"Very Spicy Samgyeopsal"

(Editor’s Note: I don’t want to get sued so I’m not going to name the ‘Korean’ restaurant I went to yesterday.  Plus the owner was very nice and we had a great conversation about Korea.  He introduced me to one of the kimchi chefs, who was from Anyang, the place where I was a public high school teacher for two years.)

Wooden chop sticks???

A Korean restaurant should not have wooden chopsticks.  The concept just seems so ridiculously insane.  Now, the novice, who wouldn’t know what the hell they were talking about (even if they meant well) would not have a problem using wooden chopsticks at a Korean restaurant.  The only problem is they would be wrong.

It is so wrong.

In Korea the chopsticks are long, thin, and metal.  The chopsticks I was given were short, thick, and made of wood. 

I went to the restaurant with my Korean friend Hee seop, my partner in the Red River College Mentorship program which pairs up an international student with a local one.  I thought this was a good way to give back considering I had been helped by so many people while I was in Korea and I was interested to find out what it was like for a Korean to live in Canada.

I picked up Hee seop from the College at around 2 pm.  I had looked up the location of several Korean restaurants and many of them were located in the same area along Pembina hwy.   It’s a good thing I had Hee seop with me or I might have gotten lost.  I thought the best way to get to Pembina hwy from William/Princess was to go down Main Street to get to confusion corner (I’m not even sure if that’s possible)

I asked Hee seop and he said the quickest way to get to Pembina Hwy from the College was to go down Donald St, so that’s what we did.  A few minutes later we were driving down Pembina.

(In my defense, even though I’ve technically lived in Winnipeg for over 30 years, I’ve only lived in the city for the last 8 months, consecutively.  Hee seop’s been here for over a year.  That’s way longer than I’ve been here.  Therefore it’s not shameful at all to get directions from him.)

On the way into the restaurant we were approached by a local filmmaker who was helping out with a documentary about these Koreans who travel around the world and get people to try kimchi.  If you don’t know what kimchi is, it’s made out of a cabbage that they ferment somehow, I think. I’m not really sure.  I chose to do Korean pottery and not the  “learn how to make your own kimchi” seminar.

I never really liked kimchi, but I have had it before so I am allowed to say that.  It is a little bit spicy, depending on the kind it is and whether or not the person eating it is used to eating spicy food.  At my public school in Korea there were three things that were a part of the meal every day: rice, soup, and kimchi.  Of the three, the only one I ate was the rice and I had to learn to like rice and only did so because I was so hungry and when I get that hungry almost anything will taste good.

 I never had kimchi in the school cafeteria once.  Mostly I ate just rice as fish was all too often the side dish that went with rice. (I learned from Hee seop that rice is always considered the main part of the dish, and that rice isn’t a side dish.  In Korea it’s considered ‘rice and chicken’, and not ‘chicken and rice’.

Since the filmmakers doing the filming were from Korea I felt obligated to help them out.  After all, I had been a government employee for two years and their taxes had paid for my salary.

I must have been doing something funny as I chewed the kimchi.  It wasn’t overly spicy or as strong as some of the kimchi I had tried in Korea.  I wasn’t sure why they were laughing at me as I ate.  Apparently this is a joke that I just don’t get.

They seemed pleased with the footage they shot of me and I am hoping that I make the final cut and appear in the documentary.  It might even make it onto one of the big networks, like MBC, or KBS.

The food in the restaurant wasn’t bad.  I’m sure if a person didn’t know any better they might have confused it with authentic Korean food.  I didn’t.

It only took a few minutes for the meat to cook.  In Korean BBQ they cut the meat up into tiny, thin pieces to make it cook faster.

Part of the experience of authentic Korean BBQ is that the meat is cooked at the table it is served at.  There’s a small bbq pit like hole in the table and there are hot coals placed inside the pit with a grill over the pit.  Above that a vent can be lowered down to suck up most of the smoke.

I used to love going to Korean BBQ while I lived there.

I once went to my favourite Korean BBQ place in Anyang with the gym teacher at my school.  He was used to eating lunch with me at school in the cafeteria where I mainly ate rice and shied away from a lot of things because I was worried they were too spicy.

Apparently, the name of my favourite restaurant in Korea was “Very Spicy Samgyeopsal”.  It was written in giant Hangul letters on the outside of the restaurant.   Even though I’d been in Korea for three years I’d never bothered to learn how to read the alphabet, even though it was very easy because it was written phonetically and only took a few hours to learn.

“Very Spicy Samgyeopsal” is an awesome restaurant and I give it 5 out of 5 stars.  For a very afforadable price the thick samgyeopsal is the best I’ve ever had in my life.  For a truly authentic Korean meal, that is the place to go to.  Unfortunately it would cost about 2000 dollars to fly there, so it just might not be worth it.

Til then I’m gonna have to continue my search in Winnipeg because (name of ‘Korean’ restaurant withheld to prevent a possible lawsuit) isn’t it.