So Kelly picked me up from Osan Station at 6:25a, with her son (a student at You & I where she and I teach) sleeping in the van’s back seat, and we picked up Mr. X (name to come), his son (also a former student at You & I), and we headed for the festival.

Kelly and Mr. X took turns driving, and after a few hours, we stopped at  an unassuming little restaurant for breakfast. Most Korean restaurants are very short on decoration compared to restaurants in the west, but the lack of decor is no absolutely no indication of how good the kitchen is. This place is big, it was hopping, and it was difficult to find a table for the five of us. That’s a much better sign about how good the kitchen is.

Another thing about many restaurants here, they specialize in one thing or just a few. This place, as advertised on its sign out front, served kkongnamul gook bap, a variation on kkongnamul gook, soybean sprout soup, bap means that there’s rice in it as well.

It was awesome stuff, there were so many bean sprouts, they must buy them buy the ton, and they were so fresh, they must have gotten a delivery everyday.

Something interesting I hadn’t tried before, actually a couple things, but the first was that we all got a bowl with a raw egg, and a small package of gim (Korean seasoned and toasted seaweed). I watched Mr. X as he spooned some of the hot soup broth into the bowl and mixed it up, then crumbled the gim into the mixture, and began eating it. I followed suit, and it was delicious, definitely something I’ll try again, maybe even at home. So that’s why there was a huge stack of eggs in the dining room in front of the kitchen window, probably more than 2000 eggs total. (I haven’t seen refrigerated eggs anywhere since I’ve been here. I’ve bought a few dozen since July and haven’t suffered any problems. I do refrigerate mine once I get them home, just in case you’re wondering.)

So onto the soup! Delicious! A little spicy, light, clear. Believe it or not, the sprouts stay crunchy even though they’re cooked for about 20 minutes. It’s truly great breakfast food, a tie with my favorite breakfast food of all time, cold pizza (Hey, stop judging me!). Mr. X told me it was good after a night of too much soju (Korean wine, about 30-40 proof, made from rice and sweet potatoes) or maekju (beer – the “ju” part means alcohol, and although very similar to the Chinese word for alcohol, “jiu”, it has a different origin). I think the soup is just a great way to start the day, no matter how you’ve ended the previous one.

I saw that the waitresses were taking jugs of a milky brown liquid to some of the tables and asked Kelly what it was (her English is excellent, Mr. X’s is about as good as my Korean, which is to say, not very functional yet). She asked him, and then told me that it was a regional alcoholic drink called moju (there’s “ju” again) and he asked if I wanted to try some.

Drinking at 9:30a? Uh, sure, why not? I at least wanted to taste it, I haven’t even heard of it before, who knows when I’d a chance to try it again? So he ordered a bowl for me (the more rustic drinks, like moju and makkoli are are poured into bowls) and out it came, warm, brown, and cloudy. It smelled great, like cinnamon punch, and it tasted even better, thicker than water, sweet, and flavored with cinnamon and ginger. Fortunately the alcohol content was minimal. Kelly had never had it before (bear in mind she’s lived in Korea her entire life), and asked me for a taste. She quickly ordered a bowl for herself. Yes, it was that delicious. Which doesn’t mean I had another bowl, but if I have a chance to drink it again, I’ll jump.

Thoroughly fortified, we got back into the car and headed for out next destination, which wasn’t the food festival, but one of the most famous Son Buddhist (Zen in Japanese, Chan/Shaolin in Chinese, Mahayana in Sanskrit) temples in Korea.

It was still early, but I wondered if we’d ever get to the food festival with all these stops. But really, since I was with some new friends and eating so well, I wasn’t concerned. Let’s just keep eating our way across the province!

Matthew, our best Korean friend and the guy who’s treating us to this table-top grill meat-fest, says many of the people in the restaurant (and I’m assuming at the many, many nearby joints as well), don’t have to work tomorrow. I’d have to hear it from them to truly believe it, but I’ll take his word for it. Still, it’s amazing, the amount of food being eaten and beer and soju being consumed for a Tuesday night. We’re leaving at 11:45p and we’re leaving early, nobody else seems to be really ready to go.

It’s Matt’s first payday at his new job, and he’s treating us. I pour his soju, he pours our beer. He shovels another dozen slices of super thinly-sliced lean beef onto the blazingly-hot table-top grill (too many hyphens? probably). The three of us eat lustily. The beef is incredibly thin, in long, bacon-like strips. It must have been literally shaved off with a meat planer from a big block while it was very cold, the curls of meat are quite lovely. Once cooked, it’s melts in our mouths. Matthew calls it paper beef, though this isn’t a translation, just his poetic interpretation. Dipping the caramelized strips in the toasted sesame oil, salt, and pepper mixture we each get makes it that much better, so much better. The side dishes are good and fresh: cooked cabbage kimchi, green onion salad, green lettuce salad, macaroni salad (not kidding, and not bad), raw garlic slices, raw hot chili pepper slices, plain tofu, spicy bean paste sauce…have I left anything out? Oh, the ubiquitous soybean sprout soup, some sort of egg dish that comes to the table so insanely hot that it bubbles away for a few minutes after the server brings it to the table. Matthew knows I like doenjang jigae (soybean paste stew), so he buys a bowl of it for me and some rice as well. Groan…hope I can make it home without popping.

I’m so happy Korean food is generally very healthy, all except for the fried foods, and there’s none of that here. Oh I forgot a couple more side dishes: a very thinly sliced raw cabbage salad with a Chinese hot mustard dressing, and of course, fresh green leaf lettuce, to which we add a little grilled garlic, or maybe some green onion salad, or kimchi, and the grilled meat, before creating a little leafy, green bundle, and dipping it in the spicy bean paste sauce and popping it into our mouths. Like Vietnamese food, it’s a wonderful combination of flavors, textures, and temperatures, which is why I like Vietnamese, and now Korean food, so much.

We waddle outside and open our umbrellas which give us very little protection against the heavy summer rain. We’re full and fully satisfied, our happy glow a result of sharing a great meal with friends, knowing we have fully tasted everything offered and made the most of it.

Time for bed and to dream sweetly of my ever-present love, Kamila. If I’m really lucky, maybe I’ll catch her on Skype before I drift off.

I made this photo from the kitchen in the Branding Iron, a restaurant that’s been in Merced for more than 52 years. When I was a kid growing up in Merced, it was the best place in town (probably still is) and when my grandfather gave me a choice of any place in town when I turned 9, I chose The Branding Iron.

Wow, that sounds really familiar!

So that was day 1 of my first 30-day series. This is day 30 of my second 30-day series. Besides having a much better camera this time (thanks to my brother-in-law) than than the one I started with, I’m also feeling much better about the photos I’m making under any circumstance, even in this dark environment. And it’s not just the higher ISO. Moments are better, expressions are better, rapport is better. I had A LOT of catching up to do with my classmates, but now I feel confident I only have a lot of catching up to do with my classmates.

My dad had mocha almond fudge, my mom had baseball nut (vanilla ice cream with raspberry swirl and peanuts) and Swiss orange chip. I had baseball nut and peanut butter cup, on a sugar cone. My sisters weren’t there, but they sure wished they were.

We opened the Buddha on July 1, 2008. If anyone asks me when NOT to open a restaurant in southwest Michigan, I can say with some authority and a lot of enthusiasm, that you should NEVER open a restaurant on July 1, so that your first weekend is right around July 4th. We got killed, hammered, rocked, whatever you’d like to call it, and we had to figure out some things to make life easier very, very quickly. A soft opening would have been nice. A soft opening sometime between Labor Day and Memorial Day would have been really, really nice.

So I’m not going to level any criticisms at Ban Thai here since they just opened, and I’ll be loathe to ever criticize them except in private, since they’re trying very hard right now, and they’re our competitors really. I wish them all the best and know there’s enough room for both of us in St. Joe.

The other major thing I have to do today is shop for the cooking class in Chicago on Monday. I’ve already told Cameron my schedule is nuts, so he’s going to do the prep, but that I’d pick up all the stuff for the class.

So off I go now!

While at the Buddha, I definitely got on servers about letting food sit in the window, eventually just taking it out to the table myself when they were too busy or too whatever to get the food. I know there are good reasons why they didn’t pick up their food promptly, but it really doesn’t matter at some point, and I got tired of yelling. After a while of yelling their names, and feeling like I was becoming a loud-mouthed fool, I made a simple rule for myself. If the server (or somebody, ANYBODY) didn’t run the food when I called them twice, I would run it myself.

Of course at the Buddha, I was management, the chef, so I had the flexibility and authority to do that. I felt so much better doing that then continuing to yell and steam about it. I think the servers were grateful, but at that point, I really didn’t care. Going to any restaurant isn’t about the server or the cook or the management, it’s about the food and the experience, and if it takes forever to get your food, and the food is cold (and shouldn’t be), you’re having a bad experience.

Usually it’s not the kitchen or the restaurant’s short-term bottom line that suffers when someone has a bad experience (I’m not talking horrendous, just not good), since most people will pay for a meal when things are less than perfect, but customers see it as a service issue, and they don’t tip their server well. So it would behoove servers to get food to the table as quickly as possible since customers like their food appearing quickly, and hot (or cold as the case may be), instead of room temperature.

At the full staff meeting on Sunday 28 June, Tom apologized for yelling at the servers when they were slow to get food out of the window, but he stressed how important it was to do it. Most of the staff is very young and inexperienced, and on this issue, it shows. I’ve worked at the Bentwood Tavern in New Buffalo, Mich., and at Brewster’s, and the food never stays in the window long, mostly due to the server’s experience. At the Bentwood, they also had a full-time runner, and service there is excellent. Servers at both places are older and more experienced than at Port 412, and that’s one of the ways it shows.

On Tuesday night, one of the hosts, a high-school age girl, was in the kitchen while some food was languishing in the window. I asked her to please run it or find someone to run it. She smiled blandly at me, walked out of the kitchen, walked back in without having talked to anyone (I watched her), and stood at the window again. Not yet knowing how much authority I have in Tom’s kitchen, I refrained from talking to her about it again, and I wish I knew the table numbers so I could have run it myself. I asked one of the front-of-the-house supervisors to run food as well, with the same result, nothing. I don’t think they’re understaffed up front, especially if someone is hanging out in the kitchen for a couple of minutes without tables.

Anyway, stay tuned. I will not let this be an issue for long at Tulips, especially since I’ll be able to run food myself. And I’ll have plenty of authority there. The only people with more will be Tom and John, the owner, both of whom will back me up on this.

Fortunately, the second place I wanted to go, Cho Sun Ok, was close and open, so although it was a close call, I didn’t starve to death. The dining room is fairly small, lots of wood, intimate almost. Some of the tables have grills in the middle. If you’re at another type of table and order something that needs to be grilled, they bring out a portable gas one. I had the seafood and vegetable pancake, which was fairly mild, but delicious, chock full of green onions, red bell pepper, tender squid, and some other seafood I didn’t recognize. It comes with a side of delicious and very Korean dipping sauce which was made with soy sauce, toasted sesame oil, and toasted sesame seeds. I’ve had kalbi (grilled marinated short ribs) and bulgolgi (very thinly sliced grilled marinated beef), both of which are extremely well known outside of Korea. Of course, I’ve also had their national dish, kimchi, along with probably a couple dozen types of panchan, the little dishes that accompany every meal. The can be as simple as lightly dressed wilted spinach, to an interesting creamy apple salad. And whatever you order, you usually get a lot of them, I’ve never seen fewer than a half dozen, and have seen twice that at one time on the table depending proabably on the number of entrees the table orders. Since it was just me, and I ordered just the pancake and the doeji gui (very thinly sliced pork, marinated, and then grilled), I only got 7 panchan. I couldn’t finish my pancake orf entree, and I tried to finish all the panchan I could, a spicy cabbage kimchi, pickled shredded daikon, seaweed salad, pickled zucchini, pickled cucumber, the apple salad, pickled bean sprouts, and I think that’s it. You might have noticed there were a lot of pickled veggies.

When my parents when to visit my sister and her partner, Ryan, in S. Korea last month, she noticed there were hardly any vegetables in the main dishes. I need to do some reading on the subject, but it appears to me like the bulk of the vegetables in Korean cuisine are in the panchan. I’ll have to research why, but my guess is that the winters, which I’ve heard are long and cold, don’t permit a lot of agriculture outside the summer months, so Koreans have learned to pickle what they can harvest, preserving it through the winter months. It makes for a very interesting cuisine, one that Mark Bittman of the NY Times calls, “Japanese food with guts.” I don’t think he meant it as a slam on Japanese food at all, just an explanation by amplification.

Anyway, it was very delicious, and I was long overdue to eat some again. It won’t be so long between visits to another Korean restaurant, but I do so love Thai and Vietnamese, and Chicago is so rich with so many great of those restaurants, that it maybe at least a few months. At least.

Then I went to a great very Viennese coffee shop on Lincoln, Julius Meinl, which had a bounty of amazing-looking pastries. I was already stuffed with Korean food, but I’d love to go back sometime and sample everything. I settled for a mocha, which was probably the best I’ve ever had.

This trip, actually every trip into Chicago or any great food city, reminds me of a saying I think I made up, “So much great food, so little time.” Perhaps I should put it on a t-shirt!

The second place I’m going, and luckily it’s a short trip from TAC Quick, is Cho Sun Ok, a Korean joint with a menu that looks authentic and delicious. What sets them apart in Chicago is that at the end of the meal, they take the panchan (little side dishes that come standard with each Korean meal, like kimchi and pickled bean sprouts, spinach salad, etc.), and use them to make fried rice for you! Supposedly Korean places in LA do this as well. I’ve had Korean food before in Columbia, Missouri, where I when to school, and it was delicious. I put Korean fried chicken on the menu at the Buddha, and after the tasting for John and the others at Port 412 during  my demo, I have little doubt that it will be on Tulips’ menu as well.

I’ll tell you all about the food tonight. I have to be in bed fairly early since I’m meeting Chef Tom at Port 412 at 7:30a for breakfast, and then he, John, Brandon, and I are going to spend the day together talking business. Even talking business with these guys should make for a fun day.

Luckily I had ridden my bike down to the tiny public beach in Union Pier before I ate that thing. The lake is still quite chilly, but after riding 8 miles to get there on a very hot day, it felt like heaven. Besides, the pool I swam in growing up was pretty damn chilly too. And the Pacific Ocean for that matter.

Milda and her husband are both great people, and both very proud to be Lithuanian. They carry a lot of foodstuffs from all over the world (their website says 40 countries, I don’t doubt it), and they make all kinds of delicious food, including some Lithuanian specialities, like a cold beet soup with dill that’s fantastic. I got the last pint of it a couple of weeks ago and some folks who came in looking for it were not very happy with me. It was worth the emnity!