{"id":4644,"date":"2019-03-10T22:11:39","date_gmt":"2019-03-11T05:11:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4644"},"modified":"2019-03-10T22:11:39","modified_gmt":"2019-03-11T05:11:39","slug":"korea-blog-fried-chickens-central-role-in-a-tv-drama-a-police-comedy-and-korean-culture-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=4644","title":{"rendered":"Korea Blog: Fried Chicken\u2019s Central Role in a TV Drama, a Police Comedy, and Korean Culture Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDid you come because of the movie?\u201d said a middle-aged man waiting a few places in front of me in line for fried chicken. He didn\u2019t ask me, but a nearby family of four or five, and they had indeed come because of the movie, as had I. That movie, Lee Byeong-heon\u2019s\u00a0Extreme Job<\/em>\u00a0(\uadf9\ud55c\uc9c1\uc5c5), racked up more than 10 million ticket sales about two weeks after it opened in Korea January, a fairly staggering success in this country of 50 million people, especially for a comedy. The story of a bumbling team of detectives who stake out the headquarters of a drug-running operation by buying a chicken shop right across the street, it has made a fad of an unusual kind of fried chicken, one prepared with a marinade normally used for galbi, the beef short-rib dish available in Korean restaurants the world over.<\/p>

Specifically, it has made a fad of galbi-marinade fried chicken available at the chicken shop I went to: Nammun Tongdak on the tourist-destination \u201cChicken Street\u201d in Suwon, a large suburb about twenty miles from Seoul. Though it doesn\u2019t have roots as deep as some of the other occupants of Chicken Street, its owners can claim to have put the dish on its menu two years ago, though they dropped it from the menu when it proved to be a slow seller, only bringing it back as soon as\u00a0Extreme Job<\/em>\u00a0instilled in the public a jones for it, or at least an awareness of it. The movie\u2019s main characters start using the recipe out of desperation: none of them have any experience frying chicken, so they have to make do with the culinary knowledge one of them picked up working at his family\u2019s Suwon barbecue restaurant.<\/p>

The hybrid dish immediately becomes a social-media sensation, and life has, to a degree, imitated art: even on a Monday afternoon, Nammun Tongdak had a line out the door and both floors filled with determined eaters. Though the taste of the chicken proved worth the trip \u2014 the Coca-Cola in the marinade gives it a metallic edge, though not an unpleasant one \u2014 I may never make another, not because of anything unpleasant about that particular chicken shop at all, but because there are so many to choose from, not just on Suwon\u2019s Chicken Street but more or less everywhere in Korea. Known not by the Korean word for chicken used in other dishes but with the loanword\u00a0chikin,\u00a0<\/em>fried chicken is, as any number of expat food bloggers might put it, not just a food in Korea but a way of life, a dish automatically chosen for so many gathering of friends, classmates, or co-workers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Read the whole thing at the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cDid you come because of the movie?\u201d said a middle-aged man waiting a few places in front of me in line for fried chicken. He didn\u2019t ask me, but a nearby family of four or five, and they had indeed come because of the movie, as had I. That movie, Lee Byeong-heon\u2019s\u00a0Extreme Job\u00a0(\uadf9\ud55c\uc9c1\uc5c5), racked up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4644"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4646,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4644\/revisions\/4646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}