GogiGo: a somewhat surreal experience

I don't have any photos of last night's dinner, but I went out to GogiGo, a new, Korean-ish restaurant in Fredericksburg, with my buddy Mike, his wife, and their eldest daughter Rachael (my goddaughter). I was all prepared to try to banter with Korean staff in Korean, but as I should have expected, all the servers and hosts and other staffers were non-Koreans. Mike ordered a rather steeply priced ($31/person!), all-you-can-eat option for all of us; we had to select which meats we'd like to have, so Mike did pork and beef while Rachael did squid, which was sauced up and cut into calamari rings (no tentacles).

Our table was done in the Korean-resto style, i.e., the middle of the table held a round, heated griddle that used gas instead of the more typical and traditional lumps of charcoal (to be fair, some Korean restos in Korea use gas). The gas didn't burn quite as hot as it does in a Korean resto in Korea, I noticed, but the proteins cooked up just fine. The all-you-can-eat option came with a bowl of gonggi-bap (standard scoop of rice in a small, metal bowl; you can get seconds, and even thirds); Mike gave me a bibimbap-sized bowl, and while he cooked the meats, I transferred my gonggi-bap to the bigger bowl, went over to a "bibimbap station," and ringed my rice with assorted veggies. The bibimbap station was laid out like a salad bar, with most of the usual ingredients there, including sesame oil and liquidy gochujang (Korean-style chili sauce). The only weirdness I saw at the station was the inclusion of shredded lettuce (is this a thing in Korea with bibimbap? I don't think so) and shredded cabbage. I ignored those in favor of the more standard, familiar bibimbap items. Oh, yes: at no point did I ever find a fried egg, which is normally a bibimbap topper, sometimes being the only protein in an otherwise-vegetarian dish.*

The menu showed this wasn't a purely Korean restaurant, but rather a fusion place. Appetizers included such non-Korean items as spring rolls, mozzarella-cheese sticks, tempura-style calamari, etc. The entrées and à la carte selections included non-Korean novelties like "Hawaiian bulgogi" and teriyaki chicken, further confusing and conflating Korean and Japanese culture in people's minds.

To be fair, Korea does its fair share of attempts at fusion, too, and as I've said before on this blog, most of them are unsuccessful—either in terms of popularity or in terms of my own opinion. Just as I was sitting there in the resto noting how This is isn't Korean; that isn't Korean, I wouldn't be surprised if a Westerner were to come to Korea and be aghast at the way Western food is, even today, often misinterpreted in creative and uncreative ways. 

Well, you can't push the boundaries of food if you don't try, but that thin layer of success (e.g., budae-jjigae) sits on an ocean of failure (e.g., cheese ddeokbokgi and its cousins).

In all, GogiGo was a good experience. Since I prepped my own bowls of bibimbap, I knew they'd be good, and they were. Mike (in charge of the beef and pork) and Rachael (in charge of the squid) both cooked their proteins to perfection, and I piled the beef and pork onto my bibimbap creation. My blood sugar, which has been suffering for days, was at its worst this morning, but that was also partly because of a regular Dr. Pepper I'd had last night (some sort of strawberries-and-cream flavor that was a lot better than the awful blackberry one).

Fusion is a thing wherever you go in this postmodern world. Cultures that probably shouldn't be slammed together get slammed together in strange combinations, especially in the context of a third, surrounding culture. As I'd noted earlier, in the US, you can find Japanese-Korean restos as well as Indo-Pakistani, Indo-Nepali, Sino-Japanese... I can add Vietnamese-Thai and all sorts of other combinations. Korea's becoming just as pastiched, following America over the postmodernist cliff. This isn't inherently good or bad; syncretism is how it's always been, but along with the jumble, it's good to have the more traditional holdouts as well.

Would I recommend GogiGo as an "authentic" experience of Korean food? I can say that the food I ate was perfectly Korean, but the menu offerings contain enough non-Korean items (probably necessary for culinarily timid Americans) for me to hesitate on the question of authenticity. As for the more basic question—did it taste good?—well, yes. It did.

Some days from now, after I've fasted a while, I'll be chowing down on some "inauthentic" pizza. As an old priest-professor of mine once said, "It's all syncretism."

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*Let me clarify: bibimbap comes in a million different variations, so a lot of what I might think of as strange has doubtless been done somewhere. In other words, bibimbap, varied as it is, isn't inherently vegetarian; you can use marinated ground beef, or strips of marinated beef, or seafood, or whatever protein you desire. I'm sure some French-run resto has done a frou-frou bibimbap using a high-grade lobster topped with the best caviar. But my point is that even the simplest bibimbap, which would otherwise be vegetarian, will often have a fried egg on top. Of course, hardcore vegetarian bibimbap won't have the egg.