Nope, Still Gross. Or, what happened when I went for Korean food at lunch today.

[seryn]

I was adventurous today. We went for Korean food.

It turns out that my abhorrence for Korean food was somewhat due to the odors in the previous instances. Like when we went in to this restaurant it didn't smell like rotting meat and fish with an overtone of burned broccoli and gag.

However, despite getting something today that I normally really like from the food court place that's completely inauthentic, I was grossed out. I got the glass noodles with beef and vegetables. First they don't tell you that the vegetables are overcooked mushrooms and that nasty bitter green stuff that looks like a cross between poor people greens and broccoli (it's got a split in the leaves and in the crotch of that there are sprinklings of wartlike broccoli buds---- it looks like an alien STD). It took forever to fish all the crud off the heap on my plate. Then my noodles were in a congealed glob even though they were too hot to touch.

Speaking of touching hot food.... yeah, they had metal chopsticks. WTF? Why bother? If I'm going to burn my hands anyway, I would rather just use my fingers directly. I wanted a fork but the server was Speedy Gonzales *zip-zip-zip Arrriba!* and we were clearly not ordering as much as the family-sized groups at other tables.

Once I got some beef that wasn't touching mushrooms or bitter green Shthuph, I discovered that it was rimmed with that jiggly fat. I ate about a third of my food and gave up.

I'm not entirely sure what the little dishes of things in the middle were. Auditions for Fear Factor? Julienned strips of milky white gelatinous ooze? rehydrated cinnamon jelly beans? leftover tempura from other restaurants owned by the same family? shredded Easter grass in 3 colors? and something that looked like griddled old people skin but tasted like eggplant?

So. overall. I still hate Korean food. But I feel reassured that my dislike of Korean food is because the food is yucky and not because I'm somehow unworthy of being a human.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Well, screw you, too. :) Why tie a bad food experience to the cuisine type, given that you're eating at what's clearly not a good restaurant?

Metal chopsticks aren't hot unless you're cooking with them. At that kind of place, they're usually hollow, anyway.

The white ooze is mung bean jelly; the beans are probably kongjaban (e.g.) and way too sweet for my taste; if there was tempura on the table, the cooking is automatically too Americanized to count as "Korean food"; the "shredded grass" is pickled daikon and carrot, usually, also too sweet most of the time (what was the third color?); and yes, grilled eggplant, probably made from little Japanese or Thai eggplant instead of the big bitter kind sold in American supermarkets.

[thistleingrey]

p.s. I had a point, but forgot it. If you're inclined to write off a cuisine based on bad restaurant experiences, you're left with nothing except for what you cook unless you're very good at selecting the restaurants at which you eat. Clearly, not the case. Write off the restaurants instead.

I'm indicating your ignorance on this post instead of on prior food-complaint posts because on this one, I know I'm not ignorant myself.

[seryn]

Sorry you were offended.
I was told it was supposed to smell and taste like it did both of the previous times. I figured if that was the effect intended and I didn't like it, it meant I didn't like that kind of cuisine. It seems unreasonable to go into an ethnic restaurant with someone who knows that cuisine and vouches for my plate and blame the restaurant if I don't like it.

I've only been to three Korean restaurants and they all serve food that people who like Korean food have said was good. I've really hated it each time, with the exception of the rice bowl place in the food court, which everyone who knows Korean food says is very unKorean.

Thanks for explaining about the eggplant.

The three colors of shredded things were green, hot pink, and white. They tasted about the same.

[thistleingrey]

Well, I can identify what you had as japchae, but only as Americanized japchae; not-Americanized japchae has somewhat different ingredients. That's part of my basis.

Obviously, there are layers and layers of good ___ cuisine; there's what a purist would like, what people accustomed to a diasporadic community consider right, what people used to outposts beyond a diaspora-community think of as usual, and so on. (That goes for regional US foods as well, not only immigrant ones.) From the side dishes you describe, this isn't the kind of place where a purist would eat; though I'm not a purist, I'm probably closer to one than are the other people you know who like Korean food. But really, the beef and noodles as described == bad food preparation.

Pink, huh? Pickled and artificially colored radish. Not cool.