Near my university is a neighborhood that locals call Korea Town. I like Korean food and last night tried my sixth Korean restaurant in the neighborhood. Unlike the others, the menu had no English; it was in Korean and Chinese. My Chinese friend had little experience with Korean food so the menu puzzled both of us. Finally I asked the waitress what was popular and we ordered that.
I’ve eaten in Korean restaurants hundreds of times; I’ve even been in Korea for a week. Our food had no overlap with any Korean food I’d ever had. We ordered three dishes. They turned out to be:
1. Bacon over pea sprouts and onion, topped with a sweet and sour sauce.
2. Bacon wrapped around enoki mushrooms (long and thin) on top of chunks of green and (sweet) red peppers, covered with more sweet and sour sauce.
3. DIY wraps. A big plate of two-inch strips of chicken, carrots, egg yolk, egg white, fish cake, and pea sprouts. You dip them into soy sauce and wrap several of them with a big thin piece of white radish.
No kimchi, no hot sauce, no little appetizer plates. There was a refrigerator full of soju.
It was like stumbling into a piece of science fiction. Some little thing had happened differently in the past and as a result Korean food had turned out differently . . . Can anyone reading this explain it?
Hmmm…sounds similar to Japanese “Yoshoku” which translates to Western food. But it doesn’t mirror European/American dishes and we commonly consider their ‘western food’ be Japanese food these days. These are dishes like Om(lette) Rice, Tonkatsu, and curry rice/udon.
Apparently they were introduced in the mid 1800s. Perhaps with time they grew to be far less like western food.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%8Dshoku
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washoku
Either that or someone just slapped on the Korean food title on their restaurant to make it sound exotic (somewhat like how the Japanese KFC convinced the locals that all americans eat fried chicken for christmas).
This is very interesting to me.
The fact that there was chinese on the menu indicates it may have been a korean-chinese restaurant, which is literally different than korean food and chinese food. You will find foods on the menu at a korean-chinese restaurant that are not available at strictly korean or strictly chinese restaurants.
But you probably know this, as you seem pretty familiar with korean food.
The food actually still doesn’t sound familiar to me, either. It may be that hearing it described in English throws me off. Sometimes, if I read the English descriptions on a korean restaurant, the food will sound disgusting, and then I’ll read the korean name for it, and will realize, “oh yeah, I had that before, it’s delicious.”
Chris, it was unlike any Western food I’ve had — or did it resemble Japanese versions of Western food. The restaurant was full of Koreans; I assume it was some sort of common genuine Korean food.
Mike, I imagine that there was chinese on the menu because the restaurant is in China. The food wasn’t Chinese-like at all; it was vaguely Korean.
Korea used to be a big place before everybody moved to Seoul. Maybe all the “Korean” you’ve had before was Seoul style, and this place did dishes from somewhere else.
I had something like the DIY wraps at a Korean restaurant in MI, however the items were to be wrapped in wilted cabbage pieces instead of thin radish strips. I was told it was popular with older Koreans who ate it when they were younger. There is also a Korean dish, samgyeopsal, that could be related to the bacon items. The sauce in samgyeopsal is certainly not sweet and sour though. Interesting for sure. Just curious, what area/town was this in? There are areas of China with Korean residents that have lived in China a long time. Maybe their Korean food is more traditional and has also been modified over time.