Tag: galbi

Why Your Galbi Experience Might Be a Lie (Unless You’re Doing it Like This)
Most people think they’ve eaten galbi because they sat at a grill, flipped something shiny, wrapped it in lettuce, and left smelling like smoke. That assumption is common, understandable, and usually wrong.
Seoul has no shortage of BBQ restaurants that look convincing. Wood-paneled walls. Stainless exhaust pipes. A server with scissors moving quickly from table to table. The performance is familiar. The result is often forgettable.
What keeps mediocre galbi alive isn’t malice. It’s repetition. Once enough people accept the version in front of them, the original quietly steps aside.
Table of Contents
What Galbi Used to Mean
When Substitutes Become the Standard
Cheap Galbi, Not as a Moral Problem
The Fire Chief Still Tells You Things
When the Meat Hits the Grill
About Rules, and the Lack of Them
LA Galbi Has Its Own Story
Where Galbi Still Feels Like It Used To
A Quiet Ending
What Galbi Used to Mean
Galbi 갈비 means ribs. Not ribs as a flavor category, but ribs as structure.
Older Koreans still talk about wang-galbi without irony. Large ribs. Real bones. Meat that varies in thickness and shape because animals are not symmetrical. It bends on the grill. It resists the scissors once before giving way.
The bone is not decorative. It changes how heat travels. It slows the cook. It keeps the meat from drying out before the sugars in the marinade caramelize. You notice it most in the bite closest to the bone, where the flavor deepens instead of sweetening.
That style of galbi still exists, but it no longer dominates.
When Substitutes Become the Standard
At some point, practicality crept in.
Smaller cuts were easier to portion. Uniform shapes were easier to price. A clean bone added familiarity. Food-grade binding agents made it possible to attach one to the other.
Nothing about this is illegal. Nothing about it announces itself as wrong. Once marinated, grilled, and cut tableside, most diners never question it.
The scissors clatter. The smoke rises. The table fills. The difference disappears unless you’ve felt it before.
Cheap Galbi, Not as a Moral Problem
A friend of mine, Injoo, has spent years chasing cheap BBQ with a kind of cheerful persistence. Three-thousand-won pork belly. Five-thousand-won galbi. He treats new price points like rumors worth investigating.
Most of the time, the results are predictable.
One night, after a long day wrangling kids at a Halloween carnival, he suggested another bargain galbi place. I hesitated. Cheap galbi often means shortcuts, not because the owner is dishonest, but because something has to give.
This place held.
The grill came out empty. Then the charcoal arrived.
The Fire Chief Still Tells You Things
In older galbi houses, someone still handles the fire.
Charcoal comes fast and hot, dropped into the pit with the practiced indifference of repetition. Ash lifts into the air. Heat rolls across the table edge and into your sleeves. It smells sharp, unfiltered, and temporary.
Gas grills are tidy. Charcoal announces itself. You notice it later, on your jacket, when you think you’ve left dinner behind.
When the Meat Hits the Grill
The sound is dry and immediate. Sugar catches quickly. Soy and garlic darken if you hesitate. Fat drips, flashes, and sends smoke back up into the hood.
The scissors move fast. Metal clicks against metal. Pieces fall where they land.
This is usually the moment when substitutes reveal themselves, not through drama, but through texture. Uniform cuts behave politely. Real galbi pulls unevenly. One section yields. Another holds for a second longer.
You don’t need to know why to feel it.
About Rules, and the Lack of Them
Every few years, someone decides galbi needs etiquette. One lettuce leaf only. Garlic cooked but not raw. Sauce in a specific order.
None of that holds at the table.
Koreans eat galbi according to mood, appetite, and whatever is within reach. Garlic raw or grilled. One leaf or two. Kimchi folded into the wrap because it fits better that way.
There is one rule that does seem to persist. Don’t put your rice spoon into a shared stew. Everything else adjusts.
LA Galbi Has Its Own Story
LA galbi exists because butchers in the United States cut beef differently. The solution was to slice across the bone. Thinner meat. Faster cooking. Easier to handle.
It can be good. It is not a replacement for wang-galbi. It solves a different problem.
When a restaurant offers only this cut and presents it as tradition, it’s usually a sign of what they value most. Speed. Predictability. Familiarity.
Where Galbi Still Feels Like It Used To
You tend to find it in places that are slightly inconvenient.
Restaurants with uneven menus. Grills scarred from decades of use. Ventilation that rattles louder than the music. Tables filled with people who don’t photograph their food because they’ve eaten it before.
These places don’t announce themselves. They don’t need to.
You don’t stumble into them the way you once could. You notice them because something about the meal feels slower, heavier, more complete.
A Quiet Ending
None of this means you were fooled. It means the city changed around a dish that once had a narrower definition.
Galbi didn’t disappear. It loosened. It adapted. It learned to behave.
If you’ve eaten enough of it, eventually you notice when something feels different. Not worse exactly. Just smoother, easier, and oddly forgettable.
That recognition tends to arrive mid-meal, when the smoke hangs a little longer and the bone finally makes sense again.

This post was originally published on Oct. 29, 2005. Updated in 2026.
January 14, 2026
VIP Restaurant, Anchorage, Alaska
On trips to see family in Alaska’s largest city, Anchorage, I make it a point to visit VIP Restaurant at least once. It’s located in the Valhalla Center, a retail and office building amid the Korean business cluster along West Northern Lights Boulevard.
There are a few other Korean restaurants in the city, but I have a personal connection to this one. A relative built the center the 1970s and leased the space to the restaurant in the early 1990s.
VIP Restaurant is on the ground floor of the Valhalla Center on the far right side. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
VIP Restaurant — 영빈관 in the Korean name means “house for special guests” — serves a large variety of Korean food, particularly soups and stews (탕 tang and 찌개 jjigae). VIP also has a selection of broiled fish, beef and pork dishes.
For those reluctant to try Korean food, also offer a modest selection of Chinese restaurant favorites, such as curry chicken, fried rice and Mongolian beef.
My husband and I brought my mother-in-law and stepfather-in-law for a weekday lunch. The restaurant was not crowded, and we received attentive service.
Land of the Morning Calm in the Land of the Midnight Sun: A 13-banchan display was traditionally reserved for royalty, but this is not a snooty, royal cuisine restaurant. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)
The waitress brought out 13 반찬 banchan (appetizer plates), the most I’ve seen at any Korean restaurant I’ve visited so far in the States.
One of the banchan highlights was the seaweed salad. My husband normally eschews chewing seaweed in its various forms. This was first seaweed salad he said he enjoyed, partly because the type of plant used was the more delicate wakame seaweed (which is called 미역, miyeok in Korean) and partly because the savory-sweet marinade pleasantly masked the taste.
The main course came with a small bowl of 동민 dong min radish kimchi broth flavored with green onion and beef. That was another first for me on this side of the Pacific.
Between the four of us, we ordered 갈비 galbi (grilled beef ribs), two variations of 돌솥 비빔밥 dolsot bibimbap (hot stone bowl filled with mixed vegetables and rice) and Mongolian beef.
Ordering galbi ($12.99 lunch) and Mongolian beef ($11.99 lunch) allowed a side-by-side comparison of Korean and Chinese foods. The galbi was grilled wang-style (“king” cut with thin meat along two- to five-inch-long ribs) rather than L.A.-style (a thin flanken cut) more common to Korean-American restaurants.
The galbi had the typical Korean sweet touch, likely from fruit juice or corn syrup in the marinade. The Mongolian beef was stir-fried with ample green onion and certainly was more savory than the galbi. My Korean cuisine–averse builder-relative scarfed up the galbi and barely touched the Chi-Am dish.
The dolsot bibimbap dishes — served at this established in thick metal bowls rather than earthenware — hit the key cue: a blazing-hot bowl to crisp the rice in sesame oil and keep the food warm throughout the meal. The latter is nice for a typical Anchorage August day: in the 50s Fahrenheit and raining.
Kimchi bibimbap with the required fried egg. The other veggies are hiding behind the kimchi (Jeff Quackenbush photo)

My husband ordered dolsot kimchi bibimbap ($14.99). He noted for our Korean cuisine–cautious tablemates that cooked kimchi takes on a mellower flavor from its banchan brother.
Royally Jeonju-style bibimbap: I decided I preferred having kimchi on the side this time around. (Tammy Quackenbush photo)

For my hot bibimbap, I chose to eat like a queen: 전주 Jeonju bibimbap ($15.99). This specialty of Jeonju incorporates cues from Korean royal cuisine. My dish was overflowing with veggies: shredded laver, carrot, radish, soybean sprouts and gosari. My taste buds appreciated a generous squirt of bibibimbap 고주장 gochujang (a sweetened version of Korea’s go-to spicy red pepper sauce) from the tabletop squeeze bottle.

VIP Restaurant
Valhalla Center, 555 W. Northern Lights Blvd, Ste. 105, Anchorage, AK 99503
(907) 279-7549
Hours: Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m. to 10 p.m.
Yelp: www.yelp.com/biz/vip-restaurant-anchorage
August 13, 2011
Peanut Ssamjang a.k.a. Satay Sauce
On a barbecue blog I found a recipe for Korean Satay Sauce. It’s a dipping sauce combining marinade for the popular Korean grilled beef dish 갈비 kalbi, peanut butter and water.
Satay is a favorite marinated skewered meat dish of Southeast Asia, and it’s usually paired with a peanut sauce.
“Korean Satay Sauce” is a curious recipe name, because a sauce Koreans commonly use with meat is 쌈장 ssamjang. The word literally means a jang, or sauce, for ssam, or meat wrapped in a sauce-slathered leaf of lettuce or 깻닢 kkaenip (perilla). A common ssamjang is a greatest-hits sauce with 된장doenjang (fermented soybean paste), 고추장 gochujang (spicy red pepper sauce), sesame oil, onion, garlic and green onions.
Peanut Ssamjang is a sanitary, economical and delicious way to use up the rest of your 갈비 kalbi or 불고기 bulgogi marinade (such as Korean drama superstar Bae Yong Joon’s) flavoring the raw meat. It’s a shame to put all the work on the marinade from scratch and then dumping most of it down the drain because it’s been in contact with raw beef.

Koreans don’t have a long-term relationship with peanuts or peanut butter, but you can marry Korean spiciness and your favorite peanut butter. (photo by Michaela Kobyakov on Stock.xchng via Creative Commons license)
March 22, 2011
The Beauty of Korea: Bae Yong Joon’s Kalbi Steak
I bought the Korean version of Bae Yong Joon’s best-selling book, The Journey to Discover the Beauty of Korea. I got the book because I knew there would be several Korean food recipes tucked in the pages. I got excited when I found his recipe for Kalbi steak so I decided I would work translating the recipe into English (ahead of Bae’s forthcoming English version) and also test out the recipe to make sure the ingredients and methods would work in an American kitchen.
Even though the kalbi recipe excited me (and my family) the most, there are other noteworthy recipes in the book as well, including Bae’s mother’s personal recipe for cucumber kimchi (page 67).
My first step in translating this recipe for American audiences was to try to make sure I got the correct cut of beef rib. The picture Bae included is a spartan shot of the finished kalbi steak on a plate. It did not look like the chopped up beef ribs one usually finds in the grocery store for braised ribs. It also didn’t look like the wang kalbi style that one finds all over Korea and at higher end kalbi restaurants in the USA. Bae’s recipe does not use the thinly sliced LA style kalbi ribs like those featured in my own Kalbi video on YouTube.
I took my book to the nearest butcher. I showed him the picture in Bae’s book and asked him what kind of beef rib was in the picture. He was adamant that Bae’s kalbi steak was made with Beef Plate Short Ribs.
These ribs are a much thicker cut than I’ve ever seen in Korean cuisine. I bought four plate ribs and brought them home. Each rib was 8-9 inches long and over an inch thick. There’s no way that these behemoth ribs are the same thing as Bae’s photo but I tried to make them work within the specifications of Bae’s recipe. These ribs could have been a stand in for T-Rex ribs in a Flinstones movie.
Fortunately, the marinade was much less dramatic and traumatic.
Bae’s kalbi steak recipe is divided into three parts: First he lists the ingredients for the kalbi steak marinade. Then he provides a recipe for the Hyang Shin Jeup sauce (향신즙) which is then mixed into the marinade. At the end, he gives instructions on how to cook the ribs.
If you live near a Koreatown or a well stocked Korean grocery store, you don’t have to make your own Hyang Shin Jeup from scratch. Sempio(샘표), a South Korean food company, sells a version they call “Gourmet Seasoning Sauce.” I’m standing by Bae’s version (even though it takes some work) because not everyone has access to a well-stocked Korean grocery store.
Here is my paraphrase of Bae Yong Joon’s Kalbi Steak Recipe. My comments are in parenthesis. I double checked my paraphrased translation of this recipe with my local Korean grocer to make sure I understood the recipe.
To prep 3-4 flanken cut beef ribs, you need to score them approximately a quarter way down to the rib so the beef will not contort while boiling or grilling.
How to make the Kalbi Steak Marinade
1 cup 향신즙 juice
1/3 cup soy sauce
*50 ml (approx 3 tbsp) 맛술 mirin
*50 ml (approx 3 tbsp) Cheongju rice wine (similar to Japanese sake)
2/3 cup sugar (설탕)
1/3 cup sesame seed oil
a pinch of black pepper
(*Bae’s recipe calls for 50 cc of mirin and cheongju rice wine but cc is equal to ml)
How to make the Hyang Sin Jeup juice (향신즙)
100 grams (approx. 1/3 cup) Korean radish
100 grams (approx 1/3 cup) Korean pear
100 grams (approx 1/3 cup) garlic
10 grams of ginger
Grate the radish, pear, garlic and ginger. (I did it by hand but a food processor or a juicer will do the job, too). Strain in fine cheese cloth (or a fine mesh strainer). Add to the marinade.
How to pre-cook and marinade the ribs
1. Put the ribs in cold water and rinse off the blood.
2. Cook the ribs for 2-3 minutes in boiling water. Pull out the ribs and allow them to cool down before putting the ribs in the marinade. Marinade all day until you are ready to grill or broil the ribs.
Here is where I ran into real problems. Bae recommends pre-boiling the ribs for about 2-3 minutes in boiling water and then pull them out, allow them to cool down and put them in the marinade all day until you’re ready to grill them.
I ran into a lot of problems very quickly
- I didn’t have a cooking pot tall enough to fit these very long ribs completely into the pot to boil them and getting them evenly boiled was a lot of work.
- I didn’t have a bowl large enough to properly marinade them so I had to buy the largest Tupperware dish I could find (larger than a lasagna pan) to marinade the ribs.
- Boiling these thick ribs for only 2-3 minutes wasn’t going to shorten the broiling time enough to make this practical. I boiled them for over 1/2 an hour before marinading them and they still took over an hour, baking at 375 to get to medium rare. I don’t eat meat medium rare on purpose.
So I went back to the drawing board, throwing out the counsel of my well-meaning, non-Korean butcher. I went online and found a page called The Zen of beef ribs and reached an epiphany. Bae has been using flanken ribs all along but he wasn’t using the skinny cut common to LA Kalbi. He was using a thicker cut of flanken ribs. So, I went back to the butcher and ordered up 4 flanken cut beef ribs, approximately 1-2 inches thick.
The right beef rib, an English cut flanken rib. Trim off most of the visible fat but you do need to leave some on while it's cooking.
Bae mentions scoring the ribs so they will broil evenly. This is fine on the top but there’s another step you must take to make sure the ribs do not shrink and contort while grilling. On the backside of the ribs, you’ll find the silver skin, but it is not an edible or tasty silver lining. You must take your sharp chef’s knife and remove the silver skin from the ribs. If you do it right, the silver skin will come off in one strip.
The final product with the right cut of rib.
This time the recipe worked out very well. I baked the ribs at 375 for about 45 minutes to an hour to get them medium well and I was very happy with the results. Since the recipe includes natural sugar from the Asian pear as well as some granulated sugar, you will have some charring, which is unavoidable if you cook the ribs to medium well or well-done.
The ribs got rave reviews and my family are already begging me to make them again.
August 16, 2010
Tammy’s submission to Korea’s official cooking video contest
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-UN6Zx2elg
The (South Korean) Presidential Counsel on National Branding is hosting a cooking video contest called “Experience Korea–UCC Video Contest: My Korean Cooking Video” in collaboration with YouTube as a part of Korea’s hansik globalization push.
There are several rules and guidelines for submissions. One of the most important was that the cooking videos must present a simple to follow Korean recipe in English with either English, Japanese or Chinese subtitles. If the video is in Korean, the video must have English, Japanese or Chinese subtitles. The contest rules specifically state, “Foreigners get extra points in judging.”
So I submitted a stripped down version of my original galbi video. I removed most of the music soundtrack for this contest and re-upload it for the contest.
The videos have to be posted by March 31, 2010 but they will keep the contest open until April 30. The contest judges will factor in the number of views into their judgment of the best Korean food video.
My Galbi video is facing over seven pages worth of stiff competition, including Dan Gray from SeoulEats, Steve aka QiRanger and Aeri from Aeri’s Kitchen.
April 4, 2010
Is it Korean?
Food Network's interpretation of Korean cooking
Thanks to reader Outre for pointing this out.
It looks like the Food Network thinks like former Top Chef contestants in that all Asian food is the same. This is their recipe and photo for Slow Cooked Korean-style Short Rib Soup. What the Food Network Kitchens give us is a recipe for what looks like pho. The big hint that it’s not Korean is the cilantro and lime, considering cilantro is having a hard time penetrating the Korean market, and limes are almost impossible to find. They’re the unicorns of produce in Korea.
KOREAN FAIL.
Let’s go to the comments for this recipe, shall we?
My husband and I are huge fans of asian cuisine, but we have never had Korean food before, this was a perfect introduction to… the flavors of Korean food. The soup is spicy, but the cucumbers, cilantro, lime and carrots help ass some sweetness to the spicy! I also use pork instead of beef because my husband has an allergy to beef, it is just as good! I would recommend this to anyone and everyone! Amazing dish!
And from Marliyn in Hawaii
This is a great recipe, and for the life of us, we can’t understand what all the grumbling is about! Beef short ribs are… fatty by nature! Using a gravy separator to pour off fat, save broth, will easily take care of that problem. Cilantro leaf is the same thing as chinese parsley, an asian food staple. It is part of what makes this dish so authentic! Yes, there is a lot of chili paste called for: that is a normal amount for korean food. We found this recipe to be right on the money for authentic Korean cuisine. My husband’s hairdresser from Seoul, Korea thought these ribs needed more chili paste than called for in the recipe.
Her husband’s hairdresser thinks it’s authentic, so it must be. Wait… her husband’s hairdresser? Who takes a bowl of soup when to the beauty salon?
But some people saw through the emperor’s clothes.
i’ m korean and i have never heard of this before lol.
And a recent comment from New Jersey
I don’t know what food network was thinking claiming this recipe is ‘Korean-style’. It’s clearly Southeast Asian-style. People ignorantly assume Asia is all the same but it’s not. Just because there are soy sauce and Korean chili paste(which is ok to sub with sambal oelek, not a Korean spice) in the recipe doesn’t make it Korean. Cilantro and lime, are not, and never have been part of traditional or modern Korean cuisine… or Japanese. Some part of China uses cilantro, but not all of China. This is Pho recipe in disguise. All of you have been fooled into FN into thinking you’ve tried a Korean dish, I can assure you, this isn’t. They really need to do more research. It’s a shame they’d post a recipe that takes longer to cook than most recipes and can’t even put it in the right cuisine type.
Note to the Food Network and middle America: please do a little research. Even Wikipedia.
Maybe America views Asian cuisines these days similar to how it viewed Mexican in the 1950s and 1960s. There was a recipe in the classic Gallery of Regrettable Foods from a mid-twentieth century cookbook for a Mexican casserole, but the only thing that made it remotely Mexican was a bit of chili powder, which was optional.
January 12, 2010
Kogi: The Korean Taco Truck
WangKon936 at The Marmot’s Hole has revealed that a wish has become reality. Galbi tacos exist and are popular–and they’re sold from a truck. It’s run by a Korean-American Culinary Institute of America graduate, and they have a web site. I’ve noticed that a good handful of CIA graduates open food trucks.
Two years ago, blogger eatdrinkbmerry pined in la.foodblogging for the existence of a bulgogi taco truck and even made a photoshop of his dream.
A commenter on the Hole made the racially charged statement that only Korean-Americans can make good Korean fusion food. Obviously I disagree, considering I have making Bulgogi Burritos (ugly pics) and Kimchi Quesadillas since my first year in Korea. Oh, and I’m not Korean-American. Eun Jeong is Korean-Korean, and she came up with the Korean Sloppy Joe recipe that is a hit on recipe sites.
It’s not the blood. It’s the attitude.
And as for the Southerner the commenter mentions who smothered Korean BBQ with sauce–where I come from in Alabama, heavy sauce is used to disguise bad BBQ. That dude wouldn’ta flown far in Alabama either.
January 8, 2009
Vintage Post: Lamb Galbi Restaurant in Anyang
When I ride above-ground transportation through Korea, I like to play a game where I read as many Korean signs as I can before they pass by. As a result, my reading speed is about at the level of a five-year-old’s. On the bus home from work last week, I caught this sign at the corner of my eye.
Did I see that right? Yang-gogi?? Lamb?? Now, in the past, I’ve seen some restaurants advertise “Yang Gobchang 곱창” which has nothing to do with meat that bleats. So I was ready for disappointment. But then I noticed the cartoon lamb on the sign.
The next day, I mentioned it to my boss when he suggested going for beer after work. Chris, Chris and I walked from work Friday evening to this place I spotted. It looked more and more like it was an honest to goodness lamb restaurant. The plants outside indicated that it was new. When we walked inside, the smell confirmed it.
Get ready for some lamby goodness!
Now, generally, I have heard from Koreans that lamb is not a popular meat. Too gamey. They don’t raise sheep here, so it’s all imported from New Zealand. It’s a very foreign meat. You’d might as well put a zebra on the grill.
Despite this assumption, the place was packed. The location is in Indeogwon in northeast Anyang, otherwise known as the “Ajosshi Playground” because it’s where the government workers in nearby Gwacheon go to have some good times–and they must really enjoy getting massages from blind people, considering that’s the dominant business in that area.
The other pleasant treat at this restaurant, Jogicheon Yang-gogi 조기촌 양고기 (Ph. 031-457-8800), was that the prices were highly reasonable, ranging from 10,000 to 18,000 won per person for grilled meat. The basic “Lamb chop with soy sauce and herb,” 250g for 10,000 won, was the best deal.
I’ve said it many times before. Lamb has been begging for a Korean interpretation. It’s the perfect marriage. Sometimes when you get “lamb” in Korea, it’s mutton. But this meat was clean and subtle in flavor. It was real lamb. The marinade enhanced its natural taste rather than cover it up. Even better, this was sutbul gui 숫불 구이, meaning it was cooked over charcoals at the table and not over plain gas.
The side dishes stood out too. We went there two nights in a row, and most all the dishes had changed. Nothing was mediocre. The lamb also comes with a honey mustard and a smokey hot sauce for dipping.
The menu tries to incorporate lamb in a hearty handful of traditional Korean dishes, including Galbi Jjim 갈비 찜, Jeongol 전골, and, can you believe it, Yuk Hui 육회–Korea’s steak tartare.
We ordered the Yuk Hui on the second night, and it was one of those times when Jennifer (Fatman Seoul) did one of her faces that looked like something naughty was going on in her brain. Rob (Roboseyo) liked it too. Again, it was clean, freshly made and only had a subtle lamb flavor. The sauce was fruity with a slight hint of heat. It’s the closest lamb has come to being dessert. (Hopefully Jen will send me the picture she took soon.)
To get there, head to Indeogwon Station (line 4) and head south along the right side of the road. Turn right at the river. It’s on the second floor.
[Google Earth bookmark]
November 2, 2008
The Day of the Pepero
Of course, I found a few errors, and the errors were fixed at the front desk with white-out and pen. After a month, these class roster sheets look ugly, ugly, ugly.
After work Friday, I walked home in a better mood. Everything was cleared up. Eun Jeong was meeting me later for dinner. I passed a truck selling large crabs. I stopped and walked back. The guy was giving free crab samples to people, and they were buying the crabs. So I thought I’d buy a few. I also bought some stuffed squids. The Food Journal has more details on that.
I finally saw a doctor about the Seoul Cough. He prescribed me medicine that worked until it ran out. I went back a few weeks later, and I’m currently on a five day supply.
The weekend of October 23rd was my son Zen’s seventh birthday. I tried to give him a call, but as usual, no one answered the phone.
It was also the birthday of Sendil Krishnan, and if you don’t know Sendil Krishnan, as the saying goes, “You don’t know no one.”
And– it was the one year anniversary of Eun Jeong and me. We celebrated by going to a very, very bad Italian restaurant in Beomgye. Even when we ordered red wine, they gave us this sweet fruit spritzer that only sorority girls and women with big hair would drink.

We made up for the bad Italian dinner by having a second Korean dinner at Indio, where you can get three dishes for 11,000 won (that’s their gimmick). And the food was much better.
The big thing was that we ordered couple rings. We bought each other’s ring. I bought Eun Jeong this type of “champagne” jewel with a gold heart dangling from it. Eun Jeong bought me a classy gold ring that split in the middle at two tapered ends.

In the meantime, the school took a field trip to an art museum. The building was new but done up in traditional Korean architecture. The outside of the museum was more interesting than what was inside. Inside was a small modern art display, not nearly comparable to the kick ass contemporary art museum in Seoul Grand Park.
While we were finding a place to picnic, the kids came across a group of soldiers on a hike. They harassed the soldiers, but they took it in stride and marched off while they kids yelled, “Anyeong! Goodbye!”
Halloween was a hit.
I had been stressing out about this big carnival we were planning. Of course, it didn’t completely turned out as planned, but it did turn out better than I had hoped.
We stayed late Thursday night (October 27th) setting up. We had prepped so much stuff ahead of time, we only stayed until 8:30 or 9:00. A year ago at Brighton, we were there until midnight.
We were able to set up an apple dunk, two lollipop trees, a fishing booth, an art room, a cakewalk, a music room with a dancing Frankenstein, a movie room, and a haunted gym with a maze. I am posting the pictures right now.
As we were leaving Thursday night, it occurred to me that I had been so busy setting up the school, I had forgotten about my costume. While cleaning up, I found an oversized “ajumma visor,” and the wheels started turning on the way home.
The next day, I showed up wearing Eun Jeong’s gray jogging suit with the visor and a sweater wrapped around my neck as a cape. On the visor, I printed “Super???” (“Super Ajumma”), making fun of the pushy middle aged ladies who are so famous in Korea. I thought I would get beaten up for wearing a costume that mocked an aspect of Korean culture, even though playfully. But it seemed everyone got the joke and enjoyed it. The mothers took pictures of me, saying I was cute.
We started the day by taking the kindergarteners trick or treating at participating parents’ apartments. They went all out for it, and they had a lot of fun. Some of the mothers followed us back for the games.
As with every Friday of late, lunch was skimpy. That day it was just kimbap. So Julia, Lars, and I headed to a little place I had discovered which makes this beautiful rainbow looking bibimbap. It tastes good, it’s cheap, and it’s extremely healthy. Only in Korea have I found health food that I actually like.
We rushed back and played the games, which were dry runs for when the older kids came later. The most popular were the apple dunk and fishing booth. Actually, I was surprised at how overwhelmingly popular the fishing booth was. It was just some tables covered in blue bed sheets (my blue bed sheets). The kids toss a fishing line with a clip on the end over the table. Someone under the table attaches a prize bag and pulls on it, like a fish hit it. I didn’t realize how much fun it must be for a kid to do that.
The cakewalk went over pretty well, too. We didn’t have any donated baked goods like a traditional cakewalk. Instead, we had a pile of moonpies and candies. The kids went in a circle to music, stepping on numbered ghost-shaped spots on the floor. When the music stopped, they stopped, and I pulled out a number. Whoever was standing on that number got to pick a piece of candy from the table. There was a line of kids waiting to join in the game most of the time.
The Haunted Gym was the centerpiece. We were understaffed, so no one watched the gym. I knew it was going to get torn down. I was surprised it held up as well as it did. It was similar to the haunted house from last year, made up of deep sea fishing line and black plastic garbage bags. I had my classic “Disney’s Thrilling, Chilling Sounds of the Haunted House” CD playing full blast in there. I still get goosebumps when I listen to that in the dark.
We were pooped by the time the third and last wave of students finished the carnival. We had run out of apples a long time ago and had them dunking for yogurt (yes, seriously). We tore down and cleaned up the place in an hour and a half. Then Lars, Injoo, and I headed to Ansan.
Injoo wanted us to try a new cheap kalbi place. I mentioned it in the Food Journal. I saw Canada Chris there, and we caught up on what was happening in his life. I was worried that he was one of the ones getting caught up in the big immigration bust, but he was kosher.
After dinner, we headed to the bar RPM, which used to be the infamously pathetic Bon Jovi Rock Club. The reason was our old bartender friend from Magic Castle, Silver, was the manager there. He was holding a big Halloween bash. Lars wasn’t interested in paying a 10,000 won cover charge to stand around and listen to loud music, so he called it a night. I hadn’t seen Silver in a long ass time, so I stuck around.
The party wasn’t too bad. As always, people were a little stiff and needed loosening up. I met some cool foreigners, including a wonderful, hilarious girl named Courtney. I also met a beautiful and charming Korean girl, Kellis, who works as an editor for a video company. She came dressed as Magenta from “Rocky Horror,” and I was the only one who guessed who she was.
I wanted to see the bartending show. After it was finished, I found that it was too late to catch the subway. This meant that I had to stick around until 5 AM. Well, I had new friends. Might as well stick around.
Kellis waited for a friend to show up, and she did after a while. She hooked up with this other friend of hers. She also joined us in a little drinking game where we suck a glass of beer out with a straw behind the bar. (I lost for the first time.)
This girl got really, really drunk. Her brand new boyfriend did nothing to take care of her. Kellis was worried, and she couldn’t walk down the stairs.
Now, I was raised in a culture where men help women in distress. So I picked up Kellis’ friend and carried her down two flights of stairs like a rag doll. As I was doing this, her friend threw up warm pink vomit all over my clothes.
After we made sure this girl’s brother was going to come and pick her up, I headed to Magic Castle. I had had enough of that. I found that Rick had returned as bartender there. That was good news. Kellis and Injoo joined me after a while, and we talked until I saw the first subway train pass through the station. I immediately bolted for the subway station.
I was so exhausted that I woke up as the train was leaving the stop I wanted to get off on. So I got off at the next stop and entered a taxi. I told him in Korean where I wanted to go. He didn’t understand me. So I said, “Anyang Stadium.”
For some reason, he understood that.
I was so happy to be back in my bed (after a good shower, of course). I knew that the next Friday was Magic Castle’s big 3rd anniversary bash. Of course, I was going to go, but I told myself I would leave before the subways closed.
Telling myself is not enough.
Again, I had to stay out until 5 AM.
It just flew the next Friday night. We started the evening in style. Lars, Injoo, and I met Kellis at the gobchang place where Brant and I first tried this wonderful delicacy of beef intestines grilled in soju. Lars raved about how it could be the best meal he ever had. We also had a culinary first that evening. The waitress asked us if we would like “gan.”
I knew gan meant “liver.” My mother hates liver, so I grew up without that aversion to liver that most children have because I was not exposed to it until I was more adventurous in my tastes. (Thanks, Mom.)
The waitress came out with a plate of RAW liver and placed it next to the boiled and chilled tripe. The tripe we had had many times before. It’s rubbery and tasteless. It’s really just a conveyance for sauce. The raw liver, though, was quite the experience. This I considered more dangerous than eating bugs, squirming live squid, and poisonous blowfish. But I ate it. It was velvety and gelatinous, like you’d expect. It had a very intense liver flavor, the good liver flavor, not the bad. It had to be chased by something, though. We had beer and soju on hand with the flaming crackling gobchang, which tasted like onion-ey breakfast bacon.
The “Castle” said that on this party, it would try something different. The tables and chairs weren’t cleared to make way for a dance floor. There were no hip hop troupes or magicians. They also mentioned they had spent 2,000,000 million won ($2,000) on door prizes.
The first sign of dread was when we were greeted by a mime at the door.
We saw a lot of the old guard there. Old friends and new friends. Courtney showed up with her friends. The Korean dancer who had helped me win the bottle of Absolut at the last party showed up with a date of hers, a Korean who grew up in L.A. named Danny (cool guy, BTW).
As the evening progressed and in hindsight, I would prefer Magic Castle go back to their previous party concept. The door prizes were won through raffles, not through dancing contests and such. They spent big money on a small number of prizes, too.
Lars won one of them — a large bottle of Jack Daniels. He shared it with everyone at the bar. I myself didn’t drink much.
We spent the wee hours of the morning at a table outside a convenience store, downing instant noodles and warming against a crisp autumn night.
During my classes, I had noticed more surreal and entertaining English from my students. Usually, it’s by means of the Engrish on the clothing they wear. One student had a shirt that looked like it was from the Levi’s newspaper (if they ever had one). Its big headline was “Love Begins by the All-African Coffee Machine.”
In the very same class, I taught a lesson on English names for types of facial hair. I drew a face on the board and gradually added hair to the face. When I got to the mustache, I asked, “What is this?”
One student said, “The nosebrow.”
I had to sit down, I was laughing so hard. The whole class was laughing, including the student who had said it. It was so clever and made so much sense.
Pepero day was on Friday, the 11th. I have a thing about it in the Food Journal.
Injoo’s birthday was also that Thursday. For his birthday, we went to Oido for Jogae Kui. Oido is a little harbor town west of Ansan on the Yellow Sea. Jogae Kui, if anyone has been following, is my FAVORITE FOOD IN THE WORLD!!! It’s shellfish grilled at the table.
We were driven there by a girl Injoo was interested in dating. By seeing the way she snuggled with him after dinner, I think the feeling was mutual. That was good because I have never known Injoo with a girlfriend.
All of this stuff that has been going on, Halloween in particular, has ceased or slowed down. I’m kinda lost on what to do now. I’m so used to doing a million projects. I guess it’s a good thing that the U.S. is in November sweeps. But then again, Fox made the stupid move of axing “Arrested Development” and “Kitchen Confidential” for re-runs of the schlock “Oz” rip-off “Prison Break” drama.
November 12, 2005