I was sitting in a dimly lit bar in Andong, South Korea with my cousin Nick and his wife Lanie. We were drinking flavored soju from tiny glass bottles and listening to the hysterical laughter of a nearby group of college students playing rock-paper-scissors. Whenever one of them whispered the word “waegukin” another would sneak a glance at our table.
“Gawi! Bawi! Bo!” They cheered, hammering back shots of rum in rhythmic unison.
“My students play that game,” Nick said as he motioned for our waiter. “It’s weird to see it as a drinking game.”
Nick and Lanie had quit their jobs in Nashville a year earlier and moved to South Korea to teach English. They were bored in the states and anxious to go on a big, life-changing adventure. When they applied to teach in Korea they’d hoped Seoul or Busan, but had instead been assigned to the outlying city of Andong.
“All of the food in Andong is local and traditional,” Nick said. “You can’t get a lot of Western food here. We have to take the train to Seoul if we want deli sandwiches or mashed potatoes.”
“So you go to Seoul when you want…soul food?” I said, like an asshole.
The waiter arrived before anyone could come up with an excuse for not laughing. Nick ordered a beer for himself and a cocktail for Lanie and a few more bottles of soju for me.
“Con some needa,” I said, much to the waiter’s confusion. “Thank you?” I tried, looking to Nick and Lanie for help.
“Ah, gam sa ham ni da!” Nick said. The waiter laughed, bowed, and moved on to the next table.
“Gawi! Bawi! Bo!”
I shrugged off my own linguistic ineptitude with another gulp of soju, finally feeling the warm grip of a buzz wrapping around my skull. I feared that the next day would be rough, that I’d wake up with an aluminum taste dancing across my gums, a burning in my gut, and the resolution to never drink again scrawled across my throbbing brain. To hell with it, I thought. I’m on vacation.
We left the bar and walked into the neon-flooded streets of Andong and, for a moment, I felt very far from home.
***
I propped my head up on the edge of the table and did my best not to vomit as the ghosts of the previous night’s sojus tickled the back of my throat. Nick, Lanie, and I had stayed out late — galavanting from one bar to the next in Andong’s college district. My hosts had the foresight to restrain themselves but I — lost in a haze of adventure and exoticism and YOLO — had clearly gone too far.
“You know…what is?” asked the old man as he delivered small plates of kimchi, rice, and fermented bean paste to our table.
Nick replied in Korean, miming drinking a bottle of beer and then gesturing to an upset stomach. The old man laughed knowingly and shot me a wink as I finally removed my sunglasses, trying to ignore the hellish orchestra of clanking steel playing inside my skull.
“Koreans are proud of how healthy their food is,” Nick said as the old man served our meal. “They talk about it like medicine.” He gave me a quick rundown: If you’re having digestive problems, eat kimchi, if your joints hurt, drink ginseng, and when you’re hungover you eat haejangguk.
Haejangguk literally translates to “soup to chase a hangover.” It’s made with locally-sourced dried cabbage and a hearty dark red broth — with regional variations like congealed ox blood, intestines stuffed with pig’s blood, or, in Adnong, a generous portion of pork spine. In other words, I was being given a soup made from the throwaway bits, a peasant stew.
“This is the best thing that has ever happened to me,” I said, sucking meat from between two vertebrae. The pork was tender and flavorful, its grease marinating coating the surface of the broth. Coating the rich cabbage. With each slurp, the aroma of blood and earthy spices filled my nostrils.
My nausea calmed, my head quieted. Holy shit I thought. It worked.
Once I was healed, we spent the afternoon in a dog cafe. Though I was previously unaware such things existed, the dog cafe is a surprisingly self explanatory concept: you go, drink coffee, and hang with dogs.
“I feel amazing,” I said as a barista foamed milk for my latte. I had been in Andong for three days and my diet, by force, had been nothing but fresh, locally grown, rustic cuisine. It should come as no surprise that eating heavily probiotic fermented cabbage with every meal would make my digestive system…efficient, but I had no idea how soundly I would sleep or how much energy I would have. I felt like a teenager. Not the kind of teenager that I’d actually been either — more like a healthy, athletic, popular teenager with clear skin and a fast car.
We left the cafe and went straight to dinner, finding our way to a small restaurant that served only one dish: dak galbi, a popular anju, or food to eat while drinking.
“My god,” I said, pouring myself a glass of soju, forgetting about my “never drinking again” mid-hangover vow. “I love South Korea.”
Dak galbi is a charcoal stir-fry of marinated chicken, chili pepper paste, sliced cabbage, sweet potato, scallions, onions, perilla leaves, and the delicious, perfectly al dente, topokki (or rice cake). It’s a dish that—like haejangguk—was born of necessity. In recent times, it’s grown popular among the region’s college students for its inexpensive ingredients, featuring locally sourced produce and meat.
The food was hot and rich, steaming with the scent of floral spices and seared fat. Each bite was textured with the crunch of fresh cabbage. The chicken was tender and the hand pressed chili paste delivered that heat-balance. A close analog to dak galbi might be Cajun jambalaya or a low-country boil, with the vegetables cooked much less and the meat cut much fattier.
Here again, everything seemed incredibly fresh. The vegetables had been harvested just a few days before being cooked and the chicken had been butchered only hours prior. Nothing had been frozen or refrigerated because, in Andong, preservation is expensive and fresh is cheap. As an American this fact made absolutely no sense to me. Isn’t this meal artisanal? Isn’t this kimchi small batch? Why isn’t everything much, much more expensive?
Nick gestured to the waiter for another two-dollar beer and for a moment I considered expatriating.
***
“The trick is to wait until the edges bubble,” Nick said, flipping slabs of fatty duck breast over on the charcoal grill with a pair of metal chopsticks. It was my last night in Andong and we were feasting. We had gone out for gogigui or, as it’s better known in the States, Korean Barbecue. This meal included several different cuts of freshly butchered duck and—as was often the case—an abundance of expertly prepared side dishes.
A smiling waitress brought us kimchi made of cabbage and radishes, fish cakes, pickled root vegetables, sautéed cucumbers, glass noodles, braised eggs, and a salty lettuce salad prepared with vinegar and sweet chilis affectionately called sangchu-geotjeori.
Gogigui is a difficult meal to fully describe because there are so many aspects worth explaining in detail. The kimchi was heavily fermented, almost carbonated, with a light crispiness and delicate spice. The fish cakes were soft and meaty, tasting of the ground fish parts left over from other meals. The braised eggs — a horrific translucent green color — were salty and mealy and tasted not unlike a fine organ meat. The sangchu-geotjeori had an almost wasabi-esque quality. Which each bite, its taste burned across my tongue and up my nostrils.
Finally, there was duck.
The cuts we were served were small medallions of breast meat, with an extra long strip of fat and skin left on the outer rim. The meat had been smoked earlier that morning, adding a layer of depth. It was tender, it was juicy, and it was the perfect counter to the unending buffet of fresh sides. Sure, the portions of duck weren’t large, but it was easily the best tasting duck I’ve ever had.
And trust me, I eat a lot of duck.
It mades me wonder why, in America, we so readily accept out of season strawberries and augmented double-D chicken breasts as acceptable food, when their natural doppelgängers—though less accessible year round—are exceedingly more delicious and abundantly more nutritious. If Andong Korea can pull this off, why can’t we?
Back at home, my path-of-least-resistance diet resulted in chronic indigestion, morning headaches, and—to my girlfriend’s dismay—horrific gas. I’m not a scientist, I wasn’t going to run lab tests or get professional opinions, but the fact is: I hadn’t had any of those problems in South Korea.
As we left the restaurant, I nodded to the waitress and, perhaps overly encouraged by soju, said “gam saam needa.”
She bowed and said “gam sa ham ni da.” For a moment, I felt like I was home.
