This will be a fairly epic post. I will post names of food items and possibly where they were eaten. But, in several cases, I don’t know the name of the place. It was a busy month. 

This is the octopus festival of mid-March near Seocheon on the West Sea. I really liked the lady’s hands who was heating up the dried fish. Also, the bugs are silkworm larvae, and very popular in Korea.

This is classic Korean BBQ. It’s samgyeopsal and moksal, basically thick, fancy bacon. As well as some really tasty kimchi.

This is some cheap bar food (tofu, kimchi stew, dumpling soup) to match the milky rice wine seen in the golden bowls. Yes, the tofu is blurry because it shook like Jello.

These are some delicious winter soups. The red one is a majorly spicy chicken and onion affair, and the darker one is duck with lots of green onion. Plenty of side dishes as always.

This is Jordana (looking beautiful) and me (perpetually underdressed) at a fairly classy sake restaurant. We ordered the set menu of a delicately delicious sake, tofu salad, mixed croquettes, seared tuna and odang soup. Odang soup is just fish cake in a variety of shapes. “What’s this hot dog looking thing? What’s this pretty pink square? What’s inside this little edible bag? What’s this brown chunk?” The answer is always, unfailingly…fish cake.

This is a late lunch with Jordana’s family at a traditional Korean restaurant.

This is kalguksu, hand cut noodles with nice dumplings in a salty, healthy broth.

This is tonkatsu, a fried pork cutlet, with all the comfortable feelings of America inside. The set came with the never disappointing Japanese miso ramen soup.

This is a restaurant specializing in maemil. It’s buckwheat. It’s exceptionally healthy, as you can see from the healthy signs in the background. It’s gluten free. And, most importantly it’s wildly flavorful. We ordered the cold noodles, Korean pancake with seafood and mandu. Love it!

For some Western food, we start at Vatos Urban Tacos, (Itaewon, exit 1) most certainly famous at this point and deservedly so. We ate the queso appetizer, fish, shrimp and barbacoa tacos, as well as a chicken quesadilla. Go here, recommended.

Here we have my favorite chicken in Korea. Kkanbu Chicken serves up a hefty plate of fried chicken tenders for 17,000 won and it’s all good.

And last is a strange sounding item, but decidedly dynamic. It’s called chuah-tang. It’s a soup made of ground up tiny river eels. That ground eel broth is seasoned with some special powder and green vegetables, add in some noodles and rice, and you have an amazing cure-all. It’s famous for being a potent pre-cursor for males. I suppose ingesting all that eel power makes you swim like one too.

I’m including this picture at the end because I want the reader to know you can’t win ’em all. Usually, as mentioned above, I like eel. But this particular restaurant didn’t do a great eel fry. Chewy and fishy and unappetizing, we struggled through this dish.