My wife’s favorite is radish kimchi, but I love the cabbage stuff. Kimchi is basically a way of pickling.
Chicagoan here. Known of and eaten Bibimbap for over ten years at least. Of course, there’s a strong Korean presence where I live.
Bordelond, you mention Middle America in your OP, but that covers a lot of ground. If you don’t mind, where do you live around?
The New Orleans metro area.
Yeah, sometimes people conflate “Middle America” with “the American Midwest, esp the farm regions”. All I really meant was “parts of the U.S. not in the cultural spheres of NYC, LA, or San Francisco”.
Chicago is kind of its own thing, at least it seems so from here. A huge cosmopolitan city to be sure, but not merely “New York, Part 2”.
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Would it have been harder to find bibimbap (local Korean presence notwithstanding), say, 20-25 years ago?
Hmm. I like it with chilli paste (though I suppose Korean chili paste does have a bunch of fermented soybeans in it). And nobody is forcing you to add anything non-vegan; at your restaurant, doesn’t the menu specify, or are you not asked, whether you would like beef or chicken or whatever in your bibimbap?
Better places will offer dolsot bibimbop. That’s where the bowl is craved from heavy stone and then heated screaming hot. The rice on the bottom cooks into a crust, very much like socarrat from paella.
At the restaurant I was referring to, the standard beebimbob (I think that’s how they spelled it) included egg and beef, but there was also a note at the start of the menu that tofu could be substituted in any of the meat dishes, and I’m sure they’d leave off the egg too if you asked.
Bulgogi(or Pulgogi) is much better. 
I don’t think Korean food has ever become too popular in the US. Maybe on a par with Uzbekistan food…but if people in the flyover states tried those dumplings stuffed with minced lamb, Uzbeki would take off like a rocket.
I’m not a big eater of bimibop, but I will eat kimchi (cabbage or radish) in any shape of form, including over cottage cheese. Try it before you laugh at me.
Nashville Hot Chicken sounded intriguing until I did some research and found it was pretty much fried chicken with a lot of hot sauce poured over it. How is that supposed to be different than, say, Harold’s in Chicago? I’m serious…I like fried chicken and hot, and would whip a bunch of Nashville style if I am convinced.
It’s less hot sauce and more of a hot paste. Tends to make it hotter than sauce based spicy fried chicken. It’s pretty unique as far as spicy chicken dishes go, IMO (though I’ve only had Hattie B’s).
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It seems ubiquitous now, but 20 years ago? Much less so. No doubt you could find it at an ethnic hole in the wall kinda place, maybe. Thai food was popular then. Yes, I know Thai is not Korean. But Chicago did have asian food besides Chinese back then.
We have at least some Korean places around here. But I don’t think I could drive to an Uzbek restaurant within a day. Maybe Houston has one …
Checked it out – Houston had one Uzbek place open in 2017. It has since closed 
It’s not New York Lite either. That’s the worst one I’ve yet heard.
I respect New York. It’s the only place that made me feel like a country bumpkin. But Chicago is better and badder than NYC.
Chicagoland has a pretty large Korean population. I wasn’t as aware of the restaurant scene here 20 years ago but I think it would have been easy to find bibimbop then though you’d have to be looking for it. Super Hmart opened in Niles over 12 years ago and that’s a massive warehouse style Korean grocery that gives an idea of the customer base. There are five stores in Illinois now.
I don’t know how you could address the familiarity of the dish in California without recognizing that right in the center of Los Angeles is this huge place called Koreatown. Because of its location–encompassing so much of the Wilshire corridor–few people spend much time in L.A. without eventually eating in a Korean restaurant or trying Korean food, and getting to know bibimbap. It’s fairly common lunchtime meal for people at work, even over in downtown. I go to Jeon Ju at Olympic and Vermont a lot if I’m looking specifically for that, but BCD has more variety.
It’s much more likely for people in San Francisco or San Diego to not know about this dish.
I live in SoCal. Bibimbap and Indian are common. Though I’d say Korean and Japanese have a higher popularity due to the larger populations in the are. Personally, not something I’d eat. I don’t like Korean BBQ either. Honestly, I’d rather have sushi or some other Japanese dish than Korean.
Yes, it’s different than Harold’s fried chicken with Texas Pete’s on it. Basically – and I make it at home sometimes – it’s just a shitton of cayenne pepper (usually mixed with a bit of some other spices like black pepper, garlic powder, maybe some paprika, salt, and perhaps a bit of brown sugar to give it another layer of flavor–I remember reading somewhere that Slap Ya Mama may have been the “secret” ingredient of the original Nashville hot chickens) mixed with melted lard or even just the fried chicken cooking oil and spread with a brush over the chicken after it’s fried up.
It tastes quite different than your typical spicy chicken with vinegar-based hot sauce over it. As the spices are dissolved in the hot lard/oil, they also develop a bit of a toasted flavor, and it’s a deep, earthy dried-chile pepper flavor with no acidity, as opposed to a tart, fruity pickled red pepper kind of taste. This is why (in my opinion), it’s important to have a bit of pickle (or coleslaw or whatnot) with the hot chicken to give you a little of that acid.
Yeah, hot chicken came out of nowhere. I went to Nashville for the first and only time in 2013 to shoot a wedding. I researched the local food and came across something I had not heard of before: hot chicken. None of my friends had either. So I ate at Prince’s and Bolton’s (had the chicken at Prince’s and the fish at Bolton’s.) This is the first time I had an American dish where the “extra hot” was actually mouth-on-fire, I can barely eat this hot. These guys don’t kid around. Loved it. A year or two later, it seemed like hot chicken was popping up everywhere. Now we have probably around ten or more hot chicken places in the Chicago area, though many of them just do hot chicken sandwiches, and not hot fried chicken pieces.
As for bibimbap, it’s moderately known here. I would guess most of my friends and my generation (early 40s) would know what it is; my parents and most of their friends would not. I first heard of it in the 90s, but that’s because the was a 24 hour Korean restaurant in town, and if I wanted something other than diner food at 2 a.m., that was my stop.
I was a bit surprised when about five years ago, when my first daughter was born, we got one of these LeapFrog My Pal Violet talking dolls. It came with a USB plug where you can customize various things it can say and under the list of “my favorite food” options was bibimbap.
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Puly:. Thanks for the thoughtful response to the hot chicken question.
Slap Ya Mama is a cupboard staple for me. I buy the large jars in lots of six, and hand it out to friends and relations. I use it as a fried chicken seasoning shortcut rather than doing salt, pepper, paprika, and garlic individually. It will definitely go into the pan next time.
Huh. I am flummoxed. That is very cool … but the mind boggles. Feel like things are just passing me by 