Culinary Adventures

Saturday night was a lot of fun and a lot of adventure, culinary adventure that is. Sarah, Nicholas (one of the other teachers), and I all met up with some of our TAs: Kate, Heidi, Katherine, and Jennifer (not their real names, their English names) for dinner. The girls took us to this crazy dive where critters living in shells in the tanks were out front awaiting their doom. I’m just glad we were with some locals who knew what they were doing, because I would have ran out for fear of blushing to death not knowing what to do. Before I knew it, there were more plates than our table could fit that were full of… I don’t know what. Here’s my guess, one of them were definitely silk worm larvae, yes, crunchy silk worm larvae, and of course they plopped it right in front of me. I wanted to be the westerner who tried it and was like “oh yum” and chow down on the bugs, but no, they were admittedly gross… nutty maybe?



There was a plate with whole garlic cloves and fat slices of chilies, red sauces, brown sauces, raw oysters, frozen kind of crunchy fish over a coleslaw of some sort, cucumbers, an omelet I think, weird brown slimy things, and a huge plate of raw fish (chewy yet delicate raw fish).


There was a big gas grill in the middle of the tiny metal table and when we were done with the huge plate of raw fish, our server (who didn’t really seem like a real server, more like somebody’s mom who was feeding us) grabbed a handful of snails and clams out of one of the tanks outside and just threw it on the grill.


We were each given a glove to wear on our left hand and there was a huge pair of scissors and tongs that I was far from in charge of. The glove, I later found out, was to keep your hand from burning when you grabbed a clam or whatnot from the grill, the scissors to cut up the snails or clams from their shells and the tongs for convenience. Just when I thought I could not eat another weird fishy thing, they brought out the biggest tray of them all with every kind of clam that exists I think already opened and drizzled with sauce and garlic and I don’t know what. These got put on the grill too (and they set the tray on a little stool right next to me, I don’t know why I was apparently the one to get all the weirdest stuff closest to me!). While these were bubbling up to edible goodness, Mom brought out some hand rolls Japanese style of rice, negi leaf and delicate ginger colored fish eggs. Several of the things we got were “on the house” and “Mom” was just so excited to have us. Then there was the Soju, two bottles of it between us, cold and refreshing. Then we were pleasantly surprised to find out that the girls were taking us out! Aside from that they said that it was very cheap for what we were having and that in Seoul it would be twice as much.

We walked out full, smelling of fish and garlic, and still a little reeling from all the craziness. I could go on and on, the buckets by your feet to toss the shells into, the big plastic basket for everyone’s enormous coats, the crowded noise and unusual smells, my inability to read anything anywhere, the bucket with the fish flopping about right behind me (don’t worry, he was stabbed in the head and was very quiet soon after). I don’t think you could get any fresher and apparently, Incheon is one of the bestest places to eat seafood.