Blue Ginger

One of the perks of living in the Northwest is the diaspora of authentic Asian eating joints that are never too far away. And by Asian I say that in the American sense which means southeast Asian to the rest of the world. From Chinese restaurants who have their main menu written in Chinese with the English menu available on request to sushi joints that put some Tokyo equivalents to shame (or so I have heard), we have everything. If Vietnamese pho or Thai penang curry was something you only saw and heard on travel shows, you can get some of the best over here. Food writers attribute this abundance to the proximity of southeast Asia to the west coast of US. I for one, don't care. What I do care and cherish is the fact that all it takes is a grumble in my belly and a 5-10 min drive to dive right into sizzling golden tempura or spicy tom yum gai.

Intermingled within these exotic cuisines and hidden under the anonymity of it's more popular counterparts is the cuisine of the Koreans. For not so long ago , I would have put it under the 'a lot like Japanese' category. It all changed when I went to an authentic Korean joint called Kokiri last year and I was jolted with amazement at the uniqueness and personality of the menu and the food that I ate.

Just writing about Korean cuisine would be like experiencing a good glass of wine with your eyes closed, i.e incomplete. Luckily I had my camera with me three days ago when I took M out on a date to Blue Ginger in Bellevue. This place is as Korean as they get, with huge tables centered with a fire grill , the sour aroma of kimchi floating in the air and nerdy Korean waitresses. We had the option of sitting at the sushi bar since by the way even Koreans eat sushi, but we were there for a different experience. Where else would you get to cook your own meat!

One of the traditional settings of a Korean meal is the Korean bbq where meats are cooked at the center of the table atop a grill to the accompaniment of about a dozen side dishes and individual rice bowls. We chose bulgogi as our main protein . Bulgogi literally means 'fire meat' , and is thinly sliced beef marinated in soy sauce , garlic and sesame oil which is to be cooked to your liking on the grill. You heard right! the raw meat comes in a huge platter with a pair of tongs at your disposal. You slap on the meat over the grill and cook it to your perfection. Unfortunately they do not pay you to cook your own food because that is part of the experience. We also decided to order the vegetable platter , which came with sliced zucchini, sliced pumpkin, succulent mushrooms an a big fat slab of onion which also had to be grilled by us!. However the best part of the meal for me was the banchan. Banchan refers to bowl sized side dishes served along with the main protein dish and rice to be consumed as accompaniments. What will blow your socks off is the number of them! The waitress comes with a trolley peckered with these small little bowls, and as she starts transferring those goodies on to the table, your huge table suddenly starts running out of space. Initially you will panic at the sheer number of these insignificant yet intriguing embellishments until you come to terms with the fact that sometimes life can be fair and sometimes you do get more than what your bargained for!

The banchan Blue Ginger decided to bestow upon was the ubiquitous kimchi which is deliberately rotten spicy hot cabbage, kongnamul which is boiled and seasoned soybean sprouts, sweet mu-chae made of sweet white radish in vinegar sauce , stinky tofu not to be consumed by the weak stomached, stir fried fern shoots called gosari-namul,stir fried squid called something I cannot pronounce, garlic mashed potatoes, pickled zucchini, stir fried gelatin noodles and salad....phew.

We finished it off with plum wine ordered by M which was a perfect compliment to the myriad of textures and flavors we encountered in our food adventure, not that warm sake would have been a bad choice , but I had already tried that during a previous visit.

Whether you call it similar to other Asian cuisines or not , Korean cuisine does make you review how food can be prepared, presented and consumed. It makes you realize that sometimes rotten, slimy and stinky can be adjectives used to describe mind blowingly awesome food. It makes you realize how juxtaposing complex preparations of banchan and soups against the simple staples of rice and meat can be sweet music to your unknowing palette. All in all it makes a pretty twisted meal!.