Seoul Day-2

For today, we had a rather interesting day. We had the opportunity to go to a vegan restaurant for lunch and a traditional Korean restaurant for our dinner. We were given free time in the morning until about 11.45a.m. before we headed for our lunch together. For today’s lunch, Prof. Ahn decided to bring us to a vegan restaurant named Loving Hut.

Although some might have already realised this, but there are a limited amount of food choice available for vegan, or even vegetarian, who lives in Korea actually. Like most Asian countries, the staple food for Korea is rice, usually accompanied by various dishes called “banchan”. Although there are relatively a lot of food with vegetables as the main ingredients available, these dishes are not suitable for vegetarian and vegan as most of them use meat based broth such as beef broth or seafood such as anchovies and shrimps as one the ingredients or flavoring of the cuisines. In fact, even some types of kimchi, one of Korean signature dishes, could not be consumed by vegetarians. Even though kimchi is basically a traditional fermented vegetables, some people do use shrimp sauce and/or fish sauce as one the ingredients. However, there are some types of food that can be consumed by vegetarians if slight adjustment being made such as making a request to not include “eomuk”, a type of fish cake, into dishes such as “tteokbokki” and seafood into “haemul pajeon” making it vegetable pancake instead of seafood pancake.

As I had mentioned earlier, we went to 설가온(Seolgaoun) Korean Traditional Restaurant, located at the basement of Sejong Center for the Performing Arts to had dinner. We ordered a several courses dinner set and I really enjoyed the dishes as I had never tried most of them. Unlike western meals, which consist of two or three main dishes, Korean meals usually accompanies by at least 4 or five side dishes. These side dishes are served in small proportion and being shared among everyone on the table. Another thing that I realised while in this restaurant was, a lot of traditional Korean cuisine plays a lot with color to make it more attractive.

Jellyfish and shrimp

One should put the shredded ingredients into the small round pancake and dip it into the sauce

And by color, I'm not referring to artificial colorings, but to ingredients that they use such as chili paste, carrots, and green onions. At the end of the meal, we were served "sikhye," a traditional Korean beverage made of rice. "Sikhye" has a very sweet taste and by drinking it, it helps to "stop" spiciness of food and washes down the aftertaste of a meal. All in all, the traditional tasted really delicious and I really hope I will have the opportunity to eat them again.