It is finally spring in South Korea and the weather is beautiful – not too chilly and not too hot, just perfectly warm the way I like it. In other words, the weather is like Berkeley weather! After a long and cold winter, I definitely feel like I just awoke from hibernation.
So when I was watching TV with my partner’s family and we saw a spotlight on 꽃비빔밥 (flower bibimbap), my eyes lit up. On TV was a beautiful bowlful of flowers that looked so beautiful! Right away I turned to my partner and asked him to go together. So off we headed to the city of Asan to the Asan Botanical Garden (아산 세계 꼭식물관), a 40 minute drive from my partner’s home in Pyeongtaek.
Turns out the restaurant that was featured is part of a botanical garden, so we enjoyed the beautiful display of flowers on the way to our final destination: FOOD.
Is it weird to feel so hungry while looking at flowers? We were very hungry when we arrived, so while looking at the beautiful flowers and enjoying the sights and smells, I was also simultaneously thinking about the flowers that I would get to munch on at the end of the garden!
Well…after about 5 greenhouses of lovely flowers, we finally reached our destination.
Behold…flower bibimbap (꽃비빔밥), priced at 8,000W (about ~$8).
The flowers were so pretty, but I thought that there would be more (the TV program that we watched showed what seemed to be an opposite ratio of flowers to lettuce). Underneath the flowers are typical bibimbap ingredients: lettuce, seasoned spinach, mushrooms, and roots. The rice came on the side as well as seaweed soup (미역국 miyeok guk) and radish kimchi (깍두기 kkakdugi). Gochujang (고추장) also came in the typical squeeze bottle.
Overall, the dish was delicious but tasted a bit too much like ordinary bibimbap. The flowers, on their own, however had a very unique taste. Citrusy, bitter, a little sweet, and crunchy, they were super delightful to eat on their own. However, when mixed with all of the other bibimbap ingredients, they were lost and it was difficult to really distinguish this dish from a bibimbap without flowers. Maybe because we weren’t TV hosts, we didn’t get the special treatment of having a ton of flowers! I think this dish would have been more unique and balanced if the amount of lettuce had been reduced by 50% and the amount of flowers increased by 50% so that the unique taste of the flowers would stand out a lot more, especially next to such assertive (and other deliciously crunchy) ingredients as spinach, roots, mushrooms, and of course, the spicy gochujang.
It was a great experience though trying flower bibimbap! The beautiful flowers and sitting and eating inside the greenhouse with all of the wonderful smells really marked the opening of spring for me.
And of course, the visual beauty of the bibimbap was worth the trip for me!
More information about the greenhouse can be found here.
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