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Eating in Busan, Korea
October 14th, 2008
Pic from Wiki
My Twidget Nuke Son may be stationed in Japan but his ship gets to travel all over the Far East. They had the privilege to make a port visit in Busan (Pusan), Korea, here is one story of the visit,
“So Korea turned out to be much better then I had first anticipated. My hopes weren’t that high because I had just never really wanted to go to Korea so I knew nothing about it. Walking around, the city of Busan is pretty impressive. Its size was amazing. From what I thought would be another Chile experience, Korea left a good impression. We took a bus into the center of the city and were basically cut loose. “Go out and do (good) things”, the good is implied. The stores were clean and new looking, everything was well maintained. We sort of went into explore mode and just started walking. For no purpose other then to head in a direction and see what we could find. We stopped at this one place to eat which had the stove in the middle of your table. It seemed like we would have to cook our own food, or so we thought, but after ordering 4 100g portions of meat, the woman who worked there, speaking Korean the whole time, put the meat in the center, added salt and threw down some veggies and such on the hot area. She pointed to different trays that were on our table, different things to add to the slices of meat. There was seaweed leaves, kimchi, garlic, onion sort of soaked through with ginsing. We also had a tray that was just fresh onions with some sort of sauce at the bottom of the tray which was our main “plate”. Whenever pieces of meat were done cooking, she would start dispersing them between the four of us. Meanwhile we had starting trying “soju” a native drink that’s sort of a soft vodka taste, and a melon sort of soda that tasted really good.
We ate the 4 things of meat without batting an eye and ordered two more, as well as bim..bo..bop..ba… something like that, which was a large bowl of raw meat, some spicy sauce, random vegetables, that we mixed up and ate raw.. sort of. You were supposed to take a bite of the raw stuff in the bowl, and then sort of add this broth that was on the side in your mouth. You weren’t supposed to just throw the soup into the bowl, apparently it just wasn’t good that way. It was good the way she showed us how to do it, so we weren’t complaining. At one point she came around with a half bottle of melon soda and a coffee cup looking thing. She had apparently poured herself a cup of soda and she offered me the rest that was in the bottle. I was like “Sure!” When we finished eating, the tab only came up to 140,000W which for how much we ate and drank, was very very nice for 4 people. We didn’t know if it was custom to tip in Korea, (because you aren’t supposed to in Japan), but we tipped her anyways, giving her 200,000W (Each one of us basically just paid 35$ because the meal was worth about that much.). Oh, and the conversion from $ to won is 1 to 1400. So although I said 200,000W, it was like 140$ between the 4 of us.”
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The stove in the middle of the table with raw meat is called Yakiniku or “Korean Barbecue.” There’s tons of little yakiniku joints all over Japan. It’s usually bought by the plate, or all you can eat within a certain time period for a flat price. Normally you’ll have to do it yourself. The bowl stuff sounds like stone bowls, but it might be different. In Japan, some restaurants over a bowl made of stone that’s heated to a really high temperature. They then toss in a bunch of raw ingredients that you mix around, letting the heat of the stone bowl cook it. It’s all pretty good. When you guys get back to Yoko, try the stone bowl place in the Daiei mall, or the all-you-can-eat yakiniku place right past the train overpass near Shiori station.