The Hindu Business Line : Delectable eight-footer

Er… you still have only four limbs, don’t you, asks a colleague when I walk into office and tell her I’m just back from sampling the delicacies at a Korean food festival, where octopus was served. Only four limbs, but a bellyful of assorted creatures, what with the food on offer being a smorgasbord of various meats and even non-meats crafted to appeal to vegetarians.

The mention of Korean food recalled a sortie to a Korean restaurant years ago — there was little on offer beyond beef and pork and even the sole chicken dish pictured on the menu looked radical to my conservatively non-vegetarian dinner companion. The tactless mention of how another Korean restaurant had recently gotten into trouble for serving dog meat sealed the fate of our outing — we ended up eating pizza.

At Hip Asia, the restaurant that serves a range of cuisines from South-East Asia at Chennai’s Taj Connemara, there was thankfully no mention of canine stuff, nor was my conservatively non-vegetarian companion present for surely he would have quailed at the mention of the octopus, but that was about as adventurous as it got. An array of starters (banchan — typically, small side-dishes to be eaten with rice) is placed on the table — dried prawns with celery, sliced lotus root with black beans, Napa cabbage pickled in vinegar and with a spicy chilli paste, cucumber similarly prepared, king prawns wrapped in fine, pinkish shavings of vinegared radish, a chicken salad almost Western in taste. The last two are among the few dishes that don’t carry the typical taste and smell of sesame oil and fermented soybean sauce (doenjang) that runs through most of the menu. Kimchi, perhaps the only Korean dish popularised by our neighbourhood Chinese restaurants, is a name for an entire genre of fermented vegetables with various seasonings (and not just cabbage, which we in India are most familiar with). There’s a creamy porridge of ground rice garnished with pine nuts, so bland I wonder if it has been seasoned even with salt. The rice and garnish/accompaniments used change at every meal.

It’s hard to pick a single dish for the most good-looking dish award but my vote would go for the cold vegetarian mung bean jelly salad — flat, transparent noodles are entwined in a rainbow of white, red and green. An interesting feature is the couple of cold noodle dishes on the menu, one being the bibim naeng myun, a staple in summer. These are buckwheat noodles combined with the ubiquitous red chilli sauce (gochujang) that dominates the cuisine.

The t’ang is a soupy accompaniment to the rice that forms part of the main meal. It has more broth than solids, and is meant to be eaten between mouthfuls of rice. The vegetarian version I was served contained tofu and mushrooms. The rice itself comes with various prepared vegetables and a red chilli paste on the side. The rice is tossed onto your plate with the paste and the vegetables. There are as many vegetables as meats that feature in a Korean menu. There’s dakgalbi guyi (roasted chicken breast), je yuk bok em (chilli-marinated and pan-sautéed pork slices with vegetables), nak ji bok em (stir-fried spicy octopus with vegetables), saeng sun jo rim (braised fish with radish, chilli and bamboo shoot) and much, much more.

Says Chef Young Raen Baek of Shilla Hotels, Korea, one of the two chefs in charge of the menu: “Korean cuisine is both simple and complicated. Complicated because most of the dishes are marinated and fermented, which means we need to wait a few days for them to get ready. Simple because after they get marinated they just have to be put on the fire. Most of the food served at a hotel isn’t very different either. We don’t really use too many spices other than chilli and garlic.”

I come away with the impression that Korean food is spicy, but not hot, never mind the redder-than-red colour of the chilli paste that seems to colour quite a few of those dishes. What may not go down well with sugar-loving palates that look for dessert to round off the meal is the puffed rice bar on offer. This is a rather weightless confection that reminds me of Thermocol and is perhaps only as sweet! There is a denser, flower-shaped unit, also made from rice, that’s just a tad sweeter. They are served with a citron-flavoured tea which, while not sweet, pleasantly shocks you with the burst of flavour. Amen to that!

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