’s a classic combo, right Ludacris?
I keep going back to my first year in Korea and hanging out at Two-Two Chicken with the Ansan gang. Something about the summer heat even makes the mayo and ketchup drizzled cabbage taste good.
1. Naengmyeon 냉면
This is the reason to look forward to summer. I’ve already had my first Naengmyeon fit, and the quenching bowl of noodles doused the heat-induced cravings. And don’t forget the Gangwon Province version called Makguksu. There’s even a makguksu museum out there. This restaurant we went to last weekend also served simple buckwheat jeon that were pleasantly smooth and mild with a touch of the earthiness that makes Naengmyeon noodles so great. *
There are many more summer foods that didn’t make the list but should get an honorable mention, like Mul Kimchi, Makguksu, fresh blended fruit juice and barley tea. What are some others?
* I should note that even though buckwheat is not a grain that comes from grass (like wheat) and doesn’t itself have gliadin proteins that aggravate the gluten-sensitive, most Korean Naengmyeon, Makguksu and Japanese Soba are mixed with some wheat flour so that the noodles can form a strong enough dough, like around 10 percent. So if you’re highly gluten-sensitive, it’s best to avoid them.
A few years ago I was asked to write a small book on promoting Korean food. I finished the manuscript, but it never got published. The publisher ended up going out of business. Here is the old manuscript for your enjoyment, posted in segments. Keep in mind that this was written in late 2011, but some parts are still relevant today.
One day an American event organizer called me, all upset. She is Korean-American and has put together food-related events and booths for Korean organizations and government agencies. Since I live in Korea, she wanted to know how people thought inside Korea. In her mind, their marketing minds didn’t make any sense. The example that made her want to pull her hair out was a Korean food exhibit at a Chicago food fair. It had a miniature version of the famous kimchi museum. One of the first signs at the exhibit read, “Kimchi is good for constipation.”Regardless of whether or not kimchi is good for bowel regularity, associating your food product with poop is not a good way to start your marketing campaign. It may work for some forms of cereal, where you’re primarily marketing it to elderly people concerned with their intestinal health. But that marketing ploy is used when a product generally doesn’t taste good. People don’t buy high fiber cereal because it’s delicious. They do it for health reasons. If it didn’t have the high fiber, they wouldn’t buy it because it doesn’t taste that great.That’s the problem with marketing an entire cuisine based on its health properties in America. Healthy food is something you need to eat—not something you want to eat. This perception was started a little over a hundred years ago with the Kellogg brothers.
A short history of healthy food in America
The Kellogg brothers were health fanatics, and they adopted and promoted a lot of trendy practices that we would consider strange today, all in the name of health. Amidst all this, they created Corn Flakes and other healthy cereals. Fast forward to the 1960s and 1970s with the hippie movement in California. The modern health food craze was born out of this movement. A branch of this Californian culture became obsessed with vegetarianism, fruitarianism, and eating granola and cereals. They adopted any trendy health practice they could, despite there being little or no scientific evidence to back up those health claims. The derogatory terms “flakes” and “granolas” were used for these new age self healers.In the 1980s a lot of this started to become mainstream. Jogging and aerobics became parts of people’s lifestyles. Granola and wheat germ appeared on supermarket shelves. New studies on what would keep people healthy came out every day. Diet trends came and went. By the late 1990s people got weary of all this. One week a study would say one thing was healthy. The next week it would say it was unhealthy. Sugar and fat substitutes introduced to the market to make people healthier turned out to cause more harm than good. New studies showed that people who were eating tasty Mediterranean diets were living longer than people living bland lives eating tasteless health food. Health foods were getting even stranger, like a product called “Tofurkey”—turkey-flavored tofu in the shape of a roasted bird, specially made for vegetarians.As a result, a backlash against the health movement started. People embraced using bacon and butter in cooking again. Some fast food restaurant chains introduced new products that went the other extreme—vastly unhealthy burgers that surprisingly became very popular. One restaurant introduced a chicken sandwich that used two chicken patties in place of the usual bun. Another made a grilled cheese sandwich with fried cheesesticks in between. The internet became a playground where people showed off their creations, trying to make the most disgusting unhealthy creations possible. Celebrity food personalities like Paula Deen became popular. Paula Deen is a woman whose dishes include a hamburger in between two Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, deep fried butter, and tons of creations loaded in mayonnaise. So much bad tasting health food had been forced onto the American public for so many years that the word “healthy” had become a bad word. That didn’t mean that Americans didn’t care about their health. The history has proven that in the end, taste will always win over health in America.
Does it taste good?
In Korea, it seems to work the other way around. The health aspects of a food are considered more important in marketing. Some truly bad tasting products are consumed in the name of “well-being.” Yet unhealthy yet tasty products are also gaining ground in the Korean public, especially with its youth. Children crowd around pojang macha in ironically named “Green Food Zones” consuming deep fried Pokemon-shaped pork, chicken balls in syrupy sweet sauce, and diabetes-inducing slushies. When I was a teacher, I never saw a student enter my classroom with a single healthy food.Taste wins. That’s why it’s problematic to lead the charge for Korean food globalization with its health properties. In many ways Korean food is quite healthy. In fact, that will be why it will remain popular in America after the trendiness has faded. Yet it also tastes good. That’s an even greater strength.I see many campaigns and reports taking the assumption that Americans have no healthy food. That’s a myth. Traditional American cuisine is quite healthy. Americans don’t eat hamburgers and pizza every day, just like Koreans don’t eat galbi and samgyeopsal every day. The traditional American diet includes many vegetables and salads. In recent years, though, cheaper unhealthy foods have become easier to get. Sugar was replaced with high fructose corn syrup in most products. High sodium fatty foods became more convenient than whole fresh foods. The same trend is happening in Korea. So Korea is not introducing Americans to healthy food. Americans have healthy food. They just choose not to eat it because it is less convenient, more expensive, and generally doesn’t taste as good.As I mentioned, Korean food’s strength is its taste. I knew an American who lived in Japan. When she visited Korea and sat down for her first taste, she said, “Finally, food with flavor!”My brother, who had just arrived in Korea after a week in Singapore, said the same thing as I treated him to a lunch of 보쌈. Korean food has bold flavors that are only matched in Asia by Thailand, Vietnam, and India. The challenge with Korean food is to convince people to take their first bite. You do that with taste. You tell them that it tastes good. After they take that first bite, and they like it, mention that it’s also healthy. Then they will eat more.
Dangers of well-being
Not only is it not the best marketing idea to promote health over flavor, it can be dangerous. There are many health claims in Korea for foods that come from traditional medicine and from marketing. Those same claims don’t always translate well outside Korea. Asia, in general, has a reputation for making larger-than-life claims about foods that can’t be backed scientifically. Think of all the foods that are supposed to act like Viagra on men. It has become a joke amongst travelers that every other food in Asia is supposed to “keep men strong.” Claims that are based in traditional medicine without scientific proof will get in trouble with western government agencies. The American FDA will not allow some of the more fantastic health claims in Korean food to be put on labels or advertisements. Doing so will get the producers of the product fined or, even worse, get the product banned from the country.The short-lived “Ricetard”Who is actually fooled by this? And who would buy this as a health food?Even if there is a scientific study or two to back up a health claim, it’s not wise to depend on it too strongly. As I’ve mentioned before, Americans have grown weary of scientific studies that negate previous scientific studies. A study can come out one month saying a food is healthy. Then a new study could come out the next month that claims it causes cancer. Also, if the scientific studies only come from Korea, then people will question the studies’ motives.Trying to package all of Korean food as “well-being” will do nothing but shoot the globalization campaign in the foot. For one thing, only a fool would believe that a culture’s entire cuisine is healthy, and Korean food is no exception. 삼겹살 is mostly saturated fat. 떡볶이 is mostly empty calories and carbohydrates with no nutritional value. 삼계탕 has 2.5 more calories per gram than a McDonald’s Big Mac. Korean cuisine may have lower fat content than American cuisine, but it also has high sodium content. Korea has one of the highest stomach cancer rates in the world. The American Cancer Society says that “smoked foods, salted fish and meat, and pickled vegetables” appear to increase the risk of stomach cancer. Those are all elements of Korean cuisine. So claiming that Korean cuisine is healthier than other countries’ cuisines is a shaky bridge to stand on.As far as translations go, the word “well-being” itself is Konglish. It is used to describe someone’s physical or financial health, but it is not attached to foods. So if you insist on marketing Korean food as a health product, use a word other than “well-being.”
Some health claims work
Despite this backlash against healthy foods, some health claims are becoming more effective in America. A Dutch company, Innova Market Insights, studies worldwide food marketing trends. The health buzzwords that are working in America include heart healthy, vitamin/mineral fortified, anti-oxidants, organic, trans-fat free, probiotic, and gluten free. Organic is greatly becoming more important. If you claim a food as organic, you have to be serious about it. A friend of mine visited a Han-oo cattle farmer who claimed his beef was purely organic. My friend asked him what he fed them. He said it was some corn-based feed from America. He asked if the corn was organic. The farmer didn’t know. If the feed is not organic, the beef is not organic.Americans do care about health in their food. They don’t see food as medicine. Yet if a product gives certain certifiable benefits without sacrificing taste, consumers are more likely to choose it. It helps to say that kimchi not only tastes great, it is a probiotic food. That is much better than putting a sign in front of a consumer saying, “Eat this. It prevents constipation.”
[box] A few years ago I was asked to write a small book on promoting Korean food. I finished the manuscript, but it never got published. The publisher ended up going out of business. Here is the old manuscript for your enjoyment, posted in segments. Keep in mind that this was written in late 2011, but some parts are still relevant today.
NOTE: I’m continuing this because someone I recently met said he really enjoyed the first few chapters and wanted to read more.
There is a vocal and powerful minority of Korean food promoters who think that Korean cuisine needs to appeal to the expensive fine dining crowd in order to be successful. They use the argument that people follow what the upper classes and the governing classes do. So if government officials and CEOs eat fancy Korean dishes, then everyone else will do the same.
“Oooh, Donald Trump eats KFC. I should eat it too!”
Stop and think on how ridiculous that sounds. What century are these people from? When was the last time you ate something because you saw a government official eating it?
The very beginnings of the Hansik campaign concentrated on this model. They held gala dinners for U.S. Congress members. They promoted expensive royal court cuisine. They spent lots of money on exclusive dinners that shut out most of the foodie community.
They did all this when the world was going into one of its largest recessions in modern history. When people were losing their jobs and couldn’t afford to eat out, Hansik promoters thought they could woo them with Gujeolpan (Nine-sectioned Dish).
Immediately it showed that they weren’t interested in promoting Korean food for the sake of promoting Korean food. They were doing it for status. They wanted to impress others. They were envious that diners were paying lots of money to dine in high-end Japanese restaurants and not in Korean ones. When you’re more concerned with charging high prices than the quality of the food itself, you shouldn’t be in charge of promoting Korean food.
Yangban chillin’ (Credit: Wikipedia)
Succinctly, this was a classic example of one exclusive class wanting to impress another exclusive class. They want to be in their exclusive club. It was yangban to yangban marketing, or Y2Y marketing. It’s difficult to believe that there are still people who hold such aristocratic views that died after the French Revolution. And to think that they thought this attitude would work in America, a country that was founded as an antithesis to aristocracies and has a tradition of anti-elitism.
Pretension vs. Pleasure
A few years ago, I went to the restaurant of one of these Y2Y promoters. It was known as Korea’s answer to fine dining. I was the dinner guest of a travel writer for The New York Times. We made reservations, and I showed up a little early. I was very impressed by the plates. The owner was also famous for his pottery works. The tables had white tablecloths. My party arrived. We were given menus and a wine list. The first thing the Times writer noticed was how overpriced the wine was. He had traveled the world and knew wine lists, and he was laughing at how high the middling supermarket wines were priced. That was a sign of bad things to come.
Yes. A $275 chicken soup.
The prices on the menu were astounding. We have no problem with paying high prices for good food, but it has to be stellar food. There actually was a Samgyetang (Ginseng Chicken Soup) on the menu that cost almost W300,000. We didn’t order that, but we found a few items that we felt would give us a good idea of what the restaurant served.
Where’s the scallop?
The first course was Scallop Muchim. What came to the table was strings of shaved leeks in a cloyingly sweet Vinegared Gochujang. We couldn’t find the scallops. We ordered the dish because we wanted scallops, not leeks and gochujang. After some searching, we found two paper thin slices. This W18,000 dish tasted no different than side dishes at a common Korean fish house. As the meal progressed, the dishes got better. Yet they were no different than food you would get at a local mom-and-pop restaurant. They looked prettier, but their taste wasn’t impressive. The only big difference was the price and the snooty overly formal service.
Now, you would think that you’re paying these high prices for the service and atmosphere. Well, the atmosphere was nice. Yet the service was like the worst caricatures of stuffy French waiters from movies. They did not make us feel welcome. They made us feel like we were intruders in their private domains. We felt highly uncomfortable the entire meal. Then they did the unforgivable. When we had just received our desserts and coffee, they told us we had to leave soon because it was ten o’clock and they were closing. This is something that I would hear at a McDonald’s. This is unheard of at a restaurant where patrons spend W100,000 per person. When I worked in restaurants in America, guests were allowed to stay as long as they wanted so they could relax and finish their drinks. They were not shooed out the door as soon as they received their desserts.
The owner of this restaurant said that his restaurant should be the model for how Hansik could conquer the world. He had a noveau riche notion of how wealthy people ate in fine dining restaurants. He put in the white tablecloths, pricey menu, and well-dressed waitstaff. Yet he never understood why people went to fine dining restaurants. It wasn’t to impress other wealthy people. It was to relax. To be pampered. To feel welcome. To eat extraordinary foods. His restaurant did none of that.
Contrast that with a restaurant I went to in New York City, Eleven Madison Park. It has been consistently rated as one of the top five restaurants in Manhattan. I’m not one of the super rich lawyers that usually dine there. I’m just a writer from Korea. And I wanted to splurge and treat myself to a nice meal. So I made a reservation online before going on the plane to New York. I dressed nicely in a jacket and actually was nervous to go there. Fine dining always intimidates me, no matter how many times I do it.
When I walked in, the person at the door said, “Hello, Mr. McPherson. How was your flight from Korea?”
Tableside Martini service. With a smile!
Now, keep in mind that I was nervous. I was by myself in one of New York’s top restaurants. I expected that snooty service. But it was just the opposite. The staff there was warm. Warm. They made me feel like I was their guest and that they wanted me there. The maitre d’ even came by to have a pleasant conversation with me. The head bartender came by to introduce their special cocktails, and he even had stories for each cocktail. I asked for their special martini, and he made it tableside with sharp precision. The whole time, he didn’t give a frown. He smiled, joked, told stories, and asked about my background. When my courses came, the cooks themselves brought them over and explained what each one was. And the food was unique, beautiful, and most importantly, tasted good. It was food I could get nowhere else, which is why people go to great restaurants. The wait staff did not interrupt me, nor did I see them interrupt anyone else. It was Chuseok that day, and a Korean daughter was taking her mother out for a nice meal. They sat next to me. They were truly enjoying themselves. I didn’t see that at the fine dining restaurant in Korea. The restaurant in Korea was cold, and people just went there to show off their wealth. Contrast that with this restaurant in Manhattan. It was much more luxurious than the one in Korea. The staff was warm and welcoming. The food was unique and tasty. And in the end, the check was slightly more than $100 but was a great value for what I got.
Korean food as status symbol
That, my friends, is what fine dining is supposed to be. It’s expensive, but there’s a reason for this expense. Great food. Great service. Great memories. The Y2Y promoters miss this point entirely. Instead of starting out by promoting the great foods that everyday Koreans enjoy, they promoted Gujeolpan and Shinseolleo (Royal Hot Pot). Do real Koreans eat those dishes on a regular basis?
Gujeolpan. Pretty. And pretty bland.
The reason they promote it is purely for status. They don’t care that it doesn’t taste nearly as good as everyday Korean food. They don’t care that average Americans can’t find it in restaurants. They don’t care that average Americans can’t make that at home. They just felt that Korean food should be a tool to impress other aristocrats. This feeling is infectious in Korean upper classes.
For example, I graduated from a prestigious boarding school in my high school years. Recently, it has become popular with Korean parents sending their sons to study overseas. My school’s administration regularly comes to Seoul to meet the parents and to recruit new students. Many of these administrators are my old teachers and friends. The parents they meet are wealthy because the school is expensive. I met one of these administrators, an old friend of mine, at a Seoul hotel for drinks one evening. I asked him how we was enjoying the food in Korea. He rolled his eyes and let out a deep sigh.
“I’m so tired of Hanjeongsik!”
Every day the wealthy parents were insisting on impressing him by taking him out for expensive Hanjeongsik. I understand that to Koreans it’s a luxurious meal. But to my friend and the administrator that was with him, it was bland and boring compared to the Korean food he had wanted to eat. He badly wanted to go for a classic Korean BBQ. The other administrator that was with him had a son who was teaching English in Seoul. So he just told the Korean parents he couldn’t go out to eat anymore. He was going to spend time with his son. Part of the reason was that he was burned out on Korean fine dining.
It has surprised and disappointed foreigners like myself who love Korean food to see Hansik promoters ignore the foods that foreigners truly love in order to impress foreign yangban (who aren’t impressed by those foods either). Instead of courting the real thought leaders in the food community, chefs and food writers, they went after CEOs, politicians, and mainstream media. In spite of all this money being spent to promote Gujeolpan to U.S. Senators, it has fallen flat. It’s not popular. What has gotten popular is Korean fried chicken, Korean-Mexican street foods, Korean-style frozen yogurt, bibimbap, and good old fashioned Korean BBQ.
The fact that Korean BBQ has been ignored is the greatest crime of all! The entire world loves barbecue. Yet I have heard promoters say that they don’t promote barbecue because it’s not high class enough. Well, you know what happens? If you don’t promote it then someone else will. In New York a Japanese izakaya opened and received great raves from The New York Times and other food critics. What was it serving? Gobchang Gui (Grilled Instestines). If Hansik promoters don’t start promoting the foods that people love the most, others will take it and promote it as their own.
Ashamed of Korean food
Are Korean elites ashamed of their own cuisine? I have noticed that the types of food they promote tend to look more Japanese than the foods I see in Korea every day. They’re pretty foods but also bland foods—like many Japanese foods. Hansik promoters envy Japanese restaurants that charge high prices.
An upscale Samgyetang that tastes great and DOESN’T cost W299,000
One luxury hotel in Seoul experimented with a fine dining Hansik menu. They invited food writers and food bloggers to try it out. I loved the food. It was a modern interpretation of Korean cuisine that was whimsical, gorgeous, and full of flavor. After the meal, I talked to a famous Korean powerblogger. He said he wasn’t impressed by the meal.
“It tasted too Korean.”
This is the type of pretension that frustrates me so much. It revealed how ignorant this famous powerblogger was. On his website he raves about modern French foods. Yet he never realizes that the French cuisine he’s so impressed with is just modern interpretations of traditional French peasant cuisine. That’s exactly what this Seoul hotel’s Hansik menu was. It treated Korean cuisine the same way it treated French cuisine. But these yangban Korean powerbloggers hate their own cuisine.
This is the heart of the problem. Yangban Hansik promoters, from the beginning, didn’t think of why they wanted to promote Hansik. It started out as just a way to impress other yangban. And they were using the country’s treasury to do this. This was dangerously idiotic since they took an approach that had never worked, especially during a recession. Did Chinese food become popular in Korea through fine dining? Did Italian, American, Indian, or even Japanese cuisine find success from that approach? No, they became popular through sweet and sour pork, pizza, hamburgers, curry, and cheap sushi. The fine dining came later.
Even when there is great Korean fine dining, it is met with suspicion overseas. One of Korea’s best restaurants and most talented chefs opened an outpost in New York City. Despite positive reactions from diners, the New York dining press criticized it for being too upscale and too expensive. (Postscript: It now holds two Michelin stars.)
There is room for Korean fine dining, and it is starting to take hold. Yet it has been foolish to lead with it. Hansik promoters should stop hating their own cuisine. They need to embrace the heart of Korean cuisine and figure out why people like it. In America, we say people need to “play to their strengths.” Korea’s strengths are in its basic everyday foods—its barbecue, its spicy dishes, its peasant cuisine. Those speak to people’s stomachs—yangban or not. Don’t lose sight and think of Hansik promotion as a way to promote an elitist image. That will fail.
French food is famous the world over for its sophistication. Yet when traveling in France, everyone knows that the great food isn’t in Paris, it’s in Provence—the countryside. And that’s what Korea is. It’s great peasant food that speaks to the heart. That prissy urban cuisine—Tokyo has already cornered that market. Korea’s strength is its rustic dishes like boribap, jjimdalk, and dalk galbi. In a way, Korea is the Provence of Asia.
Promote Korean food to promote Korean food. Famous chef Pierre Gagnaire said that in order for Koreans to promote their cuisine, they need to learn to love it first.
Sometimes we make mistakes at the restaurant. They’re not big mistakes. The fry station will sometimes make too many of an item. Or really, they make a few extra onion rings or fries just in case a couple don’t turn out. The extras we dump into a bowl as the evening progresses. If we end up with a good amount by the close of business, we like to cover it in chili and call it a “Dump Truck,” enjoying it with that post-shift beer.
I’m telling you this because one night, I delved into the Dump Truck and noshed on a multi-hour old onion ring. It was still light and crispy. Not greasy. It came from our new little experiment that we’ve implemented at OK Burger on the Cheonggyecheon.
Let me share it with you.
There are so many ways to make onions rings. The thing is, they’re temperamental. It’s hard to get them just right, and when you do, they deteriorate quickly. A lot of foreign bars in Seoul use beer batter, and it works just fine. We were using beer batter here. It’s classic. The thinking is that the bubbles in the beer help lighten the batter as it fries, making light onion rings. But as we all know, anything with carbonation goes flat. So really, you end up with flat beer batter. It flavors them just fine, but they can feel heavy after a while. One thing that living in Korea has opened my eyes to is how heavy fried foods can make you feel. Being on a diet of non-fried foods has made me more sensitive to onion rings, fish and chips, and my old favorites.
The challenge is that I wanted to make them lighter. Maybe more of a tempura style. One way I had known in the past was to use club soda. That’s how some Japanese tempura chefs do it. Like the beer, though, you need to use it right away. Then I heard about some places in America that were trying something new–vodka. The science is that vodka has a lower boiling point than water. It evaporates more quickly, and frying is basically just rapidly drying out foods. So foods fried in a vodka based batter come out lighter. Now, vodka is still quite pricey in Korea. But we have one very affordable substitute.
SOJU.
It was under our noses all along. It took a few experiments, and we had staff and customer volunteers try them. They couldn’t taste the soju, but they liked the crispier texture. The trick was getting the right ratio of frying powder and soju. Doing it like you normally make beer batter made them too much like tempura. That’s a good thing if you want tempura. It’s mesmerizing watching the batter hit the hot oil, bloom out, and crystallize like crispy snowflakes. When they’re that delicate, they’re difficult to season. The crust just disintegrates and falls off, and you’re left with naked onions. You want something more akin to a thick pancake batter. And really, it works!
At OK Burger we serve them with our housemade smoky ketchup, and they’re addictive. We’ve noted that plates that go out with onion rings on them come back empty.
[box type=”info”] UPDATE: OK Burger on the Cheonggyecheon is now closed, but you can still do this at home.[/box]
Hooni Kim, Michelin-starred chef of Danji and Hanjan restaurants in New York City, sees the marriage of Korean food culture with American food culture as Korean flavors married to local ingredients. At this time, one can’t be a “locavore” and make authentic Korean cuisine in the States.
“I define Korean cuisine as traditional flavors applied to local ingredients,” he told me during an interview that morning. “Certain ingredients you cannot get here (in America), such as gochugaru or doenjang. Then I apply it to local ingredients. I can get cabbage in Korea, but it’s better from New York or Napa — wherever you are from. Korean beef and American beef are very different, but it is still Korean food.”
Chef Hooni Kim says Hi to Joe McPherson and ZenKimchi readers. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
Kim has an interesting way of explaining the difference between Korean food and American food: the “flavor profile.”
“I think Korean food is more dynamic because it uses flavors like spice, salt, etc.” he said. “They (Koreans) go all out, whether it’s salty, spicy or umami. You can experience all these flavors. It’s exciting to your palate. It needs to be, because Koreans eat their food with rice, which is usually unseasoned and it’s a blank canvas.”
American cuisine has individually seasoned components on a plate, while Korean cuisine builds flavors in the mouth based on the banchan and rice.
“If I like saltier food, I can eat more of the food,” he said. “If someone else doesn’t like saltier food, they can balance the salt with rice. You will never find salt on a Korean table at a restaurant for that reason.”
Kim’s vision of Korean cuisine has won him Michelin stars, yet he can’t live on Korean food alone. What he enjoys besides Korean food are sushi and steak.
“Because I cook for a living, I like the natural flavors of ingredients,” he said. “There’s a change of textures and flavors, and I do that with Korean food but when I got out to eat. I want to taste raw fish or steak that is simply flavored with salt and pepper.”
Sometimes we need our food to be complex. Sometimes we want it as simple and clean as possible.
The future of Korean-American cuisine is “bright,” but Kim said he has been criticized for his Korean fusion offerings at Danji. Hanjan serves “Korean-Korean” food.
“The best chefs personalize their food,” he said in response to such attacks. “Even if different chefs are cooking the same thing, you should see their personality. A Korean-American growing up in New York City will have a different cuisine than a Korean-American from the Midwest.”
Part of the future of Korean cuisine in America must be a new generation to step up and make it.
“Coming to the CIA, there are over 300 Korean students studying here to learn how to be a chef,” he said. “That is a first step, having Koreans who know how to be a cook, cooking their own food in their own restaurant.”
Tips for foodies and budding chefs
The afternoon of the contest, Kim seasoned the questions from CIA Greystone students with sage advice.
“There are no shortcuts in cooking.”
Not everyone discovers their life’s mission in childhood. “I started cooking at 30. Growing up in a Korean family, cooking as a profession was not an option. It’s something to do if you aren’t smart enough to do something else. My mom was the worst cook. She just gave me money to go out to eat.”His marriage to a supportive wife is one of the main reasons he was able to become a chef. “I got married at 30, I was in medical school and I hated what I was doing.”
“Making soondae is all about technique. The ingredients have to be fresh and the technique has to been well done…. Soondae is a Korean blood sausage that is sold for about $5 an order on the street. You can take any dish to the next level. There’s no thing as cheap or bad food that can’t be elevated.” Even soondae.
“These days, you are looking for mentors. My mentor didn’t want to be a mentor. I cooked in a kitchen where I had to know. I wasn’t given answers. I had to figure it out; you don’t bother the chef. I make a mistake, I got yelled at.”
“You learn something in every kitchen and take something away from every experience.”
“MSG is like an athlete’s steroids. It makes food taste better without any work. It’s cheating.”
“You have to go eat out (to learn about cooking). It’s important to eat other people’s food.”
Kim offered this wisdom while judging a pork slider dish earlier in the day: “When you create something miniature, make sure everything is perfect. There’s no room for error.”
Oh, Christ, not now. We were shooting the final shot with Anthony Bourdain before he returned to the hotel and jumped on a flight back to New York. He was sitting at a lonely street food cart in Gangnam–one of the few that hadn’t been flipped over by government thugs–pontificating on his time here. A week, all-in-all. We got him a bottle of soju, and the proprietor supplied a paper cup. While he was talking, some drunk German kids had noticed the filming.“Oh shit! That’s Anthony Bourdain!”I’m not the confrontational type. I avoid fights–even on the internet. But I wasn’t about to let these punks ruin what had been the most grueling, heartbreaking, proud moment of my short career as a media fixer. I went up to the group to perform crowd control–telling them politely, quietly, and firmly to be quiet and move on. I even dusted off some of my German than I haven’t spoken in twenty years (used to live there). Sue Ahn, my partner in this whole endeavor and the breakout savior of the whole production, backed me up. After some resistance, they got the message and moved on.
How it all came about
It’s taken me a long time to process this whole experience. After it was done, I tried not to think about it. This was what I had been working for my whole time in Korea. Back in 2003, my Friday nights revolved around a little known Food Network show called “A Cook’s Tour,” where a then little known tall grouchy host would explore exotic locations and eat the local cuisine. He actually cursed on camera. They bleeped him out. That was the first food or travel show EVER to do that. At the time, I was into my year of odd tech jobs after the first dot-com bubble burst–making websites for dentists and lesbian rugby leagues. I wanted to do what this guy Tony Bourdain did. He was the inspiration for me to pack up my life and move to Korea in 2004, start this blog, and write about my experiences.
I fell into being a media fixer in 2008 when I got the call from “Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern.” I’ve been more of a consultant if anything–making suggestions on what and where to eat while also providing people to appear on camera. I rarely got to be on camera myself, especially American shows. They prefer that no n0n-Asian looking people appear on their shows in Asia–gotta keep up that illusion of exotic orientalism. Europe? No problem. Italians can be in Denmark. Americans can be in Italy. But Asia must stay Asian. The director of “Bizarre Foods” jokingly called it the “Whitey Quota.” Since then, I’d worked with people who had worked with Bourdain, including Andrew Zimmern himself, who talked about doing TV with him. The summer of 2014, I worked on “Food Paradise International,” and the director was a former director for Bourdain’s shows from the very beginning, and she had funny stories about playing practical jokes on him in Vietnam.Then I woke up to that email. I always scan my emails in bed after I wake up–just in case something like this falls into my inbox. I saw “Nari Kye” as I scrolled through. I had a minor celebrity crush on her since her first appearance on the New Jersey episode of “No Reservations.” Back then she was an intern. But she became a bit of a star when she hyperactively dragged Tony around Seoul for a “No Reservations” episode. This was around 2007, if I remember correctly. March. I had actually written an email to Zero Point Zero Productions offering to help if they ever came to Korea. The day after I sent that email, Tony wrote on his blog that he had just returned. Just missed them! When the “No Reservations” Seoul episode came out, a lot of Koreans and expats were disappointed, angry about it. I liked it. I defended it. The focus of the show was Nari and her idea of what Korea is. It’s not everyone’s, and that’s okay. People are very passionate about this place. A thousand shows can be done about Korea, and people would still say it hasn’t been shown right. I’m expecting that people will be upset about this “Parts Unknown” episode.Whatever. Fuck them.Anyway, back to Nari. Big fan. Email. She wanted to know if I’d be interested in working on the show. She pulled in the director, Tom Vitale, and another experienced fixer, Nadia. She called us the “dream team.” Nadia put together her team, and I got Sue Ahn and Marie Frenette to help me out. This was all in September 2014. Nadia and I would meet to discuss ideas. Then we’d be on Skype calls at 7 a.m. with Nari and Tom, fleshing out ideas. I’ve developed a system of collaboration over the years that involves a lot of Google Docs. The emphasis, especially with the CNN show, was on story. What stories could we tell?My scribbles during a phone call with New York. Sometimes it’s better to write in Korean.One story I wanted to tell was of Budae Jjigae–the spam and hot dog stew. I’m in love with this dish and its history, and I thought it would fit with Bourdain’s arguments on how peasant cuisine–what people make when there’s little available–ends up becoming some of the best cuisine in the world. I had pitched Budae Jjigae on every show since “Bizarre Foods,” and it always got shot down. Not this time.This was one of many stories we came up with. Things got hammered out. We were so busy that I hadn’t bothered to ask when they were coming to shoot.“Near the end of October.”Crap! That’s soon!October has been my busiest month since I started doing the ghost tours. It’s heavy tourist season in Korea. Most all the money I make from tours comes from one month–October. On top of that, two other productions had already brought me on board, one from the UK and one from Australia. Consultant for one. On camera “expert” for the other. Still other international shows were converging on Korea that month as well, including Eric Ripert (Tony’s drinking buddy, whom I had met the year before), which Nadia was working on. I think a total of five international shows with celebrity chefs were shooting in October. No, six. I think I saw Edward Lee while I was walking through Hongdae scouting locations.
The team arrives
Nadia’s team and mine split duties in scouting locations. I was setting up a big air soft battle scene outside of Seoul. Sue was way up in Uijeongbu scouting Budae Jjigae restaurants. I was also doing on-camera interviews with potential sidekicks to appear on the show. I can’t go into detail–the NDA I signed has formidable penalties–but it was tough. And it was also the heartbreaking part, as I think I had hurt some friendships in the process.Tom and Nari arrived before anyone else. We went around to check on locations. Not everything was set yet. Tom said that was how he preferred to go anyway–by the seat of his pants. Shows where everything was laid out ahead of time were dull. That was a sign of things to come. All the prep during September and October was just a draft. The Etch-a-Sketch got shaken. The whole narrative changed. I went from setting up restaurants to tracking down professional video gamers. I was trying so hard to get Hongdae featured, but it was more and more difficult to wedge it into the story. Mokbang became a new scene, and we had to track down a mokbang celebrity. There’s this one famous rude fat guy, whom Marie contacted, but he refused. Luck played out, and we found a guy with a military theme, which worked with the Budae Jjigae concept. My friend Simon Lee, who had been setting up the air soft scene, was disappointed that the air soft scene was cancelled. But he got pulled in to be the interpreter for the mokbang scene. We couldn’t do air soft anyway as Tony had slightly injured his leg while working out.The biggest problem was communication. I really should write a book on how to shoot overseas or how to be a fixer. One tip, ditch the Apple devices. They’re great, but you can’t change the batteries. When out in the field you won’t be around chargers. That’s why the DPs carry cases of camera batteries with them. You can’t recharge out in the field. Rent phones from the airport that have removable batteries, and buy some extras to bring along.
Scrambling on the ground
Things were underway. Nadia was making sure everything was set up on the ground. Sue, Marie, and I were the forward team. We were constantly scouting new locations. May I also mention that we were working full-time jobs on top of this? I ended up losing mine soon after. Sue and I didn’t get to meet Tony until the last three days of shooting. Marie didn’t get to meet at all. We also ran into the same problem we ran into with “Food Paradise.” Korean restaurant owners didn’t want foreign shows to shoot there. One restaurant owner (Hanchu) came out and said it. He didn’t trust foreigners. It drove me nuts that they’d open their doors gladly to the Korean production “Tasty Road,” but they could care less about Anthony Fucking Bourdain!One morning in the hotel lobby, I revealed to Tom that I had this recurring dream for years of hanging out with Bourdain, and in most instances, he was annoyed with me.“Your dream may come true.”Glamping. An idea was pitched to touch upon the glamping restaurant trend. Sue hiked around restaurants south of the river. Marie and I hiked around Hongdae. Sue found the perfect place. Then the shoot was cancelled. Lots of places we scouted for and secured got cancelled. One of the minor unanticipated challenges was finding places with no faux brick interiors. Tom refused to shoot anything with a faux brick interior. I hadn’t noticed before how many Seoul restaurants have faux brick interiors.I also was checking out places that had already been set up but not actually scouted–like the seafood place at Garak Market. One thing that no one anticipated was the extreme animosity between the owner of the place we shot at and the owner of the place next to him.Also during this time, did I mention that my ghost tour was packed, packed, packed? Even though I had another great guide helping, we were overloaded with bookings before this even started. Sue also had something she couldn’t get out of the night the pojang macha scene was filmed with Drunken Tiger. Jongno 3-ga is the best place for this stuff, I had suggested. And it was set up. So Sue and I were free to take care of our other business. In the middle of the ghost tour, I got a call (or was it a text) from Nari that the pojang macha manager had cancelled.
FUCK!
I couldn’t leave the tour to fix it. Sue was out of commission. It was like watching a friend drown while you’re handcuffed to a post. My guess is that a lot of these places are run illegally, and they suddenly got cold feet. They ended up finding another place, but I’m sure they were livid with me.By then, a lot of my original places were out the window. The only thing that survived was the one place I was most passionate about, the BBQ joint. I was introduced to it by Michael Hurt while scouting for “Bizarre Foods” in summer 2008. It’s been my favorite Korean BBQ place ever since. It’s actually the focal point of our popular BBQ tour. It’s another place I’ve been trying to get onto shows. A documentary was shot with it in the background, but it wasn’t featured featured. A whole Conde Nast photo shoot was done there earlier that year, but it got edited out. When I introduced Nari and Tom to it, they loved it. I was so happy.By the time we got to the BBQ scene, we were getting towards the end of filming. The last three days. It was also the first time we saw Anthony Bourdain in person. First impression: tall. Guy is tall with that shock of white hair. His face was calm, but his hands were fidgety, like he had a lot of nervous energy to release.
How Sue saved the BBQ scene
Before we go further, I’ll give a window into how cursed and lucky this production was. This is just one of many problems we fixed. One of the big scenes that Tom wanted to do was a hwesik–an office night out. Get three typical Korean salarymen. They didn’t need to speak English. It was preferable that they didn’t. Have Tony hang out with them. We were all recruiting our ajosshi friends. The thing was, almost NONE of them wanted to be on camera drunk. I even got the boss and crew from my office involved, but one of them didn’t drink, so they didn’t make the cut. Sue found out about some guys down in Bundang, way in the south. I took a taxi there the day of the shoot. Video interviewed them and uploaded. We waited. They got the thumbs up. I got in another taxi and zoomed up to Mapo for the BBQ scene. While we were having crew meal, I got a phone call from the guys. They said they had a meeting the next day and couldn’t do it. They were still arriving, but they couldn’t do the whole shoot. I got up and told Nari and Tom. Poor Nari had this glazed look like she was heading to the gallows.The guys showed up, and Nari, Nadia, and Sue tried frantically to convince them to stick around for the entire shoot. If they couldn’t be there the whole way they couldn’t be there at all. Dan Gray and I were on our phones trying to get last minute replacements. Tony was on his way. The whole scene may have to be cancelled. Well, I don’t know about that. Tom is resourceful, I learned.While I was on the phone, Sue sat down with Tom. Sue asked, “Look around this room. Is there anyone here that would be a fit for this scene?”“How about those guys?”He pointed to three men. One was in a three-piece suit and looked to be their boss. Sue turned to Tom. “I’ll ask them.”“Really?”See, Sue has superpowers. It’s not enough to speak fluent Korean to convince restaurants and talent to appear on TV. You gotta have a certain type of appeal. Sue knows how to read people. She knows how to persuade them. Somehow–and they almost copped out at the last minute–Sue convinced those three men to drink with Tony and Dan for what looks like will become the iconic scene of the episode. Yes, we all know that reality TV, even Bourdain’s show, is mostly set up. It’s a Truman Show with Tony being Truman. But this is the truth. He really butted into these guy’s real hwesik! This was organic. This was improvised. This was not faked.While filming the night out scene, there was a break between locations. I finally mustered up the courage to formally introduce myself to my hero.“Hi, I’m Joe.”“I know,” smiled Bourdain.SQUEE!!I gave him a little gift I had gotten made, a name stamp that read “Bourdain” in Korean. I told him if he didn’t want it, maybe his daughter could play with it. He asked if I had kids, and we talked about our daughters and cooking with them.Then it was back to work. Noraebang (Karaoke) scene. Last scene of the evening (morning, really).I should mention the camera set up. They were really thrilled about these new cameras they had invented, and this was the first episode to test them out. To me, they looked like Ghostbusters backpacks. The lenses were at the ends of snakelike tubes. The backpacks contained battery and monitor. The DPs also had monitors strapped to their chests. It enabled the DPs to do lots of acrobatic camera tricks. We were earlier trekking through Gangnam getting B-roll of crowds, and the looks people had when they saw this contraption looking at them.So the DPs, Tom and Zach, were doing their camera thing with Tony, Dan, and the three ajosshies in a noraebang. The rest of the crew was monitoring everything from outside. Tom gave directions via wireless. We had another room rented, full of food for the famished crew, where people hanged out so they wouldn’t be in the way.They also set up this contraption that anchored itself on the subject’s torso with a camera, using a fisheye lens, aimed at the subject’s face. The result is that the subject doesn’t move in the frame, but everything around the subject moves, creating a feeling of drunkenness. This came about one morning when I woke up to this message from Tom, sent out to the entire team.“I want this.”Zach and Todd pulled it off.
Wrapping it up
Final day with Tony. Final scenes. Sue had spent all week and all night–she even ended up in the hospital with an IV from exhaustion–finding the right restaurant for this scene. She had found one. But while the crew was setting up, the owner got cold feet and cancelled. Luckily, there was a backup. The owner later realized his error and called Sue regularly, begging them to come back. But no. We were sick of this behavior from all these restaurant owners. Just wanted to get it done. Even though Nari was the sidekick, we still had challenges in getting people to even be in the background. Some jovial ajosshies complied.Last scenes. Some pickup shots with Tony in Gangnam. While they were setting up, Sue and I finally had some lone time with The Man. I thanked him for changing my life. And yes, that came out just as awkwardly as it sounds. And he reacted just as sheepishly awkward as anyone would. But it was nice to have ten minutes to just talk about stuff, trivial stuff.The street food cart was the final shot with Tony. By the time he finished, the bottle of soju was half gone. He gave hearty goodbyes to everyone, jumped in the back seat of his car, and left.But that wasn’t the end.We still had a full day of B-roll. to shoot. We all met at the hotel, Banyan Tree, which is at the top of Namsan Mountain. Penthouse suites. Gorgeous. And scattered with highly organized and categorized equipment. We split into two teams–north of the river and south of the river. I was with Tom, Zach, and Gerald, Zach’s assistant and a friend of mine from other projects. Our team had two major challenges. Film some cool city shots with this talented dancer. And figure out a way to film the concept of han. In between, I had to do my Thursday radio gig at Arirang. The area I had in mind with the dancer is this area in Jongno that is always used in travel guides to showcase the neon in Seoul. Gangnam’s streets were too wide for what Zach had in mind. Gerald had rented a dolly that allowed a camera to be fixed on it. The result blew everyone away, including Zach. The dancer stood on the dolly and danced to the camera while it rolled back and forth through the narrow neon-lit streets. Her movements matched the movements of the dolly. Just, wow!In the meantime, a couple of us were locating two side-by-side restaurants for the han bit. Somehow we not only found two restaurants, but we were able to convince the owners to stand in as actors. They even stayed long after closing to get the shots done.That was a wrap.We went back to the hotel. The other team had already arrived. Sue had already gone home. Nari was zombified, and she went to bed after settling receipts.The folks who were left, basically all the men on the crew, pulled an all-nighter. Todd was really into so-maeks (beer and soju bombs), so I kept him supplied all night. And this was the highlight for me. I listened to these guys tell me all these stories from over a decade of doing travel food shows with Tony. I learned stuff about his Russian sidekick Zamir, that I cannot reprint. Now, Todd got notoriety for this scene from the Indonesia episode (2:11).Later, while they were filming in the Chinese countryside, and a person ran up to the crew. Tony was bracing himself to be accosted by a fan. But the guy ran right past Tony. He went up to Todd, pointed, and said, “You! Clumsy man!”I, personally, ended the shoot angry at myself. I felt that everything I had done had fucked up. Tom put me at ease. He said my job wasn’t as a fixer anyway. That was Nadia’s job. I was more of a consultant for the story and concept. He then revealed to me that he had his own recurring nightmare–of all the fixers from all their shows getting together, trading war stories, and ganging up on him.We also discussed some post-production business, like getting Noe Alonzo’s amazing timelapse videos in the show. Since Sue had rescued the production multiple times, I made sure she got the majority of the money ZPZ paid us.Everyone needed to be in the van for the airport by 6:00 a.m. I was the only one from the Seoul team to last the whole night. I helped pack and saw everyone off in the van. Before they left, Tom handed me the penthouse key.“It’s yours until noon.”I waved goodbye. I went up to the penthouse.I slept.(Credit for some of the photos goes to CNN. Was so busy, I didn’t take many pics with Tony actually in them.)
The Acorn Jelly breaks easily, so it works better to arrange them on the plate and then dab them with the dressing.
Substitute Sesame Oil with Wild Sesame Oil (Deulkkae Gireum 들깨기름)Substitute the Sugar and Rice Syrup with Korean Plum Extract (Maesil Ek 매식엑)
This and many photos credited to CNN 
The street food cart was the final shot with Tony. By the time he finished, the bottle of soju was half gone. He gave hearty goodbyes to everyone, jumped in the back seat of his car, and left.But that wasn’t the end.