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Koreans I meet for the first time tend to draw all their questions from the same well. What they ask starts out basic \u2014 why I came to Korea, what kind of work I do, how did I become interested in Korea in the first place \u2014 and then gets more culturally revealing. Having asked how long I\u2019ve lived here, for instance, they often follow up with, \u201cUntil when will you live here?\u201d, I question I wouldn\u2019t even imagine asking a recent arrival in America. When the subject turns to matters of the table, as in this food-centric society it always does, they almost invariably ask not \u201cDo you like Korean food?\u201d but \u201cCan you eat Korean food?\u201d \u2014 a matter not of taste, they imply, but ability.<\/p>\n
If Korean food is indeed a challenge, Graham Holliday can certainly rise to it, as extensively demonstrated in the new Eating Korea: Reports on a Culinary Renaissance<\/em>. This eating-driven travelogue, which comes branded as \u201can Anthony Bourdain book,\u201d has something of the swagger (a word now associated with that wisecracking, peripatetic celebrity chef with an admittedly wearying frequency) that name suggests. Holliday likens eating Korean soups to \u201centering a boxing ring. Red pepper arrived as a right hook, garlic a blow to the torso.\u201d The stir-fried chicken dish dak galbk<\/em> is \u201ca violence, a mess, a mistake that works.\u201d A soup, \u201cthick, fiery,\u201d and \u201cbood-red,\u201d drips \u201cdelicious violence.\u201d\u00a0 He observes his order of live hagfish as they \u201cconvulsed violently as they sizzled on the grill.\u201d<\/p>\n
Of his most gruesome dinner he writes that \u201covaries, intestines, blood, cartilage, guts, and stomach smiled up at me like Carrie on prom night,\u201d but elsewhere Korean food proves equally suited to metaphors of concupiscence as to those of carnage: a strong tofu dish is a \u201cnuns and whores slutty swingers\u2019 night,\u201d a famous version of the rice-and-vegetable dish bibimbap<\/em> a \u201cnipple-tassle-wearing, cigarette-holder-flicking glamour puss.\u201d After all that, a \u201changover stew with clotted cow\u2019s blood\u201d strikes him as \u201can attractive-sounding proposition.\u201d This language brings to mind Korea\u2019s explosion onto the international cinema scene around the turn of the century, when Western distributors pitched Korean film, not quite accurately, as the next big source of the sex- and violence-saturated Asian \u201cextreme.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n