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We were just ‘tagged’ by our Nashville friend Jennifer to list our five favorite restaurants in Korea. It’s a little difficult to do. Since there are SO MANY restaurants in every town in Korea, we seldom eat anywhere more than once or twice. I’ll do my best. Maybe Adam will have something to add later, but here’s my list.

1. Genghis Khan Mongolian Barbecue. This is the best restaurant on the English Village campus. I get 5 meal vouchers per week, and usually two of them are spent at GK each week. One meal voucher buys a “small” barbecue. This so-called small barbecue is almost too much food for Adam and me to share for dinner. We get a small bowl and can collect with metal tongs what we want in our dinner. We fill the bowl to brimming with fresh vegetables, press them down to fill in any air pockets, heap on more carrots, green onion, cabbage, sprouts, cucumber, thinly sliced beef, pork, chicken, and thick tofu. When we can no longer balance anything else on top of the precarious tower, we hand it over to the cook who dumps a massive handful of spaghetti noodles on top, at which point it all spills over onto the plate under the bowl. The cook scoops spicy barbecue sauce, lemon sauce, a canned fruit salad, and minced garlic atop it all. Then, it is all cooked together on a hot stone slab. Ohhh… my mouth is watering.

2. Tongildongsan Dubu Village. Dubu is the Korean word for tofu. Adam particularly loves this place which is down the road from the village. It’s a wonderful healthy feast. You can gorge yourself and still feel like you did something good for your body. You can eat for hours on more manifestations of tofu than you could ever imagine. Adam’s favorite is a soup that smells distinctly like stinky feet. I like the reaaaaally soft tofu served in a little log. It’s so soft that you have to eat with a spoon and then dip it in this yummy soy sauce mixture for perfection. I could eat a whole log of it myself. They also make kimchi that I actually enjoy.

3. Duck. This is another favorite restaurant down the road from the village. We ate my favorite Korean food, beef galbi, there several times before we realized that the restaurant is named Duck because they actually serve duck (we’re bright, I know). We went there with a whole group of my co-teachers, mostly Koreans, and we shared Duck’s specialty, a large stuffed duck. Duck’s duck has the most flavorful, earthy stuffing of vegetables and long-grain rice. Adam and I were scavenging every last grain of rice from the remains with our chopsticks. The flavor was so earthy and unique, we weren’t surprised when our friends said that the duck is slow cooked in some sort of mud… I didn’t really understand how. But it’s so delicious.

4. McDonald’s. Just kidding– seeing if you were reading. How about… Everest Indian/Nepalese Restaurant in Dongdaemun. We ate at Everest for the first time last night, but I can see many bright visits in our future. This wasn’t the same earth-shaking quality as our Indian cuisine encounter in Bangkok, but it was solid Indian food with the biggest, garlic-est naan ever. We devoured everything and licked the bowls clean. Most of Seoul’s Indian restaurants are wicked expensive, so it’s a relief to find good, affordable Indian food. The service was so great and the atmosphere so comfortable that we didn’t realize that we had been there almost four hours until the staff was sweeping around us.

5. Freevie’s in Ilsan. We’ve been there twice now for special celebrations with our English Village friends. It’s a massive buffet. It’s also really expensive, but come on. Freevie’s takes all of the foreigners’ favorite hard-to-find foods and puts them all together in top-notch quality. Fresh, made-to-order sushi, a pasta bar with traditional and adventurous options, taco fixin’s, pizza, steak fillets, chocolate fountain with fruit and marshmallows, sundae machine, cotton candy, rich chocolate mousse cake… mmm… They definitely win for the best concentration of desserts we have found in Seoul.

I’m fasting today. Can you tell? I got a little animated in those descriptions.

In keeping with the international theme, I hereby tag these five people to tell us their top five restaurants:

Daniel and Elizabeth, where are your favorite places to dine in Ethiopia?
Heather, what do you northern Canadians eat?
Scott and Sheryl, as you near the end of your year in Europe, can you identify the top 5 best restaurants at which you dined?
Shaun Groves, what sustenance provides you with the energy to keep on soft-rocking around America?
Melanie, you always say how incredible the restaurants are in New York City. Which five do you miss the most?

Buon Appetito.

-Jessica