Last night I ate dinner with my wife at a pub in Yongsan-gu near the Seoul Electronics Market. Eating out in a foreign country when you don’t have good native language skills can be an adventure.
It can be hard to pick a place to eat out in Seoul when you can’t really read Korean. Restaurants sometimes have pictures of each item so you can point and smile. Often they have good English translations of the items. However, some places have no pictures and no English translations. So, we generally ask to see a menu before we go in.
We briefly checked the menu of the place we ate last night. It looked like it had good English translations, so we went in. This is the adventure part: we quickly realized that the English translations were a little bit off. Just enough to make it impossible to figure out what we would get (don’t get me wrong, I don’t expect people in Korea to speak English and I don’t expect them to cater to English speakers who won’t take the time to learn their language. I’m just explaining the difficulties of being an ignorant outsider).
We ordered a few things. One was called “scorched rice with seafood”. I’ve eaten at many places in Seoul with very good chinese-style seafood fried rice. I took a leap and figured they picked a bad translation for the work “fried” and we would get seafood fried rice. Nope. What came out was a strange soup with whole baby octopi, cut up cuttle fish, mussels, clams, whole shrimp (head and all) and strange square pressed rice patties. I actually enjoy squid, octopus and cuttle fish after living in Japan for two years and Korea for one year, so the seafood options didn’t bother me. I was simply amazed at how badly I misunderstood the menu.
We also ordered a “cheese egg roll” as an appetizer. I was assuming it would be something like string cheese wrapped in egg roll wrappers and deep fried. Kind of an asian themed fried cheese. Boy was I wrong. What came out was a huge vegetable filled omelet with cheese inside, smothered in ketchup and mayonnaise. It actually didn’t taste too bad.
We also ordered smoked chicken. This was what we expected it to be. However, asians don’t generally section poultry the way western cultures to. There aren’t really wings, thighs, legs and breasts. There are 10-12 small sections, bones and all, that result from forcibly hacking the chicken apart with a cleaver. Unless you get the wing or leg, It is fairly difficult to guess which part you are eating exactly. It tasted really good, though.
