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Showing posts with label Orient Express. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Orient Express. Show all posts

Friday, January 5, 2018

Trying First Korean Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget





Trying First Korean Food with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget



In the year 2000, I began working as a restaurant critic for the Monterey County Weekly newspaper (Circulation: 200,000), which serves an area that is the size of New Hampshire and Vermont combined.  (I have always been able to drive Big Sur.)

One of the reasons I was hired was that I have an excellent knowledge of foreign cuisines and cultures, lived overseas as an exchange student with the Youth for Understanding program, and graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in East Asian Studies and an undeclared minor in art history. 

My husband Laurent and I both wanted our daughter Florence to know about world cultures, so we took her along on restaurant reviews.  I had a meal stipend from the newspaper for two diners, but paid extra for Florence to come along. 

Florence had excellent manners (i.e. she did not climb around seats and tables, throw things, or talk loudly).  She was actually pretty good cover for restaurant critics going to moderately priced restaurants.

The first place I reviewed for the Monterey County Weekly was the Orient Express in Seaside, California.  I went to the library and looked up Korean recipes, so I would know more about the spices, seasonings, and techniques used in the foods.  I cited the cookbooks I used in the restaurant reviews, if people wanted recipes or cultural information.

The following is the article that was published in the Monterey County Weekly.  The Weekly editors chose the headlines for my articles, which I have left intact:

Seoul Food

For twelve years I have been practicing what Raymond Sokolov calls gastro-ethnography learning about a country’s culture by studying its food, meal rituals, and history of the cuisine’s dishes.  I read some Korean cookbooks, made a list of questions, and set out to do some tasty fieldwork at the Orient Express Restaurant in Seaside, California.

I took a Korea travel guide to get a conversation going with our server.  Our server, who was dressed in a white-collared shirt and black slacks covered by a blue apron, asked if I was (sic) going to Korea.

I told her “not yet” and that I wanted to learn about Korean food.  She beamed a wide smile at me.  She said she would love to talk about Korea.

For lunch she recommended three typical dishes to us: bulgogi (grilled strips of marinated beef), jap chae (noodles with beef and vegetables), and dak man doo kuk (Korean New Year’s soup with beef and rice cakes).

We ordered tea and beer.  When I asked if there were Korean beers, our waitress smiled at me.

“Do women in Korea drink beer?” I asked.

She said they had just recently started to and disappeared into the kitchen.

She reappeared with a metal teapot that she held in her right hand.  She put her left hand under her right forearm saying, “This is how we serve tea.”

She served my husband Laurent first and said, “We always serve others before ourselves.”

She looked at Florence and said, “We never serve children like this,” as she poured Florence’s tea with her right hand only.

The tea smelled and tasted like corn on the cob, because Koreans use ground-roasted barley and corn to make their tea.  I wondered when and how New World food products like corn and chilis arrived in Korea.

The advertising slogan on the Hite beer cracked me up: Beer Rich with the Spirit of Pure Spring Water in Green Mountains.  Canada must share these same qualities, because the Hite tastes like Molson and Moosehead.

I easily understood why the Koreans eat duk man doo kuk soup as a New Year’s treat with its three-inch pork and scallion-filled wonton noodles, strips of beef, thin sheets of scrambled egg, and oval-shaped rice cakes floating in a chicken broth seasoned with scallions and garlic.

The bulgogi beef strips arrived sizzling with onions.  Florence claimed the bulgogi as her own.  The jap chae had strips of grilled beef in it, too, buried among the translucent noodles colored brown by the sesame oil used to fry shredded carrots and onions.

The Korean use of beef is unique in East Asia where Japanese cuisine revolves around ocean fish and that of China around pork, fresh-water fish, ocean-water fish, and chicken.  Koreans are partly descended from beef-loving Mongol invaders.  The pasturelands of Korea’s Cheju Island, south of the mountainous peninsula allow Koreans to regularly eat beef.

Our server told us that cooks marinate beef in soy sauce, water, sugar, garlic, sesame oil, and a little pepper before grilling it.

Our server brought out twelve vegetable side dishes, pan ch’an.  These included white, rectangular pieces of tasteless mung bean jello, bean sprouts, raw garlic cloves in soy sauce, potatoes in soy sauce with sesame oil, crunchy broccoli stems, seaweed, and spinach.

(Note: pan ch’an changes with the season and what is available on the market.)
There were three kinds of chili-coated kimchi (radish, cucumber, and cabbage).

I could easily make a meal of cabbage kimchi and rice like many poor Koreans have done.  (I was not being facetious when I wrote this despite what one book reviewer said when I put this article in my book The Edible Tao. I have had to be a vegetarian for financial reasons several times in my life and knew about protein combinations and vitamins that chase away colds.  Kimchi is the vegetarian elixir of life, if you can stand the garlic.)

From a gastronomic point of view, I love kimchi for its juicy, salty taste of the cabbage followed by a chili and raw garlic heat wallop that makes my nose run.  Eating rice cools off the tongue.

Some Korean restaurants give you gum when you leave to kill the smell of raw garlic on your breath from the kimchi.  I thanked our server and said I would be back to do more research.

End of Article

I took Florence back to Orient Express after school many times and to other Korean restaurants in our neighborhood throughout Florence’s youth, but the main spot we would go was Orient Express.

The owner of one of the restaurants even lent me bilingual Korean-English folktale books for children, so I could read them to Florence and teach her about Korean culture.

I am glad that my restaurant reviews encourage many people to try “strip mall restaurants.”  They soon found out that many of these strip mall restaurants have a lot of free parking and modern plumbing in the bathrooms and kitchens.

I liked our vacation in the US restaurant outings.  I also love all the Korean cookbooks that are coming out on Amazon Kindle now.  They are very reasonably priced.  My favorite Korean cookbook, though, was published by the Ten Speed Press out of San Francisco, California:

-Growing up in a Korean Kitchen by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall

By Ruth Paget, Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks, Teen in China, and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books



Ruth Paget Selfie