Chinese Banquet in Korea

Here's the post of the food in the drunken banquet we had with our Korean customer last Thursday. This food reminded me of a Korean take on a Chinese multi-course wedding banquet I had had in Hell-A back in the 80's when Eric Bohley married Mary-Anne King.

Anyway the appetizer course was jellyfish salad, a slice of pickled pork, a prawn, and a slice of an aged duck egg usually called a "hundred year old" egg. The sauce in the top bowl was like a thin soy sauce, which is unusual in Korean restaurants, we had wooden chopsticks (Koreans almost always use stainless steel chopsticks, which in addition to being much slicker than wooden chopsticks are also not rotationally symmetric) and a typical chinese soup spoon. The jellyfish salad was on top of shredded cucumber that was not pickled, the only cucumber that hasn't been a pickle I've seen the whole trip so far.

The next course was shark fin 'soup' which was more of a noodle dish than a soup in this restaurant and only had two tiny bites of shark fin, it was mostly bamboo and noodles. I took this picture after I had eaten quite a bit of it. The koreans called it "shark flipper". The dish above it was sliced pieces of sirloin in a typical Korean spicy sauce. The only other beef I had in Korea was the shredded kind that is used in Bulgogi and even the butchers I've seen in the market places don't carry much beef (I later had beef bibimbap which was also shredded) and what they had doesn't resemble cuts I am used to seeing. Notice the green bottles of soju in the pictures.
The middle dish is fried shrimp in a korean sweet and sour sauce, very similar to what was in the beef dish but sweeter. To the right is a chicken thing, I think. Iwas beginning to loose track a little here. The clear glass at the top is the soju shot glass, the little white one is the scotch shot glass and the big cup was cold jasmine tea. The wooden cylinder next to the spoon rest has an egg drop soup with a surprise ingredient that I'll note in another picture, below. On the right edge is a cold wet napkin that they give you just before the meal starts in most of the restaurants around here.
The next one was something I never encountered before. On the right is a chinese bun, think of dim sum buns you might have had before, but this had nothing in it. It was like a dough-y chinese biscuit. I was supposed to pick off parts of it with chopsticks and eat it together with the sliced portk and vegetables dish to the left. I was having problems with the chopsticks by that point and didn't eat much of this. That might have been a mistake, because I still had to endure the line o' Koreans that I talk about in the soju post.
This is the final dish that came out, and I think something must of gone wrong because you usually get desert and/or fruit at the end of a chinese banquet, but then again the only desret course I've seen or heard of in Korea is something called cold noodles which I had the first night in Taean, but it wasn't sweet. Anyway back to this dish, it is noodles in typical chinese soup stock broth with more of the "surprise" I mentioned above. The bits in the soup (you might have to click and enlarge this picture to fully appreciate this) that look like mushrooms are not. They are sea slugs! Also known as sea cucumbers. They are poisonous! Well, anyway they were in this dish, plus the soup that came in the wooden cylinder at the top of this picture next to the soju glass. So I ate a good bit of sea slug. Because that soju glass is empty I think I took this picture just after I had dumped it into Burnsed's soup.
I don't really remember anything tasting objectionable and the sea slug apart from it's not being a mushroom wasn't really bad. It's just when you expect to chop down on a nice portobello and instead you bite into a sea slug the mouth feel and consitency gives one pause. The "hundred year old" egg was much more tasteless that it would have appeared. The jellyfish salad tasted just the same as it did at the wedding where I first had it and just like at the Japanese restaurant on Eglin Blvd back home.