Eating Korea: Reports on a Culinary Renaissance by Holliday Graham

Author:Holliday, Graham [Holliday, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

16

I DON’T KNOW

I was not hungover. How could I be? I’d just spent a night at a tea plantation that edged into health-retreat territory, a place that was officially now my calmest place in Korea. But I felt like I was hungover.

In between eating, drinking, and sleeping with Team Vivian these past twenty-four hours, we had visited two museums, two temple complexes, and a national park, walked the length of an ancient city wall, and traversed a mountaintop. I was exhausted.

We had two stops left before Team Vivian zapped back to Seoul for the night shift and I continued my journey farther south. We left the tea plantation early and soon arrived in Naju. We’d come to this town to do one thing: eat a beef soup breakfast at the White House restaurant (하얀집 ).

It was eight A.M., and the White House was chock-full. I counted the hangovers around me and gave up at fifty. They floated around the White House like phantoms. Red-eyed drunks supped and slurped at soups, chewing away at the bitter lumps and worn chunks of pain inside their heads.

If the couple that ran the tea plantation in Haenam were a step forward into a calmer, more holistic future, this restaurant was very much a stagger and a stumble back into an alcoholic past. The place was littered with hurting heads. Pain pulsed from diners like the popping, glowing explosions of dying characters in a computer game.

The White House is one of the disappearing, yet gloriously alive, breed of restaurant. It was a stubborn old boot that had rejected change. Beef steam hissed from the entrance to the violent kitchen, where seven women in blue aprons worked the soup vats, rice steamers, cutting boards, kitchen sink, and serving trays. An ajumma with rubber gloves, a perm, an uninviting glare, and a shower cap ladled soup from one of two humungous, three-foot-wide vats.

We sat down at the only free table and I crossed my legs. This particular one-dish store served gomtang (곰탕 ), and the price was fixed at 8,000 won.

There were framed laminated portraits on the wall. One of the pictures was a hundred years old. In it were the relatives who had run the restaurant in the past.

The beef was cooked very simply and slowly, resulting in a clean beef broth. Inside the hot stone bowl were the soup, strips of beef brisket, rice, spring onion, and thin, noodlelike egg strips.

“You can have it in the morning or at lunch,” said Vivian. “But most people have it when they’re hungover, as you can see.”

There were only Koreans in here. Hundreds of Koreans. We looked out of place. We hadn’t touched a drop of the falling-down juice the night before. We’d been on a veritable health kick of mugwort, magnolia, and camphor. We were like the devil incarnate, and perhaps the sick were secretly envious of our healthy glow.

“Society is moving too fast,” said Kay.

She had noticed me staring at a family opposite; hungover dad, heavily made-up mom, surgically enhanced daughter, powder-puffed son.

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