A Kalbi Feast

One thing about koreans is their love for eating out. There are a myriad of restaurants, mom & pop places all over the with hundreds of choices for the hungry horde. One of my favorite is the Grilled Kalbi (Marinated Beef Rib). Yesterday, two of my korean friends took me and Billy with their children to this restaurant about 15 minutes away from Janghowon. We've always driven past this restaurant (which had a large jungle gym/playground for kids that you can see in the windows) but never had the chance to try it out. It's hard to stop by when you're in a bus or a cab.


Then my friends told me that we're going to have dinner in a faraway place. I was kinda amused by their description. I brought Billy with me (Bill opted to stay behind since it was raining and didn't look forward to sitting on the floor to eat). To my delight, they said that this restaurant was know for its Kalbi ribs. Would you look at that plate? The sight of that much red meat sets my heart (and tastebuds) aflutter.


Let's go on the side dishes (called banchan in korean), shall we? Let's see... we've got some raw greens on the lower portion of the picture with wrapping leaves in a basket. The latter are lettuce and sesame (perilla) leaves for wrapping pieces of meat with garlic, kimchi and whatever banchan you want and then stuffing it in your mouth. Simple but oh so good. And in the tiny saucers you've got raw garlic (good for your heart after eating all that calorie-laden meat), gochujang sauce (red pepper sauce) and tiny stewed sweet potatoes.

Now here we have small veggie egg pancakes, sauteed shitake mushrooms and water kimchi made out of seaweed (water kimchi is called "mul kimchi" in korean). I'm ashamed to admit that I hogged the mushrooms all for myself.



Next, we have some green onions marinated in goshujang sauce, some julienned cabbage with onions and carrots that you can add to your saucer of horseradish mustard sauce (belive me the combination is addictive: salty, spicy and tangy at the same time) and more of the same gochujang sauce.


Here are the banchan platters on the kids' table. We did the grilling on our table for safety purposes. On the lower bottom of the picture is the requisite lettuce salad with its large dollop of mayo-ketchup dressing (why do koreans have this affinity to smother their salads with a combination of mayonaise and ketchup?). The red clump on the upper right of the salad are raw marinated crabs in gochujang sauce - something that I can't bring my self to eat. I'm used to crabs being cooked, not raw and gooey in the inside. And lastly, the pink mound is mashed potatoes with corn topped with the same mayo-ketchup sauce. Sigh.



Let's get some grill action, shall we? Here my friend deftly lifts the beef rib with its meat trailing down to cut it into smaller, manageable pieces. Too bad the place didn't use real charcoal. Instead it had those japanese-type burners that one can see in yakitori restaurants. When I told my friends I love gnawing on the bones, they surreptiously piled all the rib bones on my plate. My hubby will roll his eyes when he reads this. I can't help it, there's nothing more pleasurable in life that holding a big rib bone and trying to eat off as much meat off it as you can. ;)


I dunno why but the soup or stew as you can call it and the rice always come halfway in the meal. Here we have, pardon the blurry picture from my phone camera, the stew in the black stone pot is Dwenjjang Jjige (fermented soybean stew with zucchini, onions and tofu). By this time, I am reeling from the amount of beef that we have eaten. And then the piece de resistance came, my friends ordered Bibimbap, a bowlful (or shall I say a small basin full of) rice topped with veggies and more gochujang and then mixed together. I begged off telling them I was full as a Thanksgiving turkey stuffed to the gills ready for the oven.