“What do you want for dinner? There are lots of restaurants around here.”
“How about just eating in the room? With some wine,” my daughter said, smiling.
We were talking in our hotel room in Seoul. We came to the city together and stayed the night.
“Wine?”
I laughed and started searching on my phone.
“There’s an Italian restaurant right across the street that serves wine. Want to go?”
“Let’s have sashimi,” she said.
I looked around on the map.
“Oh, there’s a big grocery store really close by. Why don’t we go see what they have? We could get some sashimi or sushi, and maybe a bottle of white wine. I think white would go better with the fish than red.”
“That sounds good.”
We walked about ten minutes to the grocery store.
We bought some sashimi, sushi, a small piece of cheese, and a bottle of white wine. There were more expensive bottles, but this one felt right for us. It cost less than five dollars.
We also bought a bag of ice. I didn’t want to drink the wine at room temperature.
Back at the hotel, I poured the ice into the ice bucket and put the bottle in.
A little later, I opened it and took a sip.
It was light and clean, and surprisingly good with the fish.
“Ah, this is just the right temperature.”
I told my daughter to take the chair.
“What about you?”
There was only one.
“I’m fine. You know I like eating standing up at the kitchen island at home.”
She sat in the chair. I sat on the edge of the bed for a while, then stood up again, eating slowly.
A piece of sashimi.
A piece of sushi.
A sip of wine.
We took our time tasting everything.
“This wine was such a good choice. It goes really well with the fish.”
“It does. It’s really good.”
My daughter dipped the sashimi in the cho-gochujang that came with it and the sushi in soy sauce. I tried one piece of sashimi with the cho-gochujang, then ate the rest with soy sauce.
When I was working as a reporter, I once attended a long lunch in Italy. I remember being surprised that a different wine was paired with each course.
But I liked this better.
Simpler. Not too much.
Sometimes we said a few words to each other. Sometimes we just ate.
We poured a little wine at a time.
Two small pours were enough.
There was still wine left in the bottle.
“Should we keep it?” she asked.
“It’s okay. We can leave it.”
Later, we went out for a short walk. There was a quiet path near the hotel.
We walked slowly, looked around, then came back.
She went to bed.
I opened my laptop and wrote for a while.
Then I slept.
Deeply.
A Four-Course Lunch
“What do you think about fine dining?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never tried it. What if it’s disappointing?”
My daughter had tried to book a newly opened Italian restaurant by a famous chef, but reservations opened only twice a month and disappeared almost immediately. So she suggested another chef’s restaurant that was easier to book.
I thought for a moment.
“At that price, I think it’s worth trying.”
She made the reservation, and we took the KTX to Seoul.
We walked past luxury stores in Gangnam, following the map on my phone. When we looked up at what seemed to be the right building, we saw a sign telling us to come inside and take the elevator.
The lighting inside the restaurant was soft. Several tables were already occupied. A server showed us to our seats, and the first thing that arrived was a neatly rolled towel.
“Oh, it’s warm,” my daughter said.
I wiped my hands with mine and smiled.
We had already read a few blog posts about the restaurant, so we knew what we wanted. We ordered the four-course lunch.
Bread came first with extra virgin olive oil.
We dipped the warm bread into the oil and tasted it.
“Oh, the olive oil is good. I don’t even need balsamic vinegar. I should try this at home,” I said.
We took photos, tasted the food, and talked a little. As we finished each course, the next plate arrived at just the right pace. Nothing felt rushed.
For the appetizer, my daughter ordered the lasagne. Only one lasagne could be ordered per table, so I chose the truffle sformato. I already knew what lasagne tasted like. I wanted to try something I had never had before.
“Oh, this is good.”
My eyes widened.
It was my first time tasting truffle. The truffle, mushrooms, and sabayon came together in a way that was rich but not heavy. I often cooked king oyster mushrooms at home, but here they tasted completely different.
My daughter was happy with her lasagne. We each enjoyed our own dish.
For the pasta course, she chose the vongole and I chose the ragu. The server explained that the vongole, one of the restaurant’s signature dishes, was made with extra virgin olive oil, garlic, and clams, without any other seasoning.
Well, there’s salt in the water for the pasta. And the clams have their own saltiness.
I wasn’t particularly curious about the vongole.
But I really liked my bolognese ragu with Reggiano.
“I like that the portions aren’t big. I get just enough to really taste everything.”
For the main course, we both had lamb.
It was called Lamb Chop Steak on the menu, although what came on the plate was a piece of meat without the rib bone.
What I noticed most, though, was the plate. It was a square white plate, but every time I tried to cut the meat, it rocked against the table.
Later, my daughter said, “Your lamb is better. This seemed almost rare, not medium.”
“You could have asked them to cook it a little more,” I said. “The lamb was pretty ordinary. I still don’t think I’ve had lamb that I like better than mine.”
“What I liked more was the mashed potato that came with it. How did they get that skin so thin and crispy?”
The crispy skin had impressed me more than the lamb itself.
The last course stayed with me even after we left the restaurant.
Citrus brûlée.
I had it with a hot Americano.
“I loved that sweet, crunchy caramelized top. I think I’ve had something like this before.”
“Remember? When I was in middle school, after my exams, you wanted to have a course meal, so we went to that expensive restaurant. We had this for dessert.”
“Oh, you’re right. How could I forget that?”
We started remembering other restaurants we’d been to back then. There was a small restaurant in a white building and another one nearby. We’d even gone back to that first restaurant with the family after it moved to a bigger place.
We looked it up on the map. It was still open.
“Oh, they’re still open. But I don’t really feel like going back,” I said.
“I thought fine dining in Seoul would feel more formal. But people were talking and eating pretty casually. It felt like a regular restaurant.”
“Yeah. They just came to eat,” my daughter said.
“When we lived in Seoul, we never thought of coming to a place like this. Now that we’ve moved away, we’ve come all the way back just to try it.”
We laughed as we walked to catch the bus.
Makchang and Red Wine
“How about some makchang and red wine after golf?”
“Oh, sounds good.”
One Saturday afternoon last year, after we’d moved back to Daegu, my husband and I played a round of screen golf for about two hours at a place near our home. Afterward, we parked in our apartment complex and walked to a nearby makchang restaurant.
We took a table by the window in a quiet corner. There weren’t many customers.
I took out the wine glasses we’d brought from home and a bottle of red wine I’d cooled to a nice temperature.
“Let me open it,” my husband said.
He wanted to practice using the corkscrew.
“I’m better at it, though. But if you want to, go ahead.”
We were laughing as he opened the bottle when the elderly owner came over with some side dishes and raw makchang.
“Oh, it’s lovely to see a couple enjoying wine together,” he said.
“We should really be buying drinks from you,” my husband replied. “But you don’t even charge us corkage. That’s very kind of you.”
“Don’t worry about that. Just relax and enjoy yourselves.”
We took our time grilling the makchang and drinking our wine.
“The makchang here is really good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It really is.”
It had been hard to find makchang like this during our five and a half years in Seoul, so I was happy to find a place serving it so close to home. The food was simply seasoned, reminding me of a small countryside restaurant.
We talked about all sorts of things, sometimes seriously, sometimes laughing, as we slowly enjoyed our wine. It reminded me a little of our dates before we got married.
The minimum first order was three portions of makchang, so that’s what we started with. But as we ate, I began to feel that I wanted a little more.
“Shall we get two more portions?”
I ordered another two.
By the time we’d nearly finished the makchang, my husband said he wanted some ramen to finish his meal.
“I don’t really feel like ramen. Could we have one ramen and a buchujeon, please?”
I was curious about the Korean chive pancake, so I ordered one for myself.
“One bottle of wine between the two of us is just right,” my husband said. “Any more than that wouldn’t be so good.”
I nodded.
We walked home feeling good. I didn’t feel particularly affected by the wine, and I was comfortably full. It had been a lovely day.
After a warm bath, I went to bed.
Then my stomach suddenly started rumbling.
I got up and went to the bathroom.
Did I eat too much?
I had diarrhea.
After a while, I went back to sleep, only to wake up again and return to the bathroom.
More diarrhea.
I was beginning to feel drained. I took some digestive enzymes, and the diarrhea stopped.
But my sleep had already been interrupted, and I didn’t feel very good the next day.
Back in my journalism days, this wouldn’t have seemed like much food. Maybe my stomach has changed.
Even after that night, we continued going to the restaurant about once a month.
“We should open that bottle of wine in the trunk soon,” my husband would sometimes say, and we’d head to the restaurant.
The funny thing was that our orders gradually changed.
We started out ordering five portions of makchang. Later, we switched to three portions of makchang and some dwit-gogi, another cut of pork. Eventually, even that felt like too much, so we started ordering just two portions of makchang and one of dwit-gogi, and that was enough.
My husband used to want ramen to finish every meal there. But one evening, the kitchen had already closed by the time he thought of ordering it.
“Oh, that’s fine,” he said.
As we left without having ramen, he remarked that it actually felt better that way.
We could enjoy food we’d missed while living in Seoul, and the bill for the food was often around 30,000 won. We would laugh at how little it cost. We could also bring whatever wine we felt like drinking without paying a corkage fee.
Perhaps that was why we liked the place so much.
But gradually, the time between our visits grew longer. Neither of us suggested going there for makchang and wine as often as before. These days, the idea hardly comes up at all.
There’s been a bottle of red wine sitting at home for months.
Neither of us seems particularly interested in opening it.
