Earlier this month I visited Seoul, South Korea, for the first time. Here's a look at something I ate from my one-week trip. One of my favorite foods in the world are Asian dumplings in all shapes and forms. After hearing my plea to eat mandu, Korean dumplings, my friend Rob brought me and a friend to Koong in Insadong. That the front window looked onto a dumpling-making station seemed like a good sign. Another potentially good sign was the prominent photograph of a old woman and her granddaughter outside of the restaurant, if I am to equate "grandmother" with "tasty home-style cuisine." The story behind the restaurant is that this woman fled from North Korea to South Korea during... More

From May 8 to May 12 I visited Seoul for the first time, mostly to eat as much food as I could and learn about a cuisine I knew little about. A food stand in Myeongdong, Seoul. Judging from the popularity of street food (and restaurants in general) in Seoul, I'm under the impression that Seoulites are hungry all the time, or they really like eating. Which means, aside from not knowing how to speak Korean, I fit right in. The variety of food was overwhelming, making it impossible to tackle in its entirety. If you want grilled meats, sweet potato french fries, dried fish, rice cakes, taco-like concoctions, boiled silkworm pupae*, waffles, or cream puffs while roaming around the... More

From May 8 to May 12 I visited Seoul for the first time, mostly to eat as much food as I could and learn about a cuisine I knew little about. When Dan of food blog Seoul Eats told me he was going to take me to a restaurant that specialized in dumpling soup, I envisioned mandu. But this dish featured the dough-only sort of dumplings, like dumpling skins without the filling, which turned out to be even better than my initial idea. For my introduction to sujebi, a noodle soup dish where the noodles are chunks of roughly torn dough, Dan brought me to Samcheong-dong Sujebi, a popular old-school sujebi joint sporting a light teal color scheme that, I... More

From May 8 to May 12 I visited Seoul for the first time, mostly to eat as much food as I could and learn about a cuisine I knew little about. I've never been a doughnut lover, which seems odd considering that I have a penchant for fried things, sweet things, and doughy things. Why does the combination of the three fail to fill me with explosive joy? Did I have a traumatic doughnut experience as a child? (Actually, I sort of did; my early doughnut memories involve unappealingly dense, dry cake doughnuts from a local gourmet food shop.) Or maybe it's because I live in New York City, which to me isn't a particularly good doughnut town. But when... More

If you think of rice cakes as only being round or block-shaped, you're...right about most of them. But at the 7th International Tteok Fair in Seoul, South Korea, there were more! So many more! For the rice cake competition, contestants made elaborate dishes that, unfortunately, only the judges could eat, but they provided plenty of eye-candy for the rest of us. Since there were too many for me to include in my overview of the fair, I separated my favorites into this gallery. Many of the tteok dishes were make to look like other things. This South Korean flag, for one.... More

On May 8 and 9, the Institute of Traditional Korean Food converted the massive aT Center in Seoul into Rice Cake Central for the 7th International Tteok (Rice Cake) Fair. While a sea of chefs competed to make the best tteok dish, hoards of kids made sweet red bean-filled tteok and watched rice pounding demonstrations. Down one side of the hall, companies for tteok manufacturing equipment put their gleaming wares on display; on the other side, vendors gave out fresh samples of tteok and sold their products. Hands-on activities included learning how to make tteok and tasting different rice wines. For the non-interactive part, there were displays featuring tteok-related relics, examples of rice cakes from around the world, and... More

From May 8 to May 12 I visited Seoul for the first time, mostly to eat as much food as I could and learn about a cuisine I knew little about. On my first night in an attempt to battle jetlag and give me my first gutbusting taste of food on South Korean soil, Dan of food blog Seoul Eats and his friends, including fellow food bloggers Joe McPherson of ZenKimchi and the walking Korean food encyclopedia that is Fat Man Seoul, took me out on a three-eatery night. You know you're with the right crowd when you eat at three places in a row. Dan's friend Rob recommended the following eatery to us, and we're all better for it.... More