Celebration banquet or why do you always eat Chinese food when you are in Korea?

Whenever we do an installation in Korea we host a celebration dinner at the end to celebrate our joint Korean-American success.  This year we had to do it on my second night in Taean because the big boss would be gone at the time we actually finished acceptance testing.  So here is what we had (compare and contrast to last year and I'll try to keep the courses in order.  Oh, and this year I was not the target.

Kevin and Matt, two of my engineers at the table before all the Koreans arrive.  As the night happened, Matt was sort of the target but the night was relatively somber because of the nationwide morning for the sailors on the Cheonan (google it).  I say relatively somber, because one of the Koreans did threaten to kiss him at one point.  Back to the meal.

First course, Jellyfish in the center, prawn with a sweet sauce at bottom, duck with a tangy sause on right, not really sure what on left (it had a ketchupy tasting sauce and was somewhat firm to the tooth, but no idea what it was, it did not scream fish OR fowl, but was probably one or the other) and "Thousand Year Old" egg at top.  All good (didn't eat the parsley).

Seond course, seafood and mushrooms in a shark fin sauce. Also good.  To drink there is the soju shot glass (don't drink to the bottom if you don't want it refilled) on right and Jasmine-like tea on left and bottle of Crown Royal in center top.

Vegetables and bean sprouts in yet another red sauce.  The long red pepper is not a bell pepper, but a korea hot pepper.  Moist towelette on right (apparently I committed a faux pas by not using it at the beginning of the meal).

Sorry for the bad photo, but this is "Red and White" Prawns.  It is just two huge fried prawns, the one on the left in a sweet white sauce, almost like gravy, and the one on the right in a spicy red sauce.  This is the first chinese food that Matthew ever cooked for the family 3 or 4 years ago.

Sweet bits of pork fried lightly and tossed in another sauce (this one the most like what Americans get in Sweet and Sour) with veggies on lettuce.  Notice the bottle of Crown is gone, now.

Vegetables cooked in a Korean spicy sauce, pretty hot.  What you do is you use your chopsticks (if you read the older parts of the blog you should be surprised that these are plastic chopsticks) to pick off a fold of the sweet bun on the left and then put some of the veggies on that, wrap it and eat it like a burrito (well a teeny-tiny burrito) it is almost completely unlike eating moo-shu.  Notice that beer has joined the soju and whiskey in the alcohol pantheon for the night.

I thought this was desert.  It was a sweet ball of fried dough thickly encrusted with sesame seeds.  That doesn't quite describe it, but it was memorably good.

It turns out we had to order a main course.  I did not understand this, even though one of my Korean friends tried to explain it (basically you get all those previous course as a set up to the main dish which you order off a menu that the waitress didn't bring and would have been in Korean anyway so everybody just go noodles, apparently at random), so I ended up with egg drop noodles which tasted just like you would imagine.

Daniel, the best english speaker of the Koreans, got the hot seafood noodles.

Matt, the pseudo-target, got his favorite dish Black Bean Noodles.  We eat this at lunch 3 or 4 times in every 2 week trip and this trip was no exception, so you can probably guess what we had for lunch that day.

And for desert we had a foamy creme thing that tasted sweet and very, very airy.

Happy Korean engineers.  Brown bottles are beer, Green bottles are soju, except for the square green one in the bottom center which is an evil Chinese Whiskey that makes you wish for the delicate flavor of Mekong.

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.