Time For A Korea Change

My favourite meal in Korea started three days before I ate it. The day I arrived in Busan, like most days I was in the city, was shrouded by rain. On my first day the rain was probably the heaviest of the five days I was there. As I watched the downpour drench passing pedestrians from my hostel next to the main train station, I decided that I needed to get lunch somewhere close by. I needed a place that was so close, in fact, that I was not willing to cross the road. The rain was so strong that I knew if I spent a few minutes crossing the road my shoes would be soaked to the point of disuse for the rest of the day. So I ran to a nearby underpass which connected with the train station and searched for a restaurant inside.

The first restaurant I passed looked reasonably good. It had a variety of Korean dishes all served with a special type of rice that the restaurant seemed to be famous for. I opted for a soft tofu ‘jjigae’ (stew), or at least that’s what it looked like on the menu. There are a range of different jjigae you can get in Korea but this one, like many, had a red soup base made from ‘gochujang,’ a red chilli paste. It arrived steaming and aggressively boiling in a very hot ‘dolsot’ (stone bowl). It had not only tofu but also tinned tuna in it. It was, surprisingly, very good. I liked the place so I made a mental note to return if I needed a close wet weather place again.

A few days later I was moving to a different hostel, though still in the same area of Busan. I had waited at the hostel for ninety minutes but, despite many attempts to communicate with the owner, no one showed up. So I left the new hostel and managed to get a bed at another place around the corner. The rain was once again pummelling the pavement. Despite having stood in three different hostels in one day, the place I eventually stayed in was still very close - closer, in fact - to Busan station. I wanted to go back to the rice restaurant. I grabbed an umbrella and I ran around the corner to the station.

The restaurant, like many casual places in Korea, had a self-serve ordering system. Like the machines used in McDonalds in Australia or to check in to a domestic flight, customers order using a touch screen and collect their food once their number is called. This is ideal for a solo traveller eating alone, not wanting the judgement of a waiter or maitre d’ when asking for a table for one. This time I had no hesitation in ordering, I knew what I missed out on last time so I knew exactly what I wanted. I grabbed my ticket and a table.

The next best thing about the restaurant was the ‘banchan’, the ubiquitous vegetable side dishes served at Korean meals. Banchan varies dramatically from place to place. Some places will just give you a bit of kimchi and maybe a few slices of mass-produced, radioactively yellow pickled daikon. Other places will give you five or six individual dishes even though all you ordered was a bowl of noodles. The rice restaurant had great banchan on the second night I visited and, even better, it was self-serve. Whilst at most places it’s perfectly acceptable to ask a waiter for a refill of your banchan, being able to get as much as you want without asking is even better. That night at the rice restaurant there was some seaweed and some radish cubes preserved in chilli paste. They were fine. But, even better were the dried radish strips which were crunchy and spicy and sweet black beans which tasted almost like raisins.

My main dish was a soybean paste-based jjigae and grilled mackerel. The stew was packed with tofu and bundles of shimeji mushrooms. Unlike its red counterpart, this brown soup base was much more subtle in taste without any spiciness. I devoured the butterflied mackerel, leaving only a few remnants of the fish on the plate when I was done.

Like all dishes in the restaurant, the meal was served with a small pot of scorched rice. The relatively sticky rice was cooked so that it caught on the pot, creating a crunchy rice skin at the bottom. It was served in a special metal pot that came in a bamboo basket. I ate some of the rice with the jjigae and with the rest I made rice soup. As is typical at the restaurant, you are also given a large kettle of tea which you pour liberally over your scorched rice and drink.

The meal ended, like so many in South Korea, at the local convenience store. I passed three on the short walk from the restaurant back to the hostel. Despite a full stomach, I saved space for my new favourite flavour of ice cream - corn. Straight from the convenience store freezer into my mouth went the corn flavoured Paddle Pop with real kernels of corn suspended in it. It was the digestif I needed to round off my favourite meal in South Korea.