The Festival's Food Options

Where there is a festival, there has got to be food. We managed to find some of the best foods for festivals that we would like to see back in Canada and here are the top 5.
1. Chicken on a stick, taco-gui go-gi in Korean is definitely our favorite. We find it everywhere and there are several stands that are loyal to their daily spots and would know us by name if we spoke Korean. We have blogged about this before but look at the size of these ones. Wow! 52 cm of chicken goodness. Yummy! $1-$2 cnd.
2. Tornado Potato. We don't see this as often but everytime we find someone making these puppies we buy one. They have a spiny tool that cuts the potato in one big spiral then they impale it onto a stick and deep fry it until crispy then they shake off the excess oil and you get to dip it into salty flavoured seasonings like BBQ and cheddar. We have got to make these back home. $1 cnd.
3. Coconut juice stands. Angèle loves these and they are full of coconut juice and lasts quite a while for Angèle. Then we bring the coconut home and she eats the coconut after I break it up. $3 cnd.
4. Crab booths. We have seen several of these guys at big events and we haven't tried any since Angèle doesn't like seafood and I don't think I would like crab without the garlic butter. From what I've seen they don't get much tools to eat this with either.
5. Last but not least, pig roast. They only roast the sides of the pig and we didn't try any yet because we saw them cut the portions for people to buy and they have 50/50 meat and fat. It smells great when we walk by and if they only gave you the good meat we would totally buy some, but they don't...
6. Beer. You can buy beer at just about any booth that sells food or small convenience stores around the festival and you can get a good price if you look around. We were paying $1.50 cnd a can and you can walk around anywhere you want while drinking. The liquor laws are very relaxed here.

Korean BBQ

Angèle, Erin and I went to a Korean BBQ today. We didn't have much choice since a lot of places were closed for Lunar New Year but we finally found a place that was open and lucky for us they had a 'half sitting on the floor' area and a 'half sitting on chairs' area which was great. I don't like sitting on the floor because you have to take off your shoes and well, having my feet close to my face while I eat isn't my favorite thing.

What is a Korean BBQ?

They have a little BBQ in the middle of each table, some are charcoal and some are natural gas. Some have a BBQ grill and others have a hot plate type surface. I prefer the charcoal with the BBQ grill however it sucks when you drop a chopstick in the fire through the grill but you look around you to see if anyone saw then you shrug it off.

You have a choice of a few meats that you can see posted on the wall in the seated areas and they bring you several side dishes that you can either cook with, use as add ons when you eat or eat just as is. They usually just bring everything to your table and place as much meat as they can on the grill and you’re on your own to do the rest but because we were foreigners that looked lost the waitress helped us along by cutting our meat in small chunks for us.

How do you eat? Well, there is no clear separation of individual foods, we all share. You pick up your chop sticks and poke at whatever you want on the table and go nuts. Picture a bowl of coleslaw and everyone’s sharing out of the same bowl with chopsticks, no word of a lie. You can also make yourself a little lettuce wrap which goes like this: 1 piece of lettuce (red leaf or some minty weird leaf) and you take a piece of meat off the grill and dip it in whatever sauce you want that we all share and you place your piece of meat on your leaf, then you place the side dishes like onions or garlic slices that you grilled with the meat or raw and you place that on your leaf and then you roll your leaf up like a fajita and you eat it all at once. Very yummy.

The only thing I don't like very much about all this is they don't clean the meat very well. You get a lot of fat with your meat and it's sometimes hard find the actual meat.

The entire meal for all 3 of us and 2 bottles of beer cost $22cnd.

Fast Food

So, food. Angèle and I have tried several things and some are good, some are not. We have come up with a saying and it goes like this "That tastes like Korea" which loosely translates too that taste like that gross taste in the air you get when all the markets are up and running.

They have several kinds of restaurants in South Korea. They have the market style which is kind of like the Korean version of the "Street Meat" hot dog vendor back home but they sell Korean stuff. They have traditional Korean restaurants which are mostly Korean BBQs that you have to sit on the floor. We have seen some Western name brands like McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, TGI Friday's, Dunkin' Donuts and Subway and we have also seen some look 'a' likes that seem to be very much the same until you go in and look at the menu and notice that they put pickles on every pizza as it's melted in with the cheese. A plain cheese pizza also has pickles.

I have yet to try to eat at McDonald's since my favorite part is to wash it all down with a Super Large Diet Coke but they don't have diet pop in South Korea. I have found Coke light which seems very similar but not quite and they don't have it at McDonald's. We did eat at 1 fast food restaurant called Lotteria (I thought it was a store that sold lottery tickets until I went in) and we ordered a "Bulgogi set" AKA Cheese Burger Deal but it "tasted like Korea". I think it's the sauce they put on the burger so we will have to try another one sometime before we leave. The "set" was the size of a kids meal back home including the size of the pop and it cost $4 taxes in.

McDonald's appears to be similar to back home but one thing that stood out was that they have an option for a side of corn instead of the fries.

I will be posting on the other kinds of restaurants that we have experienced and the funnest has to be the Korean BBQ which I plan on eating at tonight and I will bring my camera. I think I may have gotten food poisoning there last time so we are going back to see if it was really that restaurant or just some bug. Luck favours the brave.