mouthfeel

탕짜면: When I found out that Chinese restaurants in Korea — about as Chinese as Chinese take-out is in the U.S. — not only made deliveries but also could divide one serving into two dishes, I went a bit mad. For a while, I’d split between different types of noodles, indulging myself in varied flavor/textural maps, from the unctuous and dense to the spicy and runny, all from the comfort of my home. These days, I’m partial to combining tangsooyook (a take on sweet-and-sour pork) with jjajang myun (black bean noodles), a dish commonly truncated to tangjjamyun.

Korean delivery, or baedal, is fast, cheap, and tip-less, unsurprisingly affecting the integrity of the cuisine (as convenience does everywhere). Because most 24/7-delivery houses err on this side of “middlingly passable” on the palate, I’ve started ordering my tangjjamyun from a legit sit-down restaurant with normal operating hours and decor that wouldn’t be out of place if transplanted to Wilshire Blvd (read: snazzier than the average bunshik). It’s not the best Chinese-Korean food I’ve had in my life, but it’s a pretty big step up from the norm.

Note to the unschooled: Most delivery houses bring your meal in real plateware, which you then leave outside your door for them to come pick up later. It’s all just kind of magical.

Sometimes, all you want is some succulent pineapple-on-a-stick, kept cool on a rather large-ish block of ice and bought for under a buck on a hot, humid summer day in a metropolitan city.

Oh, would you look at that. Your move, western world.

니이스 컵 닭 (Nice Cup Chicken): No ddukbokgi and bland odeng combo of the traditional takeaway stand, here. Instead, the proprietors of Nice Cup Chicken serve up the perfect golden ratio of fried chicken to ddukbokgi to tater tots in a small paper cup, all mixed up with a sweet, extra spicy red sauce guaranteed to cause labored breathing and runny noses. Oh, how your snout runneth over.

For the uninitiated, ddubokgi refers to a dish made of those white dduk tubes, center front. People call them rice cakes, but they’re really more like thick, solid, glutinous pasta noodles. At Nice Cup, the dduk itself is cooked, then fried, for a crispy skin and chewy interior. The chicken pieces are lovely strips of boneless white meat prepared with that secret Korean frying technique. The tater tots kick ass simply for being tater tots. Each component in the cup could do just fine on its own, but the sum of all parts elevates three classic Korean and American junk food staples into a street dish nonpareil. Located on the main drag in the Myeongdong shopping district AND IN MY BELLEH.

더덕동동주: The aroma of this unfiltered wine (very similar to makgeolli) carries an earthy aroma disclosing its roots in… roots, specifically of the bonnet bellflower. It is initially unassuming, typically home-brewed and served in glazed earthenware bowls. But the first sip — such elegant sweetness, a tease of carbonation and perfume, with the barest suggestion of grain and malt (and it’ll stay that way if you don’t drink down to the bottom of that bottle). This beverage is your genteel elderly relative, who had, unbeknownst to you, lived a playboy’s life, traveling around the globe and mucking it up with the upper crust, before some political regime took over, leaving him with only a great deal of pride and a wish to retire to the mountainside to read Milton.

OK, real talk: shit is lethal. You can’t taste the booze at all, but it will fuck you up. Three bowls, and I was rocking back and forth inside my head while sitting still. I don’t know where the hell to get this stuff outside of the Taebaek Mountains, so you are shit out of luck in Seoul or wherever the fuck you are, friend.

비빔밥: When my mom came to visit me in March, she woke me up early before work to shower and eat breakfast — her own special version of bibimbap for her wittle woman. Kidding, my mom doesn’t actually talk like that. But, dude. I haven’t had breakfast at the top of the day since high school. And I never used to like bibimbap that much, either: restaurants always skimp on the toppings, confusing the eyes and stomach with rice overload. Yet here was this fresher-than-Doug-E. sprinkling of radish and red cabbage sprouts nestled above its perfectly proportioned counterpoint: a small child’s fistful of sticky white grains. (“You need to lose some weight,” my mom explained helpfully.) It was topped with a cheerful sunnyside up, a glob of hot pepper paste, a bit of sesame oil and soy sauce to taste, and finally served with a side of kimchi and a cup of instant coffee (not so vilified here). All ready upon completion of shower at 7:15 a.m.

Fun fact: Korean supermarkets sell a really awesomely-sized variety pack of sprouts. It’s enough to last a few days, and screams, “I’m single, no kids, don’t judge me.”

Conversation with 7-year-old nephew, thrice-removed:
— What grade are you in?
— I wish I could answer that question.
— … What?
— I’m finished with school.
— Oh, does that mean you’re a grown-up?
— … Yes… yeah… yes.

Behold — the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto. The scourge of public schools everywhere (spicy foods cause a high!), this extreme snack reigns supreme over other Frito-Lay titans. As a young sixth-grader with newfound access to a middle-school Student Store, I ate one bag of these heartattacks every day for a semester until I developed a double chin. The following summer, cut off from the sybaritic indulgences of scheduled lunches, I inadvertently lost the weight by replacing one piquant addiction with another — the relatively calorie-free bibimnaengmun.

When I was a kid, the best way to eat the Flamin’ Hots was to use only your thumb and forefinger on one specific hand so that the crimson crust of spiciness, layered over your chosen digits through repeated usage, could be licked off after the bag was done, leaving a telltale pinkish dye for about 24 hours. Nowadays, it’s no good to have twentysomething-old fingers stained in such childish ways. Use a wet napkin, and wipe after each bite. That’s what being an adult means. Unfortunately.

(mouthfeel returns with more entries for this Very Special U.S.A. Edition! Update your bookmarks!)

몸국: A Jeju island specialty called “mohm-guk” — literally, “heart soup.” “Mohm” is kind of a special word and, depending on the context, can mean heart, body, mind, spirit, etc. In other words, broth for the soul, made from black pork and a special type of seaweed.

No, it doesn’t look so appetizing, and I myself was not terribly impressed when it came out. The crazy thing about Jeju, though, is that everything that is not fish tastes like the embodiment of some terra firma faerie: rich, earthy, heartening, life-affirming.

I cannot impress upon you the bewilderment I experienced as the spoon first dribbled its contents on my lips, the astonishment and delight of two plentiful native ingredients — an emotion welled up so wholly honest and astonishing and foreign, I still can’t quite grasp it. I’ve never tasted anything remotely close in flavor to this soup. It was as if, for that one weekend in Jeju, I had discovered the island of lotus eaters, and, when forced to leave, bitterly wept at my loss.