After a staggering long day of meetings with tons of folks, I ended up with a couple of Korean artists at an unnamed rice noodle place in an unfamiliar neighborhood.
The meal came with three banchan, or side dishes. The onions on the left were for insertion directly into the hot ramen, and the cabbage and daikon kimchi were sides.
In Korea, you don’t use a knife to cut things up, you use scissors, which are at every table in the cup with chopsticks and other utensils. Cabbage kinchi like this is technically referred to as baechu kimchi, but it comes in many varieties. These leaves were huge, biggest I’ve ever seen.
Cutting up daikon kimchi, which is my favourite kimchi. I eat this stuff all the time, anywhere I can get it. This was the best daikon kimchi that I’ve ever had, it had a kind of amazing finish, a “watermelonish” flavour that I can’t describe otherwise, and was incredibly light and refreshing. This kimchi is locally called kkakdugi.
MMMM…. RAMEN……. After inserting the green onions, this was a delicious bowl of spicy ramen. It had small bits of beef floating in it, and not a lot of noodles, which were rice-based and glassy, very light. Lots of little flavours here, lots of small bites of flavours in a sea of delicious broth. More of a refreshing bowl of ramen than an oversize, oily, filler-upper.
This is something I hadn’t seen before my trip, rice added to soup after the noodles were finished. I never really saw folks eat rice at the table, or start a plate by piling rice on it and then adding food from a dish, but a lot of meals involved adding rice to broth or sauce from a partially finished dish. It’s a two-fer, like getting a bowl of ramen, and then a bowl of spicy sauced rice.
All gone. On to the next meal. Literally. I went out to an izakaya about an hour or so after this.
oh yummmmm