Today for lunch I am going to be trying Korean food for the first time with my sister and a mutual friend. I was wondering if anyone had any suggestions for a good first time meal. Also, my sister is a vegetarian so any suggestions of food for her would greatly be appreciated as well.
Well, if you like spicy fermented cabbage then kim chee is the dish for you!
Seriously though, kim chee is an amazingly delicious dish. I love the stuff.
Otherwise, in my limited experience Korean food is similar to traditional chinese, with rice, lots of vegetable dishes, seafood and the usual chicken or beef stuff.
Your sister shouldn’t have a problem. Spice maybe?
Jen (my sister) and I are all about the spice. We love indian and thai food. Now Jen 2 (friend Jen) is a tad American (her words, not mine) when it comes to spicy food.
I’ll remember the cabbage, it sounds good. Thanks.
Beef Bulgoki - simple beef stir-fry, typically a little sweet. One of my favorite korean restaurants has a Pork Bulgoki that they’ve marinated overnight in hot spicy goodness before stir-frying with green onions. MMMMmmmm. Mandu (spicy dumplings) are a good start appetizer.
Damn, now I’m hungry and all I’ve got for lunch is chicken noodle soup.
A word of warning about kimchee: Do not eat any if you are going to be closely interacting with people for the rest of the day. Kimchee has a way of permeating your bodily excretions for a period of time. IOW, you will reek of garlic and fermented cabbage. Not a good thing if you have a job that entails face-to-face contacts. But it is soooo good!
I once ate at a Korean restaurant where the meal automatically began with appetizers – ten different appetizers, in very small portions. (I remember the number because the small round dishes were arranged in a pyramid.) Several kinds of pickled vegetables, including kimchi, some kind of seaweed, a couple of dishes of small dried fish, and there was baby squid or octopus too. I loved (almost) every one of them. See if you can find something like that, it’s an experience!
My favorite Korean dish: bebimbop, preferably served in the sizzling hot clay pot. It’s rice, veggies, and a fried egg. You mix 'em all up as you eat, and the pot continues to cook them as you go. Very very tasty.
I second this, although I’ve never tried one with an egg. I’ve gotten vegetarian versions which are just a bowl of vegetables, mushrooms, sprouts and seaweed, with several condiments on the side, as BrainGlutton describes. Delicious!
But contrary to BrainGlutton’s description, these aren’t “appetizers” in the American sense. These are usually strong-flavored sides meant to be eaten along with the main dish, much like pickled ginger with sushi. Often I’ll mix up some of the condiments directly into the Bimimbop bowl (my favorites are the little dried fish and seaweed), but it’s probably more proper to eat small bites of these in between bites of the main dish, as a flavor enhancer and palate cleanser.
The word “appetizer” makes me think of someone gobbling up all 8-10 little dishes of Kim Chee and the like before the main dish shows up! :eek: That’s just wrong.
I was just coming in here to mention this. Curse your good culinary taste and superior typing skills! 
If you like spicy food, try mixing in the Gochuchang red bean paste, too, but be careful. A little goes a long way.
I’ve been a huge fan of Korean food since my army days. I’ll also second pulgogi and Korean style pork.
I’ve also been partial to Korean style fried rice, and when I was over there, and I once went for a month ordering little else than shrimp fried rice.
I like the ddok rice cakes, too.
I’ve never quite gotten around to liking Naengmyon, long noodles served in broth, for which Korea is particularly famous, but most of my Korean chowhounds did. I guess it’s an acquired taste.
I was just coming in here to mention this. Curse your good culinary taste and superior typing skills! If you like spicy food, try mixing in the Gochuchang red bean paste, too, but be careful. A little goes a long way.
I’ve been a huge fan of Korean food since my army days. I’ll also second pulgogi and Korean style pork.
I’ve also been partial to Korean style fried rice, and when I was over there, and I once went for a month ordering little else than shrimp fried rice.
I like the ddok rice cakes, too.
I’ve never quite gotten around to liking Naengmyon, long noodles served in broth, for which Korea is particularly famous, but most of my Korean chowhounds did. I guess it’s an acquired taste.
Actually, most Korean restaurants I’ve eaten at provide these dishes (although stacking them in a pyramid is a new one on me), and if you pick an older style traditional Korean restaurant, you will almost certainly see them. They’re called banchan, and they’re excellent. I remember the seaweed. Sometimes they serve it to you au natural, and sometimes they serve dried and salted seaweed called kim. Good either way.
Interesting. I’ve been to several Korean restaurants here in Seattle, and they all do the egg. I like it, but my brother doesn’t order bebimbop because he doesn’t like the egg.
I’ve always known bi-bim-bap to have an egg. At one place, over easy. At another place, kind of like an omelet laid over a mound of rice, with a Korean character written on the egg in ketchup. Yes, ketchup, not chili sauce, and not ket-jap.
For a first go at korean food, though, I’d recommend the bulgoki/bulgogi/pulgogi. It’s one of my favorite dishes across all ethnic food.
However, some Korean places are a “korean barbeque”. They’ll have a grill built right into the middle of the table, and they’ll bring you a plate of raw meat. You drop the meat pieces on the grill. It’s good to try once, but I prefer prepared dishes.
That second one isn’t technically bibimbap. That’d be omo-rice, or omelette rice. I believe they have the same thing in Japan.
As for the way Korean food is done, your main dish is rice. Everything else is considered to be a side dish, I guess. For instance, you would never get a thing of bulgogi and just eat that. Well, I don’t mean never, but that’s not the usual way to eat things. It’s always rice and banchan, rice and soup, rice and stew, rice and whatever else there is.
Bibimbap in the stone bowl is known as dolsot bibimbap (or stone bowl bibimbap). It has the bonus of making the rice at the bottom crunchy and delicious. It’s usually served with a mix of meat and vegetables, but you can certainly do vegeterian.
It’s the same in China and Japan, AFAIK.
There’s a great dish at a neaby Japanese/Korean restaurant called something like spicy rice sticks. It’s chewy rice cakes stir-fried in a spicy chili sauce with cabbage, carrots and some other vegetables. I don’t know if it’s an actual Korean dish or just a house creation, but it’s really tasty. It’s not listed as on the menu as specifically Korean, but there’s no way that thing’s Japanese with all that hot chili and cabbage going on.
Fried mandoo is a nice appetizer.
In addition to main dishes already mentiond, here’s also chop-chae. Do be aware that there doesn’t seem to be a standard for spelling Korean foods in English. SO chop-chae can be spelled as jop-chai or various other spellings. It’s a dish with glass noodles and veggies and usually some meat.
There’s also galbi (again, multiple spellings) that are small ribs.
I dearly love soon dobu (which is only one of the many ways I’ve seen it spelled). It’s spicy tofu soup, served in an extremely hot little stone or iron cauldron. It comes to the table boiling away in its container, a reddish beef broth laden with chunks of tofu and bits of meat or vegetables. Sometimes they bring you a whole raw egg in a separate dish so that you can crack it into the boiling soup to poach. It’s a comforting, luscious lunch, and the banchan and rice served with it make it a very filling meal.
Just this last Sunday we were at our favorite tofu joint, and noticed that folks at other tables were eating noodles and soup out of stainless steel bowls. We asked, and found that this was cold soup noodles, popular to eat during hot weather. Next time, we’re trying that.
Sounds like Duk Bok Gi, and yes, that’s about as native Korean as you can get when it comes to food.
It just so happens that my very first dish in Korea was Duk Bok Gi. A nice Korean family took me to the 63 Building to visit, and when I told them that I liked spicy food, they took it as a challenge. I had never sweated while eating before, but damn, I did that night.
Good stuff.
Me, I’m all about the bulgogi. Occasionally, I’ll get a sizzling bi-bim-bob for variety, but the waitresses at the local place just say “The usual?” any more, when I walk in. This is at least partly due to the wonderful sauce served with it (but I’ve heard that every cook has his or her own recipe for bulgogi sauce, so this may vary), and partly because all beef dishes around here are unusually good.
Despite what you might think, kim-chi is not at all like saurkraut. It has a much stronger, distinctively cabbagey flavor, as opposed to the more vinegary flavor of kraut. If you like cabbage, you’ll love it.
Another dish served at the restaurant here is an appetizer translated as “Korean pancakes”, though I don’t remember the Korean name for them. They’re like a latke or colcannon, except with a wide variety of vegetables (zuchinni, carrots, etc.), not just potatoes.
And tofu is not uncommon in Korean cuisine, so your sister shouldn’t have any problem. You may even be able to substitute it into a normally-meat dish.