Flavor Boulevard

Chuseok (추석) is a major holiday in South Korea; this year the holiday fell on September 8th. Chuseok celebrates the harvest and is referred to as “Korean Thanksgiving” and is similar to other harvest festivals that follow the lunar calendar, such as the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋节, zhongqie jie). It is seen as a time to spend with family and so people usually leave the major cities (such as Seoul) to go back to their hometowns to spend time with their families. This Chuseok, I had the pleasure of spending time with my partner’s family.

We ended up eating out on Chuseok day itself and to an amazing restaurant, both in taste and in the amount of food! The restaurant is large and spacious. The name is 황도 바지락 칼국수 (Huangdo pajirak kalguksu…I’m not sure if this is the right romanization, so please correct me if I’m wrong…I’m still terrible at translating Korean sounds ㅠㅠ).

Once we got inside and ordered our main dish (칼국수, kalguksu), we headed over to the self-serve bar, which consisted of do-it-yourself “barley meal” (보리밥 boribap). I haven’t have known how to assemble the dish on my own, but turns out it’s pretty simple! Take a scoop of barley, a dabbling of gochujang, and a dash of sesame oil. Add in some 열무김치 (young radish kimchi) and mix a la bibimbap!

This proved to be a great starter to whet our appetites, but if I had known the size of the main dish, I would have been a little more careful about the amount of boribap I ate!

It’s extremely difficult to really see the scale of this bowl from the picture, but it was the size of a small tub. In fact, it is probably the same size as my laundry bucket! I was informed that this is the 3-person-sized bowl (we had 4 people with us) so I am a little nervous to even think about how big this soup can get. Eating noodles from a tub was definitely an interesting experience…

Here is a picture of my (normal-sized) bowl. I was amazed by this dish…the broth is so light and tasted wonderfully of clam broth. It brought me right back to my New England roots! The clams weren’t super exciting, but they were addicting to eat, although I have to admit that I liked the broth more than the actual clams. The noodles were wonderfully cooked and had a nice chew to it and did not get soggy even after I went back for thirds! I got full fast though because I ended up gulping so much of the broth! This was an amazingly delicious restaurant and spending the holiday with my partner’s family was very nice, especially since I don’t have my own family here in Seoul with me.

There are so many Korean dishes that I have never heard of and I look forward to continuing to blog about my eating experiences!