In search of a grasshopper salad

Noryangjin, Seoul’s ‘friendly’ fish market

Seoul

The city of Seoul, South Korea, is a challenge for even its taxi drivers to navigate. It has expanded so quickly over the past 30 years that it has subsumed entire villages and farms, leaving many new streets without names. On a trip there a few weeks ago, knowledgeable restaurant-goers were to prove my best guides.

First there was Alex the Korean, who explained en route to Baru, opposite the city’s main Buddhist temple, that balance is as important as ingredients in the national diet. The ideal combination is 70 per cent carbohydrates, 20 per cent protein and 10 per cent fat – an example to many in the west.

Over 10 courses, our Buddhist dinner produced many delights: a salad with a spicy pine-nut dressing; vegetable pancakes; and sushi rice topped with slices of raw pine mushrooms. The absence of meat, fish, dairy and, of course, alcohol set me up well for a 4.30am start the following morning to visit Noryangjin, the city’s fish market – smaller but much friendlier than Tokyo’s famous Tsukiji market.

At 7am my next companions, Michael the Canadian interpreter and Paul the Australian chef, led me past a stall selling fish knives up a wooden staircase into The Cabin. With its whitewashed verandah, this restaurant would not look out of place on a New England beach. Its view, however, is of a subway station full of commuters.

Breakfast was a peppery soup made from fish bones topped with vegetables and chrysanthemum flowers and a local delicacy of diced, still wriggling, squid.

As these dishes arrived simultaneously, Paul, who oversees hundreds of chefs at the InterContinental Hotel, explained that the Korean style of sharing food can make some people feel uneasy. “At first, I think there’s a sense that it’s slightly unhygienic, but once you get used to it, it’s great,” he added, digging in.

When I asked Charles, an American journalist, for other recommendations, he simply smiled. “Restaurants move and reinvent themselves faster here than in any other place I know. But if you like fried oysters, plumper, fresher and far less expensive than in Europe, I know just the place.”

And so we set off for his favourite haunt, located, he said, in a rabbit warren of restaurants close to City Hall. But as we approached the street, he stopped in amazement. Not just the rabbit warren but the entire block had gone – all that remained was a hole in the ground. I took Charles’s arm and bought him a consoling bimimbap, a hot bowl of rice, vegetables and minced beef topped with a fried egg and fiery gochujang, or red chilli paste.

The next day, I found Jeon-Won, the home of the gracious Madame Moon Boon Sun. Jeon-Won means garden and, on the first-floor verandah, herbs, cabbage and pots of fermenting kimchi showed how little certain ingredients travel.

Trays of delicacies kept arriving at our low wooden table, where more than 30 small dishes were eventually deposited. These included a thin kimchi omelette; tender slices of octopus; diced lotus root with pine nuts; edible leaves for wrapping vegetables; tofu with red pepper; and an immaculately grilled mackerel.

For those who prefer Italian food, Madame Moon’s son runs La Campagna next door. It has four seats at a counter opposite the kitchen and is the smallest restaurant I have ever seen.

Modern Korean cooking, meanwhile, is best expressed at Poom and Jung Sik Dang. The former, run by chef/proprietor Young Hee Roh, has a stunning location and an elegantly integrated open kitchen, but I found several of her dishes unconvincing.

Jung Sik Dang was, however, an exciting experience, most memorably for a fried grasshopper salad; a dish of rice, anchovy and turnip; pork belly with pickled chili; and ginseng macaroons. Jung Sik Yim, the chef, has plans to open in New York. If the roots of exciting modern Korean cooking are to be nurtured successfully, I hope his passport is confiscated, forcing him to focus on one restaurant only.

nicholas.lander@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/lander

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Details

Jung Sik Dang, www.jungsikdang.com

Baru, www.baru.or.kr

The Cabin, 0082 02 812 6200

Poom, www.poomseoul.com

Jeon-Won, 0082 02 2278 3096