Night shot of the snowy mountain outside my apartment

The Mariah Carey music gets louder as the Christmas cake displays pile on outside any business with an oven or ice cream freezer. Even Cold Stone has gotten into the act this year. Downtown Seoul is even more lit up than last year, and Coca-Cola has taken over Gangnam. To all the complainers that Christmas gets more and more commercial, the west can never beat Korea.

Fighting!

Here’s some banchan for your stocking:

News and Blogs

• Fave (and only) microbrew importer KaBrew will have some all-you-can-drink New Year’s party
• Grace Young won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award for Stir-frying to the Sky’s Edge. You can read ZenKimchi’s interview with Grace here.
• Korean tacos are one of the top ten memes on Serious Eats for 2010
  • And have they gone out of control?
• Mahalo teaches how to order galbi in Korean (via Starting Out London)
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UujuKV2tMbQ[/youtube]
• A Korean-American joint venture hopes to open a cattle processing plant in North Dakota to process and export 1,250 heads of cattle a day [HT a reader]
• Was surprised to find my name while reading this one as a voice of dissent

Restaurants

• Zelen Bulgarian restaurant (Itaewon)
• Danji (Hell’s Kitchen, NYC) is opening with Chef Hooni Kim, formerly of Masa, with a combination of traditional and modern Korean foods–though I think the “Steak Tartare” sounds like a traditional Yuk Hui.
  • Check out the menu
  • HuffPo seems to like it
• Surajung (Burbank, CA)
• Tov Tofu (Santa Rosa, CA)
• A Korean restaurant reviewed by PETA (rather than picketed)?
• So Dong Kong (Ft. Lee, NJ)
• Jongno Bindaeddeok (Hongdae)
• Brand Nu serves unlimited cocktail at W15,000 per hour
• Tony’s Aussie Bar and Bistro (Itaewon)
• High Street Market (Itaewon) may be what we’ve been wishing for all along
• E-Pin (Halifax) “Why in hell would I want to pay to cook my own food?”
• Seoul Barbecue (Cairo, Egypt)
• Jin Ju (Chicagoland)
• BBQ Chicken (L.A.) pronounced bee-bee-cue and is known for fried chicken in Korea

Recipes

• Tammy shares a Kogi-style Korean taco recipe from ZacharyZachary
• Rob’s trying to make makkoli
• A tea recipe from Dr. Sook-ja Yoon

And finally…

Are you ready to TROT???

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQC_zB4RD30