i was really hungry.

the other day chris and i went to the video store. he got a korean movie. i hate approximately 86.5% of movies so i did not watch it, but he watched it and in the movie, some korean person ate squid or a dumpling or… something else very korean. this chain of events indirectly led us to new seoul garden (!!!), a korean restaurant in southfield. we had never eaten korean food before except for some bad kimchi in a jar that i bought at meijer, and some okay kimchi on top of a hotdog deep fried with bacon, which is not-so-much korean… so going to new seoul garden was SUPER EXCITING!!

we walked inside and a korean lady took us down a long hallway to a strange sectioned off dining room. there was a traditional dining room with tables low to the ground and seating on the floor. unfortunately we did not get to sit at this table :’-(. the guy sitting next to me had a bunch of litttlllee tiny bowls full of different side dishes. i am a self-proclaimed lover of side dishes, and so immediately i knew i wanted what he had. i thought he had spent a lot of money getting so many little dishes. i admired his food from across the room and took a picture of it after he left.

we got hot tea. i still have no idea what kind of tea it was but i wish i knew. i’ve tasted many teas and it was not a tea i’ve ever tasted! it was like a genmaicha except stronger and sweeter. what was it!??!? i want more.

i ordered the haemool soba - stirfried buckwheat noodles with seafood and vegetables. i love buckwheat noodles. i could eat them from sunrise to sunset, day and night, forever and ever. this particular dish had scallops, shrimp, mushrooms even a mushroom hater would eat, and a delicious sauce. it also contained some big squiggly black things that i have eaten several times throughout the course of my life and still cannot figure out if they are a vegetable, or some kind of creepy sea-monster.

chris ordered the bibimbap - marinated beef, vegetables, and an egg on top of rice in a heated stone bowl with a hot sauce on the side. i accidentally touched the “heated stone bowl” and THEY WEREN’T KIDDING. that sucker was h-o-t. the sauce it came with was, i guess, some sort of red pepper paste with ..other stuff in it. like oils, and spices. every bibimbap sauce recipe i find is different. both of our meals came with a bowl of miso soup. it was not the best miso in the world, or anywhere near it, but it was not the worst, and it was edible. it came with a really really long spoon. since i knew virtually nothing about korean food, i did not know that koreans ate with really long spoons. further research tells me that “sujeo” is the word for the set of utensils used to eat korean food. the set includes long metal chopsticks and a spoon with a really long handle. sometimes just the spoon by itself is referred to as “sujeo.”

10 inch long spoon “sujeo” from kgrocer.com

AND THE BEST PART OF ALL - when our food came out, it came with eight tiny bowls!! the “side dish of the day” on the menu was really EIGHT SIDE DISHES. the clouds parted and the sun shined down, and a crowd cheered inside my head as they set down one by one, eight tiny bowls, right in front of my very own eyes! i didn’t even know what all of them were! but i loved them! each and evey one of them! i was jealous no more!

koreans are just as excited about side dishes as i am! they call them “banchan”. i still do not know what many of these particular side dishes are called since i still know almost nothing about korean food (but i am learning..), other than several of them are different types of kimchi, (or kimchee, or gimchi, depending on who you are.) one of them in the front is made with bean sprouts, the one in the back is some kind of dry-but-not-dried bean that tastes like grape juice (but i was the only one that could taste the grape juice…), the one in front of the glass was a pickled somethingorother, the green one was spinach or some other related green. the rest, i think, are various types of kimchi, but correct me if i’m wrong.

after we ate, and ate, and ate more and more, we were finally done. just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, they brought us a plate of watermelon!! all happy endings involve watermelon. our visit to seoul garden was wonderful and we all lived happily ever after. the end.