Korean food adventures

So far I have enjoyed Korean food immensely, and there is a lot of fun to be had in not having any idea of what you’re ordering except for its price. Luckily I’m not a terribly picky eater so I’m usually satisfied with whatever I’m brought, and I haven’t found Korean food unbearably spicey.

Songsan has a raw fish street where there’s a bunch of seafood restaurants with buckets and buckets of live seafood out front. The octopi in the lower right corner were attempting to escape. There’s a huge variety of shellfish, including some huge mussel-like things that I’ve never seen before (in this picture, they’re the far left bucket in the middle row). Lots of crabs, clams, snails, oysters, squid, cuttlefish, and even some tanks with fish.

We tried one of these on Sunday and had a very inexpensive shellfish soup. Food is usually cooked at the table either at an inset grill or in a saucepan on a little table burner, like in this picture. Robin is slurping noodles. Eating noodles without slurping is difficult with chopsticks. Note also the presence of the ubiquitous kimchee in the lower right corner.



Here is another typical spread of food (before the main course even arrived) that we had on Monday. The middle dish was a curry pancake of some sort, the white rectangle in the back is a bean curd with soy sauce, and there was salad, mushrooms, cucumber soup, and kimchee.

Our main course was a spicy steamed anglerfish on bean sprouts, garnished with an octopus.

...and by steamed anglerfish, I mean the WHOLE steamed anglerfish...

Robin seemed somewhat discouraged when I pointed out that the fishy-tasting curly wiggly bits were probably its intestines. They did taste ok, although both of us kind of pushed them to the side after that realization.