something slightly novel

There's a Chinese restaurant a few hundred yards from where I now live. It doesn't deliver, but it's got a nice, family-friendly atmosphere. I looked on the menu and saw something unconventional: budae-jjambbong, which sounded like jjambbong from which the seafood had been replaced by budae-jjigae meats: hot dog, spam, and hamburger. I was mostly right: what came out had no hamburger in it, but it had everything else, including the standard, chewy jjambbong noodles. Here's a pic:


Jjambbong is a spicy, salty (very salty) soup with a fatty red broth. It's normally got vegetables in it—mushrooms, green onions, regular onions, carrots, squash, cabbage, etc., as well as bits of seafood, such as squid tentacles, mussels, and maybe some shrimp. Interestingly, the broth in tonight's budae-jjambbong tasted exactly like regular jjambbong broth, which makes me wonder whether the budae meats were cooked separately and then added in. Either that, or the meats did cook in this broth, and my palate simply wasn't sophisticated enough to register the difference. That would be sad: you'd think the budae meats would profoundly alter the broth's flavor, making it into something more turf than surf.

Either way, this was a somewhat novel experience, and I'll be going back to that restaurant again for more standard Sino-Korean fare.


_