Recently, some of the staff members decided to be rather brave and try a local Korean restaurant. Buried amongst the almost countless Chinese restaurants in every fairly large city, there is always a Korean restaurant. From the outside, they may look the same. If you go in you may notice a few similarities like rice and Asian-looking decor. Well, don't be fooled. Korean food is different from Chinese food. Very different.

This particular Korean restaurant happens to be built into an entire Korean market (more on that later). Basically, you go into the market, take a right and there you are. So we get a table and the menus. On the menu there's a delightful offering of Bulgogi, Mandoo Gook (I'm not kidding here) and all sorts of Kimchee dishes. There's also a smattering of "Engrish" with phrases such as "eacher" and "wlth". And finally, there was the section with nothing but Korean writing. Whatever it was, we knew we didn't want it.

So it was time to order. Most of us try the Bulgogi (pronounced bull-GO-gee) with a few trying the spicy pork box. I say box because the meal actually came in a little box with sections separating the different parts. One staff member orders "hot tea". The waitress says, "You want Korean tea?" He says, "Uh, sure". She then gives a little smirk, looks sideways and says, "OK".

A few minutes later our drinks come out shortly followed by 5 "appetizers" that we didn't order. I don't know about the hot tea, but my un-sweet tea tasted like un-sweet pee. So, I have to exchange that for water. Now on to the 5 "appetizers", which we will from now on affectionately refer to as "the five bowls of death".

First off was a bowl of meat product. It looked pretty good. It was brown and had sesame seed on it. I was thinking "If this is anything like sesame beef, then I like it already." Well...it was nothing like sesame beef. It tasted...strange. So strange, in fact, that we were convinced that it wasn't bad for the first few bites. The only weird thing at first was its lack of any heat at all. Every person at the table tried a bite and no one knew what it was. It was a mystery meat. Then, I took another bite and had a suspicion. Then another bite prompted me to shout "It's fish!" A few people thought it couldn't be. The waitress passed by so we asked her. She confirmed "Fish cake". Cake? Did she say "fish cake"? I'm not sure what those tricky Koreans are up to, but on all my birthdays I've never had a fish flavored cake.

On to bowl # 2. This one looked, well, kindof like rabbit pellets. There were these little black nuggets in the bowl staring lifelessly up at us. So, we tried them. Behold, a winner! They were black beans. Very undercooked black beans, to be precise. They also had what we guess was dates in them. It's always good to eat your dates.

Bowl # 3 took a turn for the worse. Alas it was the fabled Kimchee. Now, I remember growing up and hearing about how Kimchee was this really spicy Korean dish made of cabbage. Hey, I've always loved spicy food, so how bad could it be, right? Little did I know exactly what Kimchee was. Kimchee is old, rotted cabbage that has been buried in the ground for a while, spiced up and served...cold. That's right, a cold, hot, moldy cabbage. It's enough to make the Jolly Green Giant shit his toga!

The fourth bowl was some sort of vegetable product. I'm not really sure what to say about this one except that, like its friends, it was cold and lifeless. Maybe this was the "normal" one of the bunch.

Finally, there was the "pickles". We use the word pickles very loosely here. It was vegetables that were sour and tasted somewhat like pickles. So, we called them such. I've never had a pickle crunch in my mouth quite like that though. And they're usually not hollow either. Nor are they weird colors.

Following our brief encounter with the five bowls of death, we decide to start a high-low wager on the health rating. Guesses range anywhere from a 79 to a 95 (by the brave). Once all guesses were logged, one staff member went up to the front to find the health rating. He looked around for a while without success. Then the waitress saw him looking around and asked what he was looking for. He proudly stated that he was looking for the health rating! Everyone at the table smacked their forehead in unison as we figured that would piss her off enough to go in the back and spit in our food. Well, we didn't have to worry about that because we knew we had bigger things to worry about when the waitress's response was "Health rating? What's that?" Well, our researcher just laughed a little bit and said, "Never mind". The waitress then said, "No, really, what is it?" Wow. Just...wow.

Later on, the main course arrives. In the box there's a dumpling, a fried potato slice, a small shredded salad, noodles, steamed rice and our desired meat-product. Most of this is OK. The only real problem here was the noodles. They were clear with a brownish tint to them. When we tried them, they were cold, slippery and tasteless. I thought that maybe they would be better if they were warm so I decided to stir in some of my meat with it. No effect. In fact, no matter what we tried, those damn noodles just wouldn't take on any heat! At this point, they could only be compared to fishing lures. It was the most intriguing "noodles" we had ever seen.

After the meal, we all go up front to pay the piper. One researcher asked the lady about the noodles. She said, "Sometimes they're made out of potato. Sometimes they're made out of...(she shifts her eyes a little) usually potato." What the?!? Sometimes potato? Sometimes "usually potato"? What in the hell do you have to do to a potato to make it look like that? We were really having our doubts now. When asked who to make the check out to, the lady first said the Korean restaurant. She then quickly corrected herself and said the Korean market. Uh huh. We get it now. So it's not actually a restaurant. That's how you get by with no health rating.

Since we had heard so much about the famed Korean market, we decided to explore. Well, since the Korean food had obviously affected my mind, I picked up a bag of squids and started playing with it. There were five dried, flattened squids in this see-through bag. You could move them around a little bit and their tentacles felt really freaky. Looking back on it, I can't believe I touched that stuff. It almost makes me want to puke right now. Anyway, on to better things. There were bags of things that looked like rice crispy treats, bags of "coffee block" which said, "for your guests or yourself", canned Irish coffee, packages marked "Korean cracker" which looked suspiciously like the rice crispy treats, a bag simply marked "wangs" and candy with edible wrappers.

After that incident, my stomach started to let me know just how strange Korean food really is. I felt worse and worse. I told the secretary that I was going home sick. She then asked if I had accidentally eaten chicken (which I am allergic to) at lunch. I told her that I wasn't in any mental state to make judgment calls about poultry and then left the building. When I got home, I just decided I'd sleep it off with a little nap. Everything gets a little hazy after that but I woke up just in time to see Adult Swim.

Does anyone know how to say "health inspector" in Korean?


staff out...

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