Saturday, May 12, 2012

Food Glorious Food


Yesterday I set off to meet up with a friend and to grab some Bulgolgi for dinner in the French District of Seoul. I never imagined that the night would turn out to be as magical as it did and it reminded me to appreciate the little things. Finding myself fully immersed in the culture and history of this crazy land of Seoul did wonders for the Seoul.

The group I went with are seriously into their food and I later found out that one has his own Food App available on I tunes and the other has his own website where he video blogs about all the food he tries and all that he experiences in Korea.
I want to give both of these guys credit because I think they are both amazing people and so passionate about their work. I also am overwhelmed with the number of brilliant people that I am meeting while travelling around, this is living the dream.

K food is available through
This is a beautiful app which shows you how to prepare and enjoy Korean Cuisine.  Recipes and methods are shown through magnificent HD videos and photos.

Noe’s website is
Noe, the sole creator of this blog inspires me to see more of this country. His video blogs are both informative and funny and I found myself getting lost in his videos for most of this morning. I invite you all to check out his work and soon I will publish his video of this night. Yep as Noe said “I’m going to be famous on you tube.”

The Restaurant we went to was called Seorae Bulgogi  서래 불고기 From what I understand from the conversation last night, this Restaurant is one a kind and serves two varieties of Bulgogi, which is simply thin cuts of beef marinated in a variety of spices and herbs. 


Photo courtesy of Noe  http://www.no-kancho.net/

The food was amazing . We tried the two types of bulgogi, one that was grilled over an open flame see left and the other which is Seoul style that was cooked over an inverted metal dish on top of coals. We also had a dish of Yuk Hoe (the middle bowl with the radish and cucumbers) which is a seasoned raw beef  dish, I guess it is similar to what we would call tartare. On the table were a selection of side dishes that complimented the meat. The lettuce and perilla ( thanks Julia for repeating that name over and over so that I finally remembered it ) leaves are used to wrap up the meat , noodles , veges and sauces to be eaten as one. The green peppers are dipped in the sauces and eaten as is. The black bowl to the right is ox blood soup. This is the only dish that I didn’t try as it was just congealed pieces of blood in a broth. Noe tried it and said it tasted like old pennies. I had to get him to explain this to me and realised he was referring to old copper coins. On the grill next to the bulgogi you can see a sliced mushroom, I noticed that it has been stamped with some kind of mark and found out that it was the name of the restaurant scorched into the flesh of the mushroom. I thought this was really a really neat and unique idea.


All of this was washed down with Makgeolli and cider. Makgeolli is a Korean rice wine and cider is actually what they call lemonade here! I know it’s weird when I heard we were having cider I got all excited until I remembered that cider is not that magical crisp alcoholic drink that we have at home. So the Makgeolli and cider are mixed together in a tall teapot with a long spout and is poured into cute little wooden bowls.  It was fantastic to cheers this local drink with new friends over a magnificent feast. 

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