Anyway. I learn about new foods all the time. In the case of bibimbap, however, it’s apparently gone from “off my radar” to “thrown casually into news articles without explanation” with no introductory phase. This makes me wonder:
Is bibimbap considered a well-known, familiar food dish in the Northeastern U.S. and California? Would it be weird for, say, an adult resident of San Francisco or New York City to have never heard of bibimbap?
Are there other foods out there that are big deals on the coasts right now, in 2019, but haven’t yet made inroads into Middle America? I sometimes get peek at the shadow cast by Ethiopian food – that cuisine has almost no presence here, but it seems as popular as Indian food in some parts of the U.S. (BTW – Indian food is well-liked where I live, but still not ubiquitous).
Probably not an unfamiliar dish for most people in those places. Any place you’ve got a lot of Koreans you’ll find Korean restaurants serving it. Southern California and the Pacific Northwest, and New York, New Jersey, DC/Maryland/Northern Virginia and all points in between (and others, like Atlanta, Hawaii, Colorado, even Alaska).
There’s a chain called Bibibop (that was actually started in Ohio) with locations in Ohio, Illinois, DC, Maryland, and SoCal. List of all of their current locations: Locations - BIBIBOP Asian Grill
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Poke bowls are a similar example. They went from “unknown” to “all over the place” about a year-and-a-half ago in the New Orleans area. Even some grocery stores sell them.
It’s all good. I guess it’s a product of the Internet/Social Media Age. Things simply spread faster than they used to. Used to be more of a slow burn.
I don’t know. On my limited travels to the deeper interior of the US, mostly around Louisville, I’ve noticed a few Peruvian chicken places popping up here and there that weren’t there before. I don’t know if it’s really a “big deal” on the East coast, they’ve been here forever, but I know it’s damned delicious!
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Are you asking whether bibimbap has recently become extraordinarily trendy where it wasn’t before, as in a fad? The one baseline data point I can give you is that I have encountered it commonly enough outside of Korea- specifically including New York and San Francisco, among other cities- but it’s not like there was a shortage of it 10 or 20 or 30 years ago, so couldn’t tell you if there has been any change.
Re. “Middle America”, I expect if you travel far enough the density of Korean, as well as all other, restaurants goes down dramatically.
White Southern Californian here. I certainly wouldn’t assume the average non-foodie person on the street knows bibimbap. (I wouldn’t be surprised if they did, either.)
Looking at the NPR article, here’s the context:
It seems to me the writer chose that dish to imply a certain kind of consumer. Explicitly “environmentally conscious,” and implicitly interested in food from diverse food traditions. (I’m trying to find a non-loaded way of saying "exotic food" here, because of course it’s not exotic to lots of people.)
So I suspect it was a deliberate writing choice meant to signal something about the users of these services, which choice the writer and editor thought would work whether or not you recognized the reference. To me, it’s a bit trite but also kind of works.
EDIT: missed that they also explicitly said “gourmet.” And while bibimbap doesn’t seem inherently “gourmet” to me, it also seems like something that will show up on a certain class of “gourmet” restaurant menus, in permutations like “pork and veggie.”
I’ve never heard of it, but FWIW it is well-known enough to have an entry in both of the dictionary apps that I have installed on my phone. (And many things haven’t reached there yet.)
I would assume that anyone who’s eaten in a Korean restaurant has seen bibimbap; it’s a pretty standard dish. Here in the greater Boston area there are plenty of Korean restaurants so it seems common. Have you heard of kimchee? If so, I think bibimbap is just slightly less well known.
You could definitely have “gourmet” bibimbap (why not?), but it’s about as exotic as rice is exotic (which maybe it is in some places; it’s not like it grows everywhere).
ETA sure, far from Korea calling it “bibimbap” on a menu may make it seem more exotic than “mixed rice”.
I’d say that bibimbop is second to only kimchi in terms of American awareness of Korean cuisine. (Fake edit: On preview, what Telemark said) Korean chicken wings have seen a jump in popularity around here lately.
Nashville hot chicken seemed to appear from out of nowhere. It started out a regional favorite in whatever state Nashville is in before spreading to the coasts.
Huh, based on the description it seems to overlap with any number of Asian derived “rice with meat and veg” dishes out there.
I must confess that when I have seen it on a menu I have not ordered it because it’s an odd looking word (to me) I’m not sure how to pronounce it properly and I don’t like sounding like a goob in public. Suggestions anyone?
When I’ve watched Americans eat bibimbap, the majority of them eat it incorrectly. It is a dish served in a bowl, with a base of rice, chopped vegetables, spinach, pepper paste, normally pork or beef, and a fried egg or two. It is served with the ingredients somewhat separated in the bowl. Most Americans will pick a bite of rice, then a bite of meat, then a bite of vegetables, etc.
When it is served to you, you are supposed to mix all of the ingredients together, then eat.
That’s funny, I was about to post that I had no idea what bibimbap was when I read the NPR article, except what I got from context. I don’t think I’d heard of it despite being a former Blue Apron customer and fairly regular Food Network viewer. But we don’t have many Korean restaurants here in … Nashville.
Nashville Hot Chicken, on the other hand… not only have I been aware of it for close to two decades, I can give you a pretty good dissertation on where it came from, where it is good, and what are acceptable variations that don’t cross the line into bastardizations.
I’d have thought Bulgogi was better known, and perhaps Jjigae too. But I agree if anyone can name a few Korean dishes, bibimbap will be one of them.
Well sure, in the same way that a hamburger overlaps with any number of western derived “bread with meat and veg” dishes out there.
Actually I the only other type of dish that features white rice topped with meat and veg is the Japanese donburi. But the flavoring and specific ingredients are very different.
I learned of it while living in Montana, but then, the best restaurant in Bozeman just happens to be a Korean place (and a lot of other ethnicities are poorly represented or completely absent).
But I usually ordered the bulgogi with noodles.
As for being just a rice-and-vegetable bowl, doesn’t it also need to include bean paste and an egg?
I’ve known about bibimbap for ages, but don’t order it. I usually go to Korean restaurants for the grilled meats and the kimchee (I like a variety of kimchee but it’s starting to get hard to find anything beyond the cabbage version).
Yes, kimchi is familiar. Some of our groceries carry it, even.
Same here (except never used Blue Apron). There was even a Korean cuisine show on the Cooking Channel that my wife and I used to watch circa 2016-17. I think the host actually DID make babimbap one time – the fried eggs rang a bell – but either she didn’t call it that or she said “babimbap” once early in the episode and stuck with English circumlocutions afterwards.
There are only a handful of Korean restaurants in the New Orleans area – it’s a great food town, but many ethnic cuisines have little or no presence. There was once a fairly high-profile local Korean restaurant called Genghis Khan (I know, I know) that I’d eaten at a few times. Not that I memorized every menu item, but I have no recall of anything called “babimbap”. They had kimchi and bulgogi, though. Some of the dishes on Genghis Khan’s menu were just listed with names translated into English. I suspect “babimbap” might have rendered as something like “rice bowl” – a phrase that still appears on a lot of local Vietnamese restaurant menus. I think the bulgogi was actually listed as “Korean barbeque (bulgogi)” or something like that.
As it happens … the current Korean restaurants in my area DO serve babimbap. So … ignorance fought. It makes me all the more curious about other foods familiar in other areas that are unknown here.
Same here. Never run into jigae, either.
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I’ve *heard *of Nashville hot chicken … think I saw it on an episode of the reality show Chrisley Knows Best But it hasn’t made it down to SE Louisiana yet.
But it hasn’t made it down to SE Louisiana yet.