Thank Goodness for some Seoul Food, Seoul Pt. 2

A major factor of our trip to Seoul is the incredibly delicious and diverse foods we ate. In the United States I took for granted all of the different foods I consumed, without a second thought as to how privileged I was.

In Jeonju the variety of food is varied but varied within the Korean food group. My new little hometown would be blown away if it had foods from different parts of the world. Jeonju is actually known for its quality traditional food. We have done our best to eat Korean food as often as possible (not that we have many options). A lot of the food is tasty but I hadn’t realized how much I really missed cultural diversity in my foods until we arrived in Seoul.

The first morning we were there we had trouble finding a restaurant of any sort that was open. We had gotten there early in the morning and the city was just beginning to wake up. This was the only time during our entire stay that we had trouble finding food. Over the next week we chowed down… On everything.

I want to first point out that we did NOT shy away from Korean food but this blog will focus on our foreign food endeavors. We enjoyed a fabulous birthday with a new beverage that looks a lot like milk. It is not milk but rather a slightly carbonated alcoholic traditional Korean beverage. You consume it with mass quantities of Korean food that arrive to the table on giant platters. Most of the food that was brought to us was so good. It mostly consisted of a variety of fried things which is why it was so good!

I would like to start off our menu with some of the basics that I had not really considered a favorite food group so much as an always food group. One of those food groups being chocolate milk! We found both the Nestle and the Hershey's brands with ease while visiting Seoul. 

This one tastes better though!

Next on the menu is yellow mustard. Many of you I know do not like mustard but for those of you who do, imagine a world without yellow mustard… If you are struggling to come up with an image I’ve provided a picture below:

Us in downtown Jeonju, where yellow mustard is NOWHERE to be found

My world in Jeonju is lacking yellow mustard. Such things as honey mustard exist, many people (like the ones at the zoo) think if you ask for mustard you really mean ketchup, but no yellow mustard. At one of the cafes near our hostel we had a ham sandwich and when we asked for mustard it was with low hopes that they would reply in the affirmative.

But they did! We got globs of it and spread it inside our ham sandwich with much joy and excitement. Although upon opening the sandwich we realized that the “cheese” they gave us was maybe half an inch thin and came in 3 inch strips. We each had a small strip on our sandwich -___- It’s OK, we found cheese later on so we were not bitter for too long. 

We found a pizza joint with a thin super cheesy calzone. The menu said it had numerous types of cheeses including Gorgonzola! Now this was just unheard of! Cheese? More than one cheese? We indulged and it was great!

Another high point of the foods we tried was going out on a date night to a Thai Restaurant. In the U.S. Sean and I frequent Thai restaurants on almost all our date nights. He gets the Pad Thai and I get Panang Curry. It’s one of those things were we go to a Thai place, say we’ll get something different but can never find anything that quite makes us want to change our original choices.

Don’t fix it if it ain’t broken.

Walking in to this Thai place we were immediately seated and handed menus. We flipped through the menus with vigor holding our breaths as we looked for our respective go-to meals. It didn’t take long until we were both grinning from ear to ear and attempting to flag down the waitress to get our order in as soon as possible. We not only ordered our usual but also added a spicy shrimp soup and some little spring rolls. Sooooooooo good! Unfortunately the food wasn’t spicy at all, they must’ve thought we white people wouldn’t have been able to handle it.

We did manage to find an extremely tasty chocolate cream cake. Unfortunately they decided that taking chocolate rice crispies and hiding them in the very smooth cake was an ingenious idea... I did not. They ruined it. Not to mention that it's virtually impossible to find actual cake, they like to eat lots of cream cake.

I’d like to lead into the fact that our hostel was near a subway station, which had a Paris Croissant (which is a very similar chain to the Paris baguettes) and a BRCD (Bread Ready, Coffee Done). One of the days we had a snack at Paris Croissant, which included a chicken potpie pastry, and a thin loaf of cheesy bread. Yum!

We frequented the BRCD right up until the day it, for whatever reason, shut down and left. These morning eating here were wonderful. Walking in the aroma of recognizable food is enough to make you salivate. The menu had English on it and there were pictures, we were so spoiled!!!! BRCD was awesome. 

In Korea sandwich meat is non-existent. There is no sandwich meat. At times you can find odd shaped slices of what is called ham but looks like spam and tastes a bit odd. No sliced chicken or beef. No ham variety; smoked, oven roasted or honey baked. But at this little hole in the wall we had: ROASTED BEEF SANDWICHES! (yes the menu had roasted beef, not roast beef). These sandwiches came on fresh bread with thick cuts of actual beef that had been roasted. Lettuce was in abundance, overflowing out of the sandwich. This was yet another treat because it is uncommon to find salads here as well (kimchis don’t count). There was some cheese and sauce also on the sandwich. Guess what the sauce was? Nope even more delicious, BALSAMIC!!!! We were amazed.

They also had these meals referred to as sets, one of which included a fried egg, meat, and some macaroni gratin. We were all over this. Breakfast foods are again something that is very uncommon/ non-existent in a traditional Korean diet. Kimchi and rice is seen as breakfast foods. This is particularly painful because I could eat breakfast foods for every meal of the day, in fact I’d probably prefer it that way! The macaroni gratin was a let down, little to no cheese flavor and it was mixed with other things like peas and veggies. I was unhappy but still grateful.

Delicious "set"

We had Carbonara pasta another day, with potato soup (which was just below mediocre) and they started each meal off with some fresh bread and spreadable cheese with a sweet onion jelly thing. I know it sounds weird but the onion spread was to die for. We came more than once in order to sample this particular delicacy again. Sadly we found they did not have the onion jelly for sale in jars.

IT WAS SO GOOOOOOOOD!

I want to stop here and make a point of telling those who are traveling to Seoul to find western food or food that is not Korean, the foreign restaurants are most condensed at a place called Itaewon. Wondering how to get there? There’s a stop for it on the subway. You want to know the name of the stop? Itaewon! Some of the restaurants (and by some a mean almost every last one) over price their food but you can get some good quality food at reasonable prices if you go looking. There’s all the chain restaurants like Mickey D’s and Outback, but we actually have those two things in Jeonju. We went to Itaewon every night and we tried to try something new every night.

My mother had previously suggested to Sean and I to try and find some Halal food. One night while wandering in Itaewon we were on the look out for anything open. It was late at night, many of the restaurants were closing while many of the dance clubs and bars were just getting started (Itaewon is a big place for foreign people to party). We came across a restaurant called “Foreign Restaurant”. Right up next to the sign was a neon sign advertising that the food served there was Halal. So of course we went here.

A woman greeted us at the door, trying to warn us that they would be closing within the half hour but once our noses had picked up the scent of cooking meat and our eyes had feasted upon the available buffet there was no going back for us. We ended up actually eating at this restaurant twice is was so good! 

They had a variety of Indian curries, lamb, chicken, and vegetable. They had long grained rice, what we believe to have been Basmati =] We found little spring rolls and fried dough with veggies. They even had little spring rolls, salad, and awesome chicken soup. The sauces they offered were great! One of them being a chutney very similar to the one my mother makes. The chutney was almost wholly made from cilantro and burned the inside of your mouth pleasantly with the strong taste of jalapenos. The people working at the place were super nice, I couldn’t get enough of the food.

During our stay at Seoul we went out to the Zoo! We did loads of exciting things but most importantly we had a bit of junk food. Exhibited below you will see soft serve ice cream that comes prepackaged and is still soft! We had a "corn dog" which was actually a hot dog with fried potato as its covering. It wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. That could've been because I would kill for a corn dog.

Weird not corn dog concoction 

Sean had looked up where to get macaroni in Seoul and a restaurant called "Macaroni Market" had surfaced in our google searches. We couldn't find directions but miraculously managed to stumble upon the location anyway. We went upstairs, walked in, and immediately realized we were out of our league. The place was snazzy! And after a day of sweating and walking around, we were not.

But they had macaroni on their menu, a side order of creamed spinach, and even though the prices were through the roof, we stayed. Sean decided his lady deserved a fancy night, and I wasn't in the arguing mood (how unusual of me!)

Pictured below is a montage of the delicious things we ate. First off we decided that eating "Beef tar tare" was a must. We both had never had this before and we were deprived of beef, so why not?

Next we had one of my favorites, escargot. This dish is best served with butter, cheese, and garlic, all of which should be included in an abundance. This escargot was great! But it was served in a red wine sauce with very little cheese which was a bit of a let down.

We scoured the menu and couldn't find anything referencing a cheese platter but because we were going to be paying an exorbitant amount of money we decided to inquire. We explained that we were foreigners who had just come to the country, was there anyway we could get a plate of cheese? The waiters spoke relatively good English but it did take a couple of them to figure out we just wanted cheese, nothing else. When they brought it out we were thrilled! I don't think I had ever been so happy to lay eyes on a plate with a few measly slices of assorted cheese. And let me tell you it was so so so so so good!

There was however a small slice of blue cheese on the plate. As you can see from the picture below they took moldy cheese to a whole new level. This thing was not white but discolored. It had BLACK chunks of mold on it, Sean swears he saw spores sticking out from it. I did not see the spores or else I would have never tried it to begin with. I took only a single cautious nibble from this undesirable piece of cheese and about threw up. This cheese was seriously ripe, rotting, and just not good. I thought I was going to die from having consumed this but I haven't yet. Moving on to more successful dishes.

They had a fancy soup of the day Gazpacho! Cold and tomato based this crisp soup really hit the spot. My mom has made it at home a few times and it couldn't touch her version of the soup, but for what it's worth this soup was delectable. It was Sean's first time, and I think he really liked it too. My favorite part of the soup was the cilantro topping mixed with olive oil, yum yum yum!

For Sean's main course he went with duck! It was served on a bed of smushed carrots. This again was a bit of a let down because I thought it was sweet potato! Alas, it was not. The duck was so juicy and tender, I about died!

This is the macaroni that I ordered... This is not macaroni. This equated to cafeteria quality macaroni with marinara sauce baked with some sort of nondescript cheese on top. When this shows up in the lunchroom there is cause to be excited. When this shows up at my table when I am expecting Macaroni and cheese is a TOTAL let down. I gave most of it to Sean, I couldn't bear to look at it after the rest of my meal had been so on par.

I did have a side of the creamed spinach which was indeed home made and amazing! The cream was thick (not cheesy enough though) and the spinach had a strong flavor. Spinach is not a common part of Korean's diets unless it's mixed into something so it was nice to have it here.

That dinner was so good! It was definitely worth every penny (except of course for that disastrous blue cheese). Next I would like to discuss the breakfasts we ate that were actually breakfasts foods as we Americans know them.

We went to little brunch joints and one of the days we dived face first into some thick french toast, fried eggs, and thick cut sausage. I poured an obnoxious amount of maple syrup on my french toast, and licked every drop up. You might be thinking "How lucky! They found real maple syrup!" but we didn't. We found good ole Aunt Jamima like sugary goop and it was the best thing ever! I prefer the fake processed stuff to the real organic stuff.

Not to mention the hash browns and sausage were to die for! I mean the hash browns we got to eat smothered in ketchup and Tabasco, just the way I like it!

One of the other breakfasts that we ate was by far my favorite. We found a cute little place called "the flying pan". I assume this is a play on words in favor of those peoples who can pronounce "r's" but I liked their logo.

This little restaurant had my favorite breakfast on the planet, Eggs Benedict. Well it is my favorite breakfast but so are biscuits and gravy. They didn't have that though... Anyways this meal was so good. The eggs were poached perfectly and they spilled their yolks all over my fresh french bread when I cut them open. The hollandaise sauce was slapped on top and when I mixed the whole thing together I was in heaven. Even now as I am writing this I am salivating.

I splurged (of course) and went with a smoothie as my drink. I ordered a strawberry banana smoothie with low expectations and high hopes. When it arrived in front of me I could tell I had made the right decision. The smoothie was thick and cool, but not impossible to suck through a straw and it didn't give you brain freeze. The smoothie had been blended fresh, and was frothy on the top. The two fruit flavors were well meshed and so strong. I will be back for another one at some point on our adventure.

Sean and I split an order of pancakes which were really nothing to write home about. The important part of the pancakes is that once again I had an excuse to consume mass quantities of maple syrup D

On the buying of foreign food side of things we by accident ran into what appeared to be the black market of things here in Seoul. In a random building on the bottom floor (sorry I do not remember more than that) we found a treasure trove of things!

All of it was of course over priced and not really what you missed but it was there! I had to not waste what little cash we had left on these mundane foods. I was on a mission and had been this entire trip to find some macaroni and cheese!

We were headed out when we stopped at one of the little piled table things when we asked an old man if he carried Kraft macaroni. He said no and as we were walking away Sean excitedly almost knocked over this old man's entire stall (that may be an exaggeration =p ) pulling out Kraft mac and cheese!!! We were so excited and realized too late that we had given ourselves away as suckers who would pay too much for such a cheap commodity. It's OK because there was no way we could leave without it!

One of the nights we were in Seoul we had met up with a coworker who was also visiting the area and went for beer and fried chicken. This is a common past time for many Koreans, especially the younger generation, and we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. We met one of her friends and we all had a ball! The food was great too.

I want to end this blog on our most proud find, our trip to the local Hooters! Of all the things to find in South Korea we had not expected this. We had seen it on our first day in town but it had been closed so  we had planned our dinner date for one of our last nights in town. The food was good and in honor of this being one of my parents' favorite restaurants we ordered almost what they would've for dinner.

Me with the Hooter's Girl! She was excited that we were there =]

They had a sauce called "the Korean Bomb", they had to discontinue "911" because of its unpopularity. We did get all drums! It was good =]

Our trip to Hooter's was great! We ate like kings and just walking into the place felt like walking into a familiar haven. We left the plates clean and the table empty as was our habit throughout the Seoul trip. Living in South Korea is a blast! But my lack of adventure with many foods is bringing me down on the traditional Korean food front. I am still attempting to branch out and have added to the "like" list but our trip to Seoul refreshed my spoiled taste buds.

there will of course be more to come, in only a few short days. After writing this blog I need to go feel sorry for myself for a little bit... "That's All For Now Folks!"