This is Cookie ‘o Maniac. It sounds the name of a lesbian, Irish serial killer. It’s actually a cake.

In Korea only newer, Western-style apartments have we’d think of us an oven- 4 burners, big and boxy, with a huge steel belly to roast and bake in. As a result, every single bakery-style outlet from Dunkin’ Donuts (Yes, that Dunkin’ Donuts) on up has a dazzling array of beautiful cakes. It’s not uncommon to see Koreans sitting on the subway with one of the tell-tale takeout boxes, especially on weekends.

I don’t think I really need to explore the fact that this is one of my favorite things about Korea. Cakes change with the seasons. For awhile, cakes in the shape of houses with cookie roofs were big. There’s a mocha cake in the shape of a giant cappuccino. There’s one in the shape of a piano whose flavor remains an enticing mystery. For Murray’s birthday I got a chocolate ice cream cake studded with chocolate meteors and a white chocolate UFO the size of my fist. I will take literally any opportunity to buy one of these.

Which is not so say buying one is easy. They come pre-packed with all kinds of strange questions from the staff. I’m used to the brusque in-and-out of small Italian bakeries where they tie the box with twine and send you on your way with a minimum of verbal exchange. Here there are questions about dry ice and the anticipated time on consumption, queries about the kind of candles and age of of the eaters. All cakes come with those little booze bottles with a string you pull to make them explode in a shower of confetti strings.

Anyhow, if you’d like to peek at a cake selection, poke your nose over this way., although the selection on that page is just about half of what you’d find in any place you walked into.

Gamjatang (Literally, ‘Potato Soup’, although that’s a misnomer, hold yer horses) has quickly become my go-to “Feel better and try not to beat anyone up” meal. Mary found it first, introduced to it by a Couchsurfer she stayed with. She made somw inquiries with her students and they directed her to an literal hole in the wall in a nearby market.
One of the most shocking things about Korea- and Asia in general- is it’s strange verticality. A Western sensibility tells us that anything worth visiting is on the ground level. This goes double-triple in New York- everything above 1F is businesses and paperwork. Not so in Korea where PC Cafes, restaurants and bars rise up to the 14th floor and beyond. I’ve really learned to look up, but that’s a different topic.

Back to misnomers- While the name literally translates back as potato soup, Gamjatang is actually a red, spicy soup whose primary distinction is the great big hunks of primal-looking pork spine swimming in it’s hellish depths. For 5,000 won (About $5,mentally, something like 4.75 literally) you get a big stone bowl of the stuff with enough meat to make a satisfying meal of. The idea is to pluck the great big hunks of long-simmered spine bones out of the soup and to use your chopsticks to pry the soft-like-cotton meat from their crevices. A great deal of fat and something unidentifiable, but marrow-ish, comes along with it.

The meat itself is a major delight. This sounds a bit strange, but the first thing that comes to mind (at a good Gamjatang place, anyway) is corned beef- Salty, musky-gamey, a little mysterious, completely delicious. The broth is spicy and salty and has that weird Korean soup flavor going on- Something earthy and deep, like oregano, maybe Ginseng. I poked my nose at a few recipes and it seems to either come from the very, very, very generous shake of black pepper most Korean soups get or possible ground sesame leaf.

So, for something called potato soup, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of potato, does there? When ordered in individual bowls, Gamjatang comes potato-less. But if you’re in a group of 4 or more you can order positively massive cauldrons of the stuff for between 20 and 30 dollars, depending. If you order the larger size, that’s where you get your potatoes. I’m not sure why the smaller sizes arrive without potatoes. They’re not expensive and available year round. Go figure.
Gamjatang feels like a quintessential Korean traveler’s meal. It’s strange and unique, it’s got a terrifying cut of animal in it and it’s cheap. I’m not sure what the availability is like at American Korean restaurants, but if you see it on the menu, give it a go.

If you’d like to give it a go at home, I found this helpful little video. It might take an in-depth visit to an Asian grocery, but I can vouch for the results.

Our neighbors down the hall used to live in China and they speak pretty good Chinese. This is good news because a lot of the better Chinese restaurants in Korea only have menus in Chinese. Maybe once or twice a month we hoof over there and let our neighbors pick the good stuff off the menu.

As is often the case in Korea, we’re probably the only white people to wander in in a given week, if not ever. This is a good thing. The waitstaff starts to recognize you and on your second or third visit the freebies start to show up. “Service!” is the word for this and they’ll just drop a plate of food on your table with a smile. This happened at the Chinese place, just like it always does.

But we couldn’t quite place the mystery dish. From the outside it looked like popcorn chicken. And it was definitely a game-y bird, but not duck. And it was bony as hell. In a single little pebble-sized bite you’d find 6 or 8 tiny, edible bones. The smart money was on Quail, but who chops up quail into tiny little pieces and deep fries it? The cook kept telling us it was a good snack with beer, but his Korean-Chinese mishmash kept us from determining the true nature of our special snack. By the end of the meal we were determined to find out what this thing was. A lot of back and forth ensued, but here’s the gist: Deep-fried Quail Fetus. It’s not unusual to find a bird-fetus dish in most Asian cultures. Korea doesn’t really do it, but it’s prevalent elsewhere. And I guess this guy brought it with him from China. And then we ate it. And I’d do it again. So that’s the time I ate a fetus.

BONUS STORY: We had a special school lunch today. We went down he street to eat octopus and bulgogi soup. The best part of this meal is when the guy comes over with a big ol’ bowl of water, pulls out a hell of a monster octopus, drops it into your boiling pot of vegetables and broth and then slams down the glass lid on top of it so that you can watch this creature try and escape, fail, and die before you eat it. We ate two of these, so the second time this happened I was able to eat octopus while watching an octopus die. Forget farm to table cuisine, try Meta-dining.

Bibimbap is my default lunch/dinner/breakfast of choice. It’s about $3.50 for a an enormous bowl of rice with mixed vegetables, hot pepper paste and a fried egg, gently touched with sesame oil and seaweed. Like PB&J, it’s just one of those things that works, each flavor in perfect harmony with the others. I’ve payed a lot more money for food a lot clunkier than this. It’s a dish that makes you feel stupid for ever paying more than $3.50 for food.

So I was a little bit bummed when this showed up in the New York Times:

Excuse the weird grammar, the casual Korean and the phrase “customers of funerals”, it just flops. It’s a fine example of how Korea is generally over thinking it’s global efforts. This could not have been a cheap ad, so who forgot to run it by a native English-speaking copywriter? Also, why Bibimbap and not Samgyupsal? Why a dish of mixed rice and foreign ingredients and not, well, meat on a grill? Like a lot of Korean things, there plenty of head scratching moments in this ad.

Anyhow, if you can find it, go for it. There’s a Bibimbap place called Bap on 9th Avenue in between 55th and 54th street. It’s hardly authentic, but it is delicious.

I wrote this for a friend who is coming in a few weeks. I figured it was relevant:

Drinking is like. The national pasttime. Now that it’s winter, eveyrone drinks inside, but in Spring and Summer, after like 10, EVERYONE is drunk. You’ll see these business guys in $1,000 suits puking their guts out, passed out in bushes. Koreans dont just drink, they drink until they puke and blackout. Just now Koreans are starting to realize the dangers of alcoholism, but it’s still not really viewed as a problem. You can get booze ANYWHERE. You can also drink outside, but culturally it’s appropriate to keep it to a minimum. As long as you’re not making a huge deal out of it, you’re okay. Most convenience stores will put out folding tables and chairs and you can pop inside, get some booze and drink at a table. This is a great way to meet people, they love to see white people enjoying Korean culture. Most C-Stores also sell little dixie cups for 5 or 10 cents a pop. I always keep a few on hand to offer to passerby or people at other tables. They’ll love you and start buying you snacks and all kinds of stuff from the store. Most street food vendors also have a small sitting area and serve booze, too.

Re: Booze. There are maybe 4 brands of beer here: Cass, Hite, Max and OB. All 4 taste like shit and are 3% alcohol. OB also makes some knock-off beers that are supposed to be like Corona or Guiness or something. They still suck ass. More expensive bars will usually have Heineken or Guiness, but at eye popping prices. I know of ONE microbrewery in Seoul. Most Koreans drink Soju, a rice liquor. It tastes like Vodka but sweeter. It’s also not made from rice anymore and is subject to any number of terrifying urban legends. It’s a buck for a bottle and 1 bottle will get you fucked up. Beer is mostly a “side-drink” for Soju. There’s also Magkolei (Mah-koh-lee), sometimes called Nongju. I don’t know why some places call it by a different name, no one can tell me what the difference is. Anyway, it RULES. It’s like milky white and kind of sweet and is apparently pretty good for you. It has a lot of vitamins or something. It used to be a peasant drink, but it’s really in vogue in urban areas and with younger generations. You’ll love it. There are special Magkeolli restaurants where they serve it with pindaetok, which are Korean pancakes, usually with seafood or kimchi. Good stuff. You can also get it in bottles at any C-Store. Sometimes it’s flavored, but I think I like it straight the best. There;’ this artsy/indie party once a month and some guy there brings his Mom’s homemade Makgoeli and it will get you drunk. Major.

Re: Beer, WIkipedia has this to say: “The South Korean beer market is dominated by the three major brands: Cass, Hite, and OB. Most restaurants and bars will only have one on tap, as they are largely regarded as similar in taste and price (they are mostly brewed from rice). Foreign beers are available but are generally expensive – generally at least ₩8,000 and as much as ₩15,000 for a pint of Guinness in downtown Seoul mainly due to the heavy taxation on import beers, which is 100% opposed to 20 to 30 percent on other types of alcoholic beverage. Microbreweries are starting to appear, and this area of the market is showing increasing signs of sophistication. Unfortunately, due to the law requiring 30 billion Korean Won capital for commercial sales, it is not possible to buy microbrewery’s beer off the shelf. Of all Korea’s mass produced beers, only Hite’s Max Prime brand contains 100% barley malt.”

Among Korea’s many butchered-English slogans, the slightly-creepy Mr. Pizza holds a special place in my heart. The slogan of this upscale and inexplicably expensive pizza chain is “Love for Women”. It’s in their ads, on their take out boxes, on their billboards. Everywhere. What this has to do with pizza is several light years from my understanding. Is it like health food pizza? It doesn’t look that way. And it’s got that extra bit of creepy. It’s vaguely threatening, like a creepy boyfriend who won’t leave you alone. He LOVES you. He has LOVE FOR WOMEN.

Anyway: This gives me an opportunity to talk about something strange in Korea. The Pizza Gap. Pizza comes in 2 varieties, affordable and unaffordable. For some reason places like Mr. Pizza and Pizza Hut can command 20-25$ a pie. Meanwhile, there are multiple local and chain pizza places where a pizza for two can be had for as little as 5 or 6 bucks. I’m always blown away by that. That’s a 20 friggin’ dollar difference. That is THREE extra pizzas. How can this be?

At this point I should note that Korea has the same schizophrenic, anything-goes attitude towards pizza that’s so prevalent in Easter Europe and the rest of Asia. Beef ribs with jellied bones, corn, potatoes, mayo, mustard. These are normal. Pizza School has a crust made from cocktail wieners adorably called ‘The Vienna’. It will set you back an extra $1.50. Do it.

An interesting article on North Korean Food Diplomacy from the I-could-read-this-all-day Edible Geography blog. It looks like the North Koreans have a restaurant in Phenom Pen. We’ve been talking about taking a trip around Thailand/Cambodia/Vietnam. Don’t know if we’ll make to Phenom Pen, but if we do then North Korean dinner theater is on the menu for sure.

UPDATE:A first-person account of creepy North Korean dinner theater.

ehhhhhhhhhhhh.

My first week in Korea I was thirsty. Fortunately, foreign beverage cases tend to be a carnival of delights. Take Kofola, for example. Kofola is only available in the Czech Republic. It is Coke’s grow up, responsible brother. Lightly carbonated, it tastes heavily of licorice and nutmeg, maybe a heavy peck of anise. Served ice cold it is what Jesus is drinking right now. There are places- little portals to Heaven- where you can get it on tap. I think about it with alarming frequency.

This is not Kofola. It’s not even tea, really. Oh, it looks like tea. It comes in a tea bottle. And it’s stocked with other tea products. But here’s a secret: It’s liquid popcorn. Okay, it’s corn silk tea. And you will buy it by accident EVERYWHERE. In a single week I bought 4 different kinds whose labels ranged from “This is definitley corn tea, WHITE DEVIL” to “I am not telling you shit about what is inside this bottle”. The one above is pretty obvious, but. How was I supposed to know?

Truth be told, I drank the whole thing. Once you know what you’re in for, it isn’t so bad. It just tastes exactly like liquid popcorn. Do with tha what you will.

Sorry about that DRANK above, right as I started to type that post title that killer Sleigh Bells jam Crown on the Ground came on. Have you heard it? It’s the sickest jam this side of the MOON. It sounds like a grim hip-hop club right at the moment a bling-ed out Voltron with 12 story sub woofers in it’s legs obliterates it with ION LASERS. It’s equal parts big booty Method Man beats, dreamy space jam Cocteau Twins pretty female vox and fuzzy noise pop. Which is like a dream listen. Bacon dipped in fudge and wrapped in a waffle or something.

Anyway, this is not about that. This is about Pocari Sweat. Pocari Sweat is one of those things that always turns up on a list of the TWENTY CRAZIEST THINGS I SAW IN ASIA lists, mostly because it has “Sweat” in the name. Big letdown: Hey, it’s pretty good! It tastes like Gatorade back when you had to make Gatorade from a powder and it came in flavors that existed like Orange and Lemon-Lime and not RIP TIDE RUSH or ARCTIC ICEFLOW. One of those is a real flavor, the other one I made up, but I’m sure someone at Gatorade is taking notes. Also, ugh- Riptide Rush? Who wants to drink something called ‘Riptide’? That’s like. Ben & Jerry’s Silty Sand Fudge.

So, silly name aside Pocari Sweat is pretty good and I drank it a lot during the summer and also when I get drunk and do not want a hangover. It has electrolytes. And resupplies your ions. In case you have a grimy club to BLOW UP.

This is not my picture. Oh, I had pictures, but in a piqued fit of self-preservation, my unconscious mind led me to delete them from my camera. What you see there is not a delicious cinnamon roll, but instead a ghastly minon of the pastry Satan called ‘Garlic Olive Roll’. Take that in for a moment. Garlic. Olive. Donut. Sugar. It sounds like the losing ambition of a particularly batty Top Chef contestant. Have you parsed it yet?

Our very first morning in Korea, something like 10 hours after getting here, we popped into Dunkin’ Donuts because we could read the sign and we knew what it was. One of the truer delights of going abroad is seeing familiar things go utterly weird and in that regard D&D delivered. Sure, there were old favorites like the plain glazed and the ‘Bavarian Cream’ (What, you don’t know where Boston is, Korea?), but there was also a whole new spectrum. There’s something called a ‘Chewisty’, which is 8 small, rice flour donuts bonded into a ring. It’s my new favorite donut.  The rice flour gives it a chew so that the total effect is Donut Bubble Gum. There’s also a segmented heart filled with both jelly and cream.

And the there are misfits. Originally there was just the First Sin, Garlic Olive Roll. But then something called ‘World Donut Festival’ rolled into town and it was like. Let me paint a scene: There’s a new temp at Dunkin’ Donuts Korea HQ. The big boss says, “Larry! Get these rejected donut ideas down to the incinerator!”. Meanwhile, a pretty young secretary is bringing up a folder full of Good Donut Ideas. Larry leaves the office and is SMITTEN with this pretty lady and bumps right into her. In the commotion that follows, the papers get all mixed up. The result is World Donut Festival.

Now, it’s not all bad. There’s an ‘Olive’ Chewisty that tastes exactly like the regular Chewisty. There’s also a yogurt filled Greek donut. The one that made the headlines on food blogs was a ‘Kimchi Donut’, but it’s actually a Kimchi Croquette and you can get them 3 for a dollar at any self-respecting Korean bakery so BACK OFF WHITE DEVILS. But there was also something called ‘Lentil Cacao’, a chocolate frosted donut speckled with raw lentils. And some kind of baked bean thing from the country of Hell.

But none of them could muster the kind of audacious horror of Garlic Olive Roll. It’s a permanent fixture at D&D, this is not a seasonal item. This donut stands with the Pink Frosted and Toasted Coconut Thing. It’s a real deal. 6 weeks after my first sighting, I finally picked it up. I figured, “Hey, it’s here everyday. And maybe it’s a mistranslation thing. After all, who would put garlic and sugar on a donut?”. Had I bothered to be more critical, I would have remembered that this is a county that studs it’s cakes with tomatoes.

So I bought this thing and I bit it and I never want to tell you what it’s like because it is HORRIBLE FOREVER AND EVER BE GONE YE DEMONS. I’m not averse to the concept, but the execution is putrid. It’s like someone made the regular glazed donut and rolled it though the trash pile at the Olive Garden. It tastes like every low-rent Chinese food meal I’ve ever had. Who did this and why?

Point being: It’s not even a novelty, like those banks shaped like boobs or the pot bellied Batman I spent 7000 won prying from a crane machine. It’s a bad idea in Korea, it’s a bad idea on the Moon and it’s a bad idea on every plane of the Multiverse.

Noodle Soup is not really a tradition in Korea, although there are plenty of soups with noodles in them. A lot of them are served cold with hardboiled eggs and can be had for somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 bucks. This soup comes from the market near our apartment. It’s 2000 won (1.75-ish?) for a quantity that can be described as ‘embarrassing’.  These photos do a poor job of explaining the scale of that bowl. It’s very deep. You could feed 2 people on it.

Anyway, some market stalls have big back rooms attached to them. This one has a really big back room that serves as one the market’s few proper dining areas. You wander in off the street and order in the only way we know how: “Two”. As far as we can tell, this is the only thing they sell and nosy glances at other tables seem to confirm this suspicion. Outside of the backroom, where the dining area faces the market proper, 3 ladies tend to 3 enormous cauldrons of hot broth while another woman mixes, rolls and cuts the noodles by hand on the spot. Place an order and she grabs a handful of the raw noodles and pops them into one of the soup cauldrons. A few minutes later she strains out the noodles, adds them to that freakishly sized steel bowl, tops it with the broth and off it goes for a final dosing of seaweed, sesame seeds and scallions. The end result is a broth that’s been thickened by the starch of the noodles, not unlike the fabled ‘pasta water’, the secret trick of killer cooks everywhere.

We’re not sure exactly what goes into the broth, but it comes studded with chunks of zucchini and white onion and is definitely not without it’s own distinct taste. We’ve never found a stray hunk of meat, but maybe there’s a bullion involved somewhere? It’s not salty. Which reminds me: I have yet to see a salt shaker in a Korean restaurant. What you see above is a pepper shaker- Koreans LOVE to dose their soup with obscene amounts of pepper. I join them in this when it comes to earthier, meatier soups like a Dduck Bulgogi. It seems wrong here. Back to the point: Most things are really quite well seasoned and what’s not, well. Usually you make up the difference in hot pepper paste. That Satanically-red stuff above is a blend of dried red peppers, scallions, garlic and god knows what else. 2 tiny teaspoons of it were enough to render my gigantic bowl of soup nearly inedible. I watched a prissy looking Korean woman across the aisle spoon in EIGHT teaspoons and she looked like she was bored with it. LIAR.

Anyway, this has quickly become a default dinner for us. If we’re not sure what else to eat, it’s off to the market for noodle soup. And we’re not alone- Something that’s great about traditional Korean fare is the multi-generational clientele. We sat across from a the aforementioned prissy firebreather, but behind a mother with two kids. Teenagers ate in the back and old folks slugged Soju and slurped noodles against a far wall. It always feels deeply actual and maybe more like home than anywhere else.

Towards the end of summer nearly every c. store, grocery store and store with a freezer has a crazy markdown on ice cream confections. We’re talking 40-75% off. This is good for people like me who tend to buy things that look like they’ll kill you. Case in point: Corn Ice Cream. When I saw this in the freezer I said- and I did say this out loud- “No, come on”. It was clearly a corn flavored ice cream pop. I took it home and stashed it in the freezer and totally forgot about it. Until last Wednesday when I had  a crazy jones for something frozen.

Now, I’m not against weird flavors. I like weird flavors. But this seemed to wander into. Well, can you imagine the boardroom scene? American Ice Cream companies have wisely followed the “Take a flavor and shit to it” formula with great success. Chocolate and Pretzels. Okay! Heath Bar and Bannana. Okay! The zaniest we’ve ever gotten is Marzipan.

So, anyway, I unwrap this thing and am immediately consumed with delight. This is no popsicle. This is a CORN COB made of WAFFLE filled with buttered corn ice cream. The real kicker? Underneath the corn cob waffle is a layer of chocolate. It also has little frozen chunks of corn in it. That I wasn’t so crazy about, but I’ll give it a pass. I immediately wanted another.

Problem was, with those crazy 75% off sales, nearly store had an empty freezer. I stopped in every shop we walked past for days looking for my beloved corn ice cream. Nothing. I found a knock off popsicle version, but not the waffle kind.

And then Murray launched her own search and came up with 3 more from god knows where. This is why you get married. Because some day a beatiful woman will turn up at your door with corn flavored ice cream and make it all okay.

Unfortunately, I’m still grappling with some nasty gastro-intestinal bug and I am forbidden from eating diary for a WEEK. I am sure that this is a test and I’m also sure that I’m bound to fail it.

Corn Cob Ice Cream, you’re the greatest.