Eating Korea: Reports on a Culinary Renaissance

by Graham Holliday

Overview

An energetic, fast-paced trip through the rapidly changing world of Korean cuisine by the author of Eating Viet Nam

Journalist, world traveler, and avid eater Graham Holliday has sampled some of the most exotic and intriguing cuisines in countries around the globe. However, none has intrigued him more or stayed with him longer than Korea’s. On a pilgrimage to Korea to unearth the real food eaten by locals, Holliday discovers a country of contradictions, a quickly developing modern society that hasn’t decided whether to shed or embrace its culinary roots. Devotees still make and consume traditional dishes in tiny holes-in-the-wall even as the phenomenon of Korean people televising themselves eating (mukbang) spreads ever more widely.

Amid a changing culture that’s simultaneously trying to preserve what’s best about traditional Korean food while opening itself to a panoply of global influences, that’s balancing new and old, tradition and reinvention, the real and the artificial, Holliday seeks out the most delicious dishes in the most authentic settings-even if he has to prowl in back alleys to find them and convince reluctant restaurant owners that he can handle their unusual flavors. Holliday samples soondae (or blood sausage); beef barbeque; bibimbap; Korean black goat; wheat noodles in bottomless, steaming bowls; and the ubiquitous kimchi, discovering the exquisite, the inventive and, sometimes, the downright strange.

Animated by Graham Holliday’s warm, engaging voice, Eating Korea is a vibrant tour through one the world’s most fascinating cultures and cuisines.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062400765
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/14/2017
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Graham Holliday grew up in Rugby, England, and moved to Iksan, South Korea, in 1996 to teach English. He is the author of Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table and the blog noodlepie about street food in Sài Gòn. He has written for the Guardian (UK), the New York Times Magazine, the South China Morning Post, Time, BBC, CNN, and many other media outlets.

Table of Contents

1 The Chance to Begin Again 1

2 This Is Special 13

3 Do Koreans Dream of Electric Kimchi? 21

4 Neo-Korea 31

5 Seolleongtang 39

6 1.5 Dak Galbi 45

7 Buckwheat Pilgrimage 61

8 The Whole Head of a Cow 79

9 It's Our Time Now 91

10 Low-rise Leftover 119

11 Slow Korea 127

12 The Big Kim 133

13 In the Hamlet of Yucheon-ri 139

14 Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun 147

15 Only K-pop Sounds Happy 155

16 I Don't Know 161

17 With You for Life 169

18 We're the Last Generation 181

19 The Afterlife 205

20 It's All in the Water 221

21 A Wormhole in Myeongdong 259

22 We're Not Aliens 267

23 Like Mom's Food 275

24 The Pyongyang Connection 281

25 An Alleyway in Seoul 291

26 Long Deserted, the Dreams 297

Acknowledgments 305

Notes 307

Editorial Reviews

12/05/2016
After two decades of teaching English in South Korea, journalist Holliday returned on a mission to reeducate himself about the country’s rapidly evolving cuisine. This lovingly written food pilgrimage starts by asking, “What is Korean food?” Holliday leads his reader on an obsessive quest to find “the honest guts of Korean food, of the country,” in dishes such as kimchi, bibimbap, blackened goat, and hagfish (somewhat like eel). Holliday effectively conjures the family-run restaurants of remote South Korean towns, and the vendors and markets that support them. He celebrates “a way of eating that is very Korean” even as it disappears due to less home cooking and the rapid disintegration of the traditional family unit. When discussing mok-bang (Koreans who broadcast themselves while eating, for others to watch), one of Holliday’s dining companions has this insight into her society: “We developed so fast, in such a short period, we don’t actually enjoy ourselves apart from drinking and eating.” Holliday captures these uniquely Korean sights, smells and flavors with appetizing detail, and along the way finds his true prize: a hard-won understanding of the nation’s changing culture. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

Holliday captures these uniquely Korean sights, smells and flavors with appetizing detail, and along the way finds his true prize: a hard-won understanding of the nation’s changing culture.” — Publishers Weekly

“Holliday has a flair for bringing unique locations and provisions to life, taking readers with him into crowded restaurants and markets, creating an exciting work for food lovers interested in a combination of culinary history, cultural analysis, and travel. ” — Library Journal

From the Publisher

03/01/2017
Holliday has a flair for bringing unique locations and provisions to life, taking readers with him into crowded restaurants and markets, creating an exciting work for food lovers interested in a combination of culinary history, cultural analysis, and travel.--Melissa Stoeger, Deerfield P.L., IL

Library Journal

2016-11-20
A British journalist who lived in Korea in the 1990s chronicles his return in 2015, when he found the culinary landscape transformed, mostly for the better.It didn't seem promising when a friend took Holliday (Eating Viet Nam, 2015) to a small restaurant in downtown Seoul and invited him to eat pizza flavored with fruitcake, proclaiming, "this is the future." While teaching in Korea 20 years earlier, the author fell in love with its down-home, superspicy food; fruitcake pizza was not his idea of a good development. However, he was excited by the new pride Koreans take in their cuisine, no longer embarrassed that it is "too smelly, too spicy." So Holliday decided to travel around the country sampling its quintessential dishes. He fears—as he notes a few too many times—that traditional Korean food is disappearing like the old hanok bungalows bulldozed to make way for skyscrapers. On the contrary, he discovered, the new cooks take pride in reclaiming old recipes. As the narrative moves out of Seoul into the provinces, the author makes palpable the "glorious stench" and mouth-burning tastes of a highly spiced cuisine, from kimchi to bibimbap, a one-bowl festival of flavors that is a specialty of the city of Jeonju. Like many food books, the parade of one meal after another can become wearying, and Holliday's lingering descriptions of textures and substances that are bizarre by Western standards ("it was as if a urinal cake were now lodged inside me") are not for the squeamish. But his cook's tour also includes interesting observations on Korea's rapidly changing society: the increasing assertiveness of its once-subservient women counterpoised against the rage for plastic surgery, its "quickly-quickly" culture contrasted with the mysterious concept of han, a state of soul combining "irresolvable pain [and] unrealizable dreams" that Koreans regard as a uniquely national quality. The navel-gazing about the pluses and minuses of modernization is expendable, but Holliday provides a lively snapshot of an ancient culture in transition.

Kirkus Reviews