Food

In brief, Korean food is tasty and healthy, but the lack of international alternatives can be frustrating.

Home-cooked meals are full of vegetables, kimchi (spicy fermented cabbage), and rice— a nutritionist's dream— but restaurant meals are surprisingly meaty, with galbi and samgyupsal, both variations of meat-cooked-over-a-grill, highest in popularity. Beef is pricier than pork but it's around. Also nice are samgetung, a type of chicken stew, and bibimbop, a mix of greens, rice, and egg. There are several tasty noodle-and-beef soups such as galbitung. Street snacks such as gimbab, a sort of vegetable sushi, is also common, and in winter there will be little pancakes and skewers on sticks to warm you up.

On the table, some large bowls are individual, but most are shared. In many restaurants you will sit on the floor on a mat and the table will be low. Most people use metal chopsticks, but spoons are also used. It is not a tipping culture, and restaurant meals are generally inexpensive. You can get up and get your own water, and you'll need to ask for your bill. In a rural mom-and-pop restaurant it can feel like dinner at home. Western TGIF-type restaurants will be more familiar with tables and chairs.

Koreans have quite a lot of mealtime rules of etiquette. Koreans do not like to drink from the bottle and beer will always come with glasses. Typically, others may fill your glass for you. You can do this too, but wait until someone's glass is empty so that they don't feel rushed. As with anything else, when giving or receiving something it's considered polite to use both hands. If you ask your students about table manners they will tell you not to blow your nose at the table; I don't know a culture which likes that sound, but Koreans find it particularly rude. Koreans tend to eat quickly and do not have a lot of conversation until after the meal, and some older people won't drink anything until after the dinner when there's time for chatting.

Westerners, if it's a group of friends, will usually go out for supper and then split the bill in some manner, whether it's everyone throwing in ten bucks or a to-the-penny calculation. If you go out with your class or with a student in Korea they will usually insist on paying. If you go out with them often you should sneak away to pay for everything sometimes. The students will make a theatrical show of protest, but they will appreciate you doing so. It is a delicate social nuance you should learn so that no one feels you are becoming a freeloader.

Being a dishwasher is not a nice job here!

You will also see street food at stands or in little "soju tents" with plastic tarps in wintertime. Street food, or dishes such as dakgalbi (chicken) or duc boki (rice ball, noodles and egg) should wait until you are acclimatized to the spice level, which can be ridiculous. Koreans will prattle on endlessly about how healthy their food is, but too much gochujung (red pepper sauce) can damage your stomach, and some college students seem to feel it's a contest, just like westerners with hot chicken wings. The rate of stomach cancer is high here from the spice. Too much ramyeon isn't good either, as it's full of MSG. Some people like squid (ojinga), but for those who don't (like me), sometimes it's hard to avoid tentacles in your dinner. Few foreigners like bundaygee (boiled silkworms!), but a few do. My favorite snack is hote-duck, a sort of cinnamon-fried waffle that's wonderful on cold days.

Because home-cooked Korean meals are usually pretty light on meat, it's not hard to be a vegetarian in Korea if you're not too strict about it, and the concept will be easily understood. It is much more difficult for vegans, as Koreans will tend to see vegetarianism as a dietary choice and not an ethical one, and vegans may get frustrated continually explaining the reasons for their choices.

Everyone has a pet peeve about Korea, and I suppose mine is the food nationalism. Again, I like the food, but if you get sick of it you're out of luck. If you live in a small town or eat in a school cafeteria, it will be Korean food, every meal, every day, every week, every year. It's gotten better; when I first came here in 2003 I was a hero if I could find a tin of beans. Now I can find some increasingly odd things in the more international supermarkets such as Italian pastas or cheese (Koreans usually don't like cheese except on pizza). There are some things which Koreans generally dislike the taste of, such as mint and root beer, and these will be next to impossible to find. I've never met an ESL teacher who didn't like Mexican food, and sadly it's almost unobtainable here. This may change. I notice that suddenly taco chips are all the rage as bar snacks.

You can go out to a restaurant, or your
stomach can develop a sense of humor.

As far as restaurants, excepting fast food, there will be almost nothing except Korean food. Even the fast food will be Koreanized, with potatoes on the pizza and kimchi in the hamburgers. Busan is a city larger than Vancouver. When I lived there, this city of several million had some Japanese sushi restaurants, two or three Indian, a few pricey American-style eateries, two Vietnamese, and that's it. A Mongolian barbecue restaurant opened and closed within three months for lack of customers— to be replaced by yet another grilled-pork restaurant. Younger Koreans, or those who have traveled, will be open to other dishes, but do not criticize Korean food or things will get nasty. I was told of a tour group that went to Italy and never even tried the food—they brought their own. You're just going to have to get used to it, or be prepared to buy more expensive imported groceries. I know some tenacious teachers who do this.

Koreans will complain that western food is greasy and salty, and that desserts are sickeningly sweet. Admittedly, western food is somewhat so in comparison—when I moved to the US I found I had lost the taste for some dishes and my tolerance for grease, salt, and sugar was reduced. Nevertheless, remember that most Koreans have only had western fast food, and assume that everyone eats that way at home in America. Many are surprised to learn that westerners eat salad! By the way, salad here can mean anything from a vegetable mix to assorted greens, and it seems that there's only one creamy dressing available in the whole country...

Things will be somewhat better in Seoul, which is more westernized. Here you will find the trendy coffee shops and the Italian or donair restaurants, next to the opera house. For a wider choice of food or art or culture, you need to go to Seoul. You might not feel very authentically Korean if you're sipping on your low-fat latte to Herbie Hancock, but there are some advantages to living there! Yet I've noticed that even in smaller centers, there are now coffee shops everywhere. The country seems to have gone coffee-crazy in only a few years.

It's hard to get good bread in Korea, although you might occasionally find familiar flavors in a bakery, and like everything else with foreign food in Korea, things are getting better. Koreans seem to traditionally view bread as a dessert, and so you might bite into a piece and find it too sweet or filled with some type of jam. I brought a breadmaker back from Canada and started to make my own. There are many different types of teas, from green to black (orange pekoe) to all sorts of roots or fruits or Chinese flavors. Traditional coffee shops are called tabangs and are often fronts for prostitution, so don't use that translation if you went to a Dunkin' Donuts the night before or your students will giggle.

What's in the soup? Relax. You are not going to eat a bowl of Rover stew by mistake. The consumption of dog is in a legal grey zone and is usually only done in back-alley restaurants. Increasingly, it's seen as old-school among young Koreans. Besides, boshintung is an expensive delicacy. Would you waste escargot on someone without telling them? You can decide about the ethics. I don't have a problem with others eating dog, but I don't myself because farmed dogs are treated harshly (as opposed to pet dogs, which are babied and spoiled!). The thing you must not do is to strongly condemn or mock it. Canadians generally don't eat much wild meat nowadays; but I think of how annoyed I would feel if people made fun of "barbaric moose-eating Canadians!"

Korean booze is highly underrated. The beer is predictable but abundant; it tastes like American lagers and is cheap. Cafri tastes suspiciously like Corona if you add a lemon slice. My favorite is Hite. Soju, a kind of Korean vodka-ish moonshine made with potatoes and imbibed straight, is less than a dollar a bottle! Older male Koreans may think of beer as a sissy drink and will insist on soju. Other variants are bekseju, a kind of mix of soju and wine, and bokbunja, which is like a sweet raspberry wine. Macalee and dongdongju are strong milky beverages, nice after a hot day of mountain hiking. Japanese sake is surprisingly uncommon outside of Japanese restaurants and will be expensive.

Actual wine is not popular here, although it is becoming trendier as for social climbers. I find good wine hard to find as most of the plunk is sparkling wine or too sweet for my taste, but things are definitely getting better as the EU free trade pact takes effect. Mixed drinks are more difficult to find and are expensive—try finding tequila!—although gin imported from Russia (usually served with tonic) is often dirt cheap, and gintonic, as it's called, is popular. Guinness drinkers will have to shop around, but it can be found, and there is even pricey draft Guinness to be found in some fashionable parts of Seoul. The country is changing fast, and I am beginning to see more unusual beers in supermarkets such as Belgian or South Asian brands. For some reason Hoegaarden can be found everywhere.