In 2008, after working for 20 years at Alice Waters’ famed Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, chef Russell Moore, with his wife, Allison Hopelain, opened Camino in Oakland. Moore gained immediate acclaim for his personal take on California cuisine, his commitment to local ingredients, and, most of all, his use of fire—cooking in a nine-foot-wide wood-burning fireplace. Not evident on Camino’s menu was the fact that Moore, who grew up in Southern California, is half Korean.
Indeed, even though he developed a curiosity about and a passion for Korean food, he had never been to his grandmother’s homeland—until AFAR sent him and Hopelain to Seoul, the capital city, and Gwangju, the southern culinary hub, to examine his cultural heritage through the lens of Korea’s markets, restaurants, and artisans.
![Cheonggyecheon (Hangul: 청계천) is an 8.4 km (5.2 miles) long, modern public recreation space in downtown Seoul, South Korea. The massive urban renewal project is on the site of a stream that flowed before the rapid post-war economic development required it to be covered by transportation infrastructure. The $900 million project initially attracted much public criticism but, after opening in 2005, has become popular among city residents and tourists.
Cheonggyecheon is a 5.8 km creek flowing west to east through downtown Seoul, and then meeting Jungnangcheon, which in turn connects to the Han River and empties into the Yellow Sea. During the presidency of Park Chung-hee, Cheonggyecheon was covered with concrete for roads. In 1968, an elevated highway was built over it.
The stream was named Gaecheon ("open stream") after the first refurbishment project to construct a drainage system during the Joseon Dynasty. The work, which included dredging and bolstering the banks of the stream and building the bridges, was carried out every 2~3 years during this period from the reign of Taejong, the third king of the Joseon Dynasty. King Yeonjo especially undertook the refurbishment work as a national project.[1]
Gacheon was renamed to Cheonggyecheon, its current name, during the Japanese colonial period. During this time, financial difficulties prevented the colonialists from covering up the stream despite several attempts to do so.[2]
After the Korean War (1950–1953), more people migrated into Seoul to make their living and settled down along the stream in shabby makeshift houses. The accompanying trash, sand, and waste, and deteriorating conditions resulted in an eyesore in the city. The stream was covered up with concrete over a 20 year period starting in 1958, and a 5.6 km-long, 16 m-wide elevated highway was completed in 1976. The area became an example of successful industrialization and modernization of South Korea.[2]
(source Wikipedia)](https://afar.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/b2fb144/2147483647/strip/true/crop/970x1200+0+0/resize/1440x1781!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fafar-media-production-web.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fbrightspot%2F67%2F24%2Fbd6a10a2aadece3fe424b20b4416%2Foriginal-rowat-afar-20140412-1907-15.jpg)
Cheonggyecheon (Hangul: 청계천) is an 8.4 km (5.2 miles) long, modern public recreation space in downtown Seoul, South Korea. The massive urban renewal project is on the site of a stream that flowed before the rapid post-war economic development required it to be covered by transportation infrastructure. The $900 million project initially attracted much public criticism but, after opening in 2005, has become popular among city residents and tourists. Cheonggyecheon is a 5.8 km creek flowing west to east through downtown Seoul, and then meeting Jungnangcheon, which in turn connects to the Han River and empties into the Yellow Sea. During the presidency of Park Chung-hee, Cheonggyecheon was covered with concrete for roads. In 1968, an elevated highway was built over it. The stream was named Gaecheon (“open stream”) after the first refurbishment project to construct a drainage system during the Joseon Dynasty. The work, which included dredging and bolstering the banks of the stream and building the bridges, was carried out every 2~3 years during this period from the reign of Taejong, the third king of the Joseon Dynasty. King Yeonjo especially undertook the refurbishment work as a national project.[1] Gacheon was renamed to Cheonggyecheon, its current name, during the Japanese colonial period. During this time, financial difficulties prevented the colonialists from covering up the stream despite several attempts to do so.[2] After the Korean War (1950–1953), more people migrated into Seoul to make their living and settled down along the stream in shabby makeshift houses. The accompanying trash, sand, and waste, and deteriorating conditions resulted in an eyesore in the city. The stream was covered up with concrete over a 20 year period starting in 1958, and a 5.6 km-long, 16 m-wide elevated highway was completed in 1976. The area became an example of successful industrialization and modernization of South Korea.[2] (source Wikipedia)
Photo by Andrew Rowat
Not Your Typical Korean Mom “My mom was born in Hawaii in a Korean-speaking household. Her mother was a postcard bride, and my mom never wanted to play the traditional role of the Korean woman. She didn’t want to learn to cook—and she’s not a very good cook. Growing up we ate a mishmash of Hawaiian-style Asian food, which sounds terribly derogatory, but it really was like the sloppy version of teriyaki, the sloppy version of soba, an abbreviated version of Korean food. We did have kimchi, which my father, who was white, never ate. And my mom made horrible, horrible white people food.
At a certain point, I got really into Korean food, and I became much more versed in it than my mom. When I started making kimchi, mine was a thousand times better than hers, and she was happy about that. She always said, ‘I’m responsible for you becoming a cook because I cooked so badly that you had to learn.’
My Korean friends say, ‘In Korea when you want a certain dish, you go to the street that has it. If it’s bindaetteok pancakes, you go to this particular area, and the restaurants make only bindaetteok. If you want bossam, there’s an entire bossam alley.’
I wanted to see that and see what it’s really like in the homeland. How spicy is the food? Is the banchan very elaborate? Is it much better than what we have here?”
Wiggling Octopus? OK. Sea Squirts? Not So Much
“Our first meal in Seoul was in a bossam alley, where every shop serves the same thing. If one place is full, you just go to the next. The table was dirty and sticky, but those kinds of things don’t necessarily indicate whether the food is going to be good or not. The pork belly was delicious, the kimchi was great, and we drank a lot of soju.
The Noryangjin Fish Market in Seoul, South Korea.
Photo by Andrew Rowat
The next day we ate in the Noryangjin fish market. You basically go through and pick out some fish and then take it to the back wall, where there are all these little restaurants. You hand them the fish, and they help you figure out what you want done to it and cook it up for you. Everyone is hounding you, come, bring your food over here. We went with a woman who prepared the fish a couple of ways—including live, which I didn’t want to eat. Through some sort of broken communication, we could tell she was saying, do you want this one raw? We were trying to ask, well, what’s the best way to have this? I don’t have that bro thing where I want to eat live fish that’s still wiggling.
However, we bought some little octopus, sannakji, which were everywhere, and when they serve them to you, they’re still moving around. And what? I wasn’t going to eat them? On the plate, a tentacle would stretch out and shrink and then stretch out and shrink, and you’d just pick it up and eat it. You dip them in sesame oil so they don’t stick to your throat, because the little suction cups are still active. It was really tasty. We also had a sea squirt, which is like a sea cucumber, and that was gross. Later, I read chef Roy Choi’s thoughts on sea squirts and thought, OK, I shouldn’t have eaten that raw.
After two nights in Seoul, we took the train south to Gwangju. It felt like the country—they don’t get tourists from the United States. There were signs everywhere advertising a kimchi festival. When we found it, there were what seemed like thousands of booths, all serving kimchi. There were only about eight ingredients but prepared 800 different ways. It was intense. After a while, you were thinking, the clam kimchi over there was pretty good, but, I don’t know, the clam one here’s pretty good, too. The fun part was that there were all these grandmothers out there rubbing chilies on kimchi and wrapping it up and serving it. It did feel touristy, but for Korean tourists.”
This Hanok (traditional home) village is located in Changpyeong, within the Damyang County, in South Korea.
Photo by Andrew Rowat
Eat Like a Monk. Or a Panda.
“We had one fancy meal in Gwangju. We wanted to try hanjeongsik, a traditional, ceremonial kind of feast, so we went to Myeong Seon Heon. The woman who ran it was a well-known Korean chef, but I don’t think you get at the heart of a city by eating at the fanciest restaurants. Outside of Gwangju, in Damyang, there’s a bamboo forest and a bamboo museum. We had lunch at Deokinkwan Restaurant, famous for its bamboo dishes. There were a lot of vegetables, bamboo, rice cooked in a bamboo sauce with jujube, gingko nut, and pine nuts. The meal was clean and light. It felt like we were having Buddhist food, simple like a monk would eat—in a great way.
The one meaty thing we had there was tteokgalbi, which was revelatory. It was short ribs, opened up, the bone removed, and the meat chopped by hand. Then they stuck the bone back in, so it was like a little hamburger kebob. When you first see it, you think, is it really a short rib? But there’s the bone right there. I think Koreans really want to chew on the bone. Korean barbecue is not my favorite thing in the world, but that was delicious and different, and we had never seen it done that way.”
Kisoondo Traditional Foods, in Changpyeong, South Korea. The matriarch of this operation, Soon Do Ki, prepares all of the traditional sauces from local organic ingredients. Pictured here workers start the process of creating doenjang (a soybean paste similar to miso) - a once a year activity that involves placing meju blocks into a machine that crushes and separates the blocks to then be put in clay pots along with a saltwater brine for fermentation. During the process doenjang separates out from ganjang, a dark sauce similar to soy.
Photo by Andrew Rowat
A Serious Pickle
“The best experience on the trip was an inadvertent visit to the sauce master in Changpyeong, Damyang. The man whose house we were staying in ended up being our guide because we had no other transportation. He was taking us to lunch, but on the way he took us by Kisoondo Traditional Foods, where this woman, Soon Do Ki, with her whole family helping her out, makes soy sauce, gochujang, and doenjang. She had chilies and soybeans fermenting together in big crocks outside. When we got there, she was washing barley for a barley honey. She was horrified that we saw her like that and went inside and put on her “real” clothes. She served us different kimchis she had made, and we had a tasting of new soy sauce, year-old soy sauce, and then really, really old soy sauce. It was so different from Japanese or Chinese soy sauce. The gochujang was aged and had this earthy, funky depth—I brought some back for the Camino kitchen, and we use it at staff meals. She also served us a pickle, just in soy sauce. It had been buried outside for over a year. She went out and got a piece of it and cut it very small. Her son was looking at us like, don’t fuck around, you’re about to receive something good. It was incredible, with subtle, deep flavor. It blew us all away.”
![Gajok Hwegwan, a well-known bibimbap restaurant, located in the birthplace of Bibimbap, Jeonju.
Pictured here is bibimbap along with several side dishes. Bibimbap literally means 'mixed rice' and is normally served hot in a bowl of warm rice, seasoned vegetables, gochujang, doenjang, and a raw egg.
Some of the side dishes pictured here include:
-side dishes ( see numbered picture attached)
1 kongnamulguk - bean sprouts soup
2 mumalaengi - seasoned dried radish
3 dureup - edible shoots of fatsia
4 danguinamul - Seasoned angelica gigas
5 Kimchi
6 Chwinamul (wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chwinamul
7 Arongjatae Gimjangachi - Gajokhwaegwan made dish (seasoned dried laver with soy sauce )
8 gamjajorim - seasoned boiled potato
9 Dorajijeongwa - cooked roots of balloon flowers
10 yeongeunjorim - seasoned lotus root
11 gyeranjjim - boiled eggs
12 supsanjeok - korean kebab
13 munamul - seasoned daikon leaves
14 hwangpomuk - yellow acorn jelly
15 myeolchibokeum - Stir-Fried anchovies
16 gochujjangachi - seasoned chilli
17 maneuljjong - seasoned garlic leaves
18 kongnamuljapchae - seasoned sprouts with potato noodle
19 Gulbijjangachi - Seasoned Dried yellow Corvina
20 Pagimchi - scallion kimchi
21 gochujorim - seasoned chill
(Source: Wikipedia)
Jeonju, written as 전주시 (Korean pronunciation: [tɕʌndʑu]) is a city in South Korea, and the capital of North Jeolla Province. It is an important tourist center famous for Korean food, historic buildings, sports activities and innovative festivals.
In May 2012, Jeonju was chosen as a Creative Cities for Gastronomy as part of UNESCO's Creative Cities Network. This honour recognize the city's traditional home cooking handed down through generations over thousands of years, its active public and private food research, a system of nurturing talented chefs, and its hosting of distinctive local food festivals
Jeonju bibimbap 전주비빔밥, a traditional local food, is well-known across South Korea. There are also several very popular vegetarian restaurants serving Jeonju style food and pine wine.](https://afar.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/4840a23/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1200x970+0+0/resize/1440x1164!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fafar-media-production-web.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fbrightspot%2F4f%2F74%2Fcc0828d4a54b3f20956f0dfe7148%2Foriginal-rowat-afar-20140412-1928-07.jpg)
Gajok Hwegwan, a well-known bibimbap restaurant, located in the birthplace of Bibimbap, Jeonju. Pictured here is bibimbap along with several side dishes. Bibimbap literally means ‘mixed rice’ and is normally served hot in a bowl of warm rice, seasoned vegetables, gochujang, doenjang, and a raw egg. Some of the side dishes pictured here include: -side dishes ( see numbered picture attached) 1 kongnamulguk - bean sprouts soup 2 mumalaengi - seasoned dried radish 3 dureup - edible shoots of fatsia 4 danguinamul - Seasoned angelica gigas 5 Kimchi 6 Chwinamul (wikipedia) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chwinamul 7 Arongjatae Gimjangachi - Gajokhwaegwan made dish (seasoned dried laver with soy sauce ) 8 gamjajorim - seasoned boiled potato 9 Dorajijeongwa - cooked roots of balloon flowers 10 yeongeunjorim - seasoned lotus root 11 gyeranjjim - boiled eggs 12 supsanjeok - korean kebab 13 munamul - seasoned daikon leaves 14 hwangpomuk - yellow acorn jelly 15 myeolchibokeum - Stir-Fried anchovies 16 gochujjangachi - seasoned chilli 17 maneuljjong - seasoned garlic leaves 18 kongnamuljapchae - seasoned sprouts with potato noodle 19 Gulbijjangachi - Seasoned Dried yellow Corvina 20 Pagimchi - scallion kimchi 21 gochujorim - seasoned chill (Source: Wikipedia) Jeonju, written as 전주시 (Korean pronunciation: [tɕʌndʑu]) is a city in South Korea, and the capital of North Jeolla Province. It is an important tourist center famous for Korean food, historic buildings, sports activities and innovative festivals. In May 2012, Jeonju was chosen as a Creative Cities for Gastronomy as part of UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network. This honour recognize the city’s traditional home cooking handed down through generations over thousands of years, its active public and private food research, a system of nurturing talented chefs, and its hosting of distinctive local food festivals Jeonju bibimbap 전주비빔밥, a traditional local food, is well-known across South Korea. There are also several very popular vegetarian restaurants serving Jeonju style food and pine wine.
Photo by Andrew Rowat
Where Bibimbap Was Born
“We had heard that Jeonju, about 50 miles north of Gwangju, was the birthplace of bibimbap. During the trip, we’d been having a hard time communicating with cab-drivers. Travel is so easy now—you can look on your computers and smartphones, and in many parts of the world everyone speaks English—but it’s not like that in Korea, which is awesome. We got into a cab with a driver who spoke no English, but when we said ‘Jeonju,’ he immediately looked up and said ‘Bibimbap?’ After he dropped us off in town, deciding which place to have bibimbap was a challenge. The one we randomly chose had this Soviet Union–era look to it. It felt desolate and quiet and made us think, is this really the right restaurant? But we sat down, and they kicked into gear and put plate after plate of stuff in front of us.
There were some mountain vegetables I didn’t recognize: rooty-, weedy-tasting things. They could have been foraged or cultivated. The herbs were especially good—that’s something I’m going to experiment with more in our restaurant. Even the bean sprouts had flavor. And the gochujang was good. I don’t eat much bibimbap at home. It’s just not very exciting. I think maybe it’s because of the imported gochujang, which can be sweet and cloying. This was a completely satisfying meal, by far the best bibimbap we’ve ever had. We left thinking, OK, that was the right choice.”
Seoul’s Gwangjang Market, known for is amazing food stalls and small restaurants. One of the (many) specialties of the market is bindaetteok, a Korean mung bean pancake. The pancake is what is pictured here as a tighter detail shot.
Photo by Andrew Rowat
Pancakepalooza
“Back in Seoul, we went looking for bindaetteok in the giant Gwangjang market in Seoul. Every street has a specialty—hardware, clothing, whatever. We went around this corner, and all of sudden, it was like a city block of pancakes. There were these big carousel-like machines grinding the mung beans, making it kind of dusty and smoky. People were bustling around grabbing seats in front of these little pancake places. It was chaos. We found a place that had a big line leading to it, and we thought, this is the one. We had a round of pancakes and drank makgeolli. That’s what everyone else was doing. Makgeolli and pancakes: it was weird meal. It’s hard to describe what was great about the pancakes. They weren’t spongy or heavy. Some had scallions in them, some didn’t. The funny part is, we were just about done with our pancakes and we thought, wow, that was really a great find! Then we got up to walk away and we saw a bigger line. We were a little bit tipsy and said, let’s do it again! And we did.”
