Korean Dinner with 3M Asia

3M Singapore, A-tai and Carl enjoying our communal Korean dining experience.

2/14/12

3M Asia came to visit Singform last week. Because of this, I want to describe another restaurant!

Wed. night, Don came home from work and said we were asked to go to dinner with SF and the visiting Asians. We met the three men, one from Korea, one from Thailand and one from Singapore, at a Korean restaurant not far from our house along with Cherry, Johnson,Carl and A-tai. It was a very nice restaurant. It was another experience in communal eating.  

The Koreans have their own style. We had two tables pushed together to accommodate the eight of us. Each table had a “grill” and a heater/burner recessed into the table, similar to the way a hot pot restaurant works. The grill was round and had burning coals under a concave grate. There were many plates of raw meat and fish that we laid on the grate to cook.  

The other heater was covered with a clever domed heavy gold “thing,” like an inverted wok with no handle. I will describe it. Its size fit exactly over the burner. Around the domed center was a little moat with edges several inches deep. When the dome was nice and hot, we took thin slices of meat and laid them on top of it to cook. Vegetables, including lettuce, were put into the “moat” and a pot of boiling water was poured over the meat washing it’s juices down into the moat with the vegetables, which could then be scooped out into a soup bowl.  

Until I came to Taiwan, I had no idea there were so many ways to cook meat and make soup on a tabletop! We grilled large raw, which means they were black, shrimp on the grill and watched them turn orange. They were very good! Cherry showed me how to cook a thin strip of beef and eat it wrapped in a lettuce leaf. Also very good. We had a bowl of “rice” which means it includes pieces of pork, vegetables, etc. I like that, too. They served Kim chi, but I passed on it. Don said it was “real” Korean Kim chi, not too hot. I didn’t chance it. I can’t decide if Korean food is just tastier than Taiwanese food or if I am acquiring a taste for Asian food, but I liked everything I ate at that restaurant. That’s a first! It’s taken only seven weeks!