Food Adventure with Family!

Best part about hanging out with my parents? Well, I guess it's actually the second best because the first best is being able to be with my parents. So the second best is... EATING!!!! 

We met up with my mom's friends family and we went to this delicious restaurant in 홍대 or Hongdae, named after the arts university in the area. It's got a lot of cute places to eat and so we went to one called 어머니가 차려주는 식탁 or The Table that Mother Prepares [for you to eat]. YAY! 

Super cute, yeah?

Basically it's a lot of traditional Korean foods with modern twists. It came out in about 10 courses. I didn't upload pictures of all of them — I just put up my favorites. But wow, I was so SO full by the end. 

Delicious salad with tofu slices and an (edible) peony on top. 

This one was super interesting. The folded green and white slices are thinly sliced pieces of rice cake, kind of like the rice paper they give you at all-you-can-eat Korean BBQ restaurants but thicker and slightly tougher. Take a slice (using chopsticks of course) and then take some of the salad and place it in the middle of the rice paper slice. Then wrap it, dip it in the sweet sauce, and mmm. So good. 

This is the modern twist of the 삼겹살, or the Korean equivalent of bacon, but way better because it's fattier. It was so good. It was so soft and tender and greasy. It was on top of this delicious salad and if you ate it together it was the perfect combination of meat and veggies. 

Isn't the presentation of this one awesome? Look at the heart! 

The food looks like fried stuff, and yes it is, but it's not your typical tempura. Inside the one that looks like shrimp is actually ginseng. I thought it would taste so weird, but it was actually quite good. And the other fried food is two slices of eggplant, held together with mashed shrimp. Yummmm. 

Then this is your typical 갈비, or Korean meat, right? WRONG. It's the most tender, best marinated meat ever. And to "heat" it, they lit it on fire. Yes. FIRE. And yes it's sitting on top of rocks and spruced with some kind of pine leaf or whatever. 

To finish the meal, we have greens mixed with rice and spicy sauce. I was about to die by this time because my stomach was so full. 

To finish it off, a nice cup of coffee, plus watermelons+oranges in the background.

So that was another entry. No pictures of me, but y'all are more interested in the food anyway, right? Wow I'm hungry. More updates soon :)