Korean BBQ tastes great! Except…….

Ok, so we’ve been here 3 weeks now, but I have already found a great restaurant where we will be taking all of our guests to when they come for visits. You have been warned! The restaurant in question is a Korean barbeque type, where you get to cook food and a wire mesh placed over a tub of hot coals right at your table. You are then presented with an abundance of side dishes, many that I cant tell you the Korean name right now, but things such as Sambay sauce, lettuce, pickled radish, pickled onion relish soup, scrambled egg, marinated tofu, mint leaves, more sauces, hot and sour soup, noodles and a plate of delicious looking crab in hot sauce!

The meat is brought to the table on a plate, and the server puts this on the grill for you. A few minutes later, they are back with a pair of scissors to cut the meat into strips, which then cooks until tender and browned. This is then placed to the side of the grill, and the next slab of meat put on. I think we had a tendency to overcook the meat, because they would hover in the background and turn up to turn our meat for us, and not carbonize it. You take the chunks of meat, and wrap it in a leaf of lettuce or mint, then apply some of the onions and sauce, then stick it in your mouth and chew. Wow! Tender and juicy! Yum. A variety of meats can be chosen, but we tend to start with beef, then pork, then sausage ending up with prawn. Delicious!

On the first couple of visits I tucked into the plate of crab covered with spicy hot sauce, and was congratulated on my technique and courage to eat the crab. No big deal, I thought. It was very tasty, although the spicy sauce didn’t really allow the flavour of the crab meat to come through very well. On the third visit to the restaurant, I found out why I was being praised. It turns out that the crabs are whisked out of a tank at the back, cleaved in half alive, then plonked onto a plate and smothered with spicy sauce. If they weren’t dead already, then the sauce would finish them off. It would seem I was munching on raw crab! Now, I have heard some horror stories about raw crustaceans and the nasties it can bring on. I just hope I haven’t fallen third time (un)lucky! I’m sticking to anything with 4 legs from now on – oh wait, don’t they eat dog here? Errrrrr… then it’s pig and cow I guess!