 I never expected to eat Italian food while staying in Seoul, but according to my friend, it is one of the more popular cuisines here. Since she is a vegetarian, my friend also said that she likes eating Italian food while living in Korea because most of it is vegetarian-friendly. While Primo Bacio Baci was friendly towards vegetarians, the server was definitely not friendly towards hungry eaters! The story is actually pretty funny. My friend and I were definitely hungry, but as a food writer/blogger, I also like to order a lot of food just to have the opportunity to try different items across the menu. And with a restaurant like Primo Bacio Baci (the location in the linked blog post is Hongdae, but the one my friend and I ate it is located in Myeondong, a popular tourist shopping area), where I am not sure when I will be able to return again, I definitely wanted to try a lot of their menu! Well…apparently this type of ordering doesn’t go over too well in this restaurant. My friend and I each ordered an entree and then we decided to try […]
Continue reading Eating in Seoul: Italian Food in Myeondong
 None of the secondi struck our fancy, but we did order a substantial number of dishes. So substantial that instead of ordering by the names, I curled my index finger and thumb into a square bracket and pointed on the menu “we’ll take these four and these four, and the potato, and the asparagus please.” That was 10 out of 25 “dishes” on the menu, if olives and salads could count as dishes at all. Three years ago, I had a bite of pork belly sandwich from Corso. I remember nothing of it, except that it was memorably good. I vowed to come back, but my cravings are always either rice noodle or pancakes (although every time I get pancakes, their texture is gravely disappointing), so for these three years, the vow stayed as a vow and didn’t happen. I kept hearing from multiple sources near and far about how good Corso was, though, so my confidence for this Italian restaurant increased. When I picked Corso for dinner last Friday, I didn’t expect the restaurant to wow us, but I felt confident that the meal would be […]
Continue reading Corso
 Sometimes you just have to cast away all manners and enjoy a day in town like a tourist. After a few cups at Teance, Kristen and I were famished. As student I’ve gone lunch-less almost daily without problems, but drinking oolong without lunch is definitely the quickest way to wake up the hungry beast in you. We planned on gorging down pancakes at Bette’s across the street but we missed it by 6 minutes (why on earth do they close at 2:30 on a Friday?), so we dashed back to the other side of the street to Zut with exclamation mark and chose an appetizer and two entrees before the waitress could ask what kind of drinks we wanted. This, in our book, was record fast. However, despite our effort, the food didn’t come out fast enough. On a normal day, we would say the appetizer indeed got out in a really reasonable time, but one thumb-sized stuffed squid plus our extreme tea-induced hunger plus the lack of bread commonly served at Western restaurants really brought out the best of us: we stared longingly in the direction […]
Continue reading December, 3 pm – Zut!
 The 7-year-old Antica Osteria is much too young to be one of “the nurseries of our legislators”, but it sure feels like one: warm brick walls, dark wood work, an old house nested in the green, sleepy residential area northwest of Rice University, and a patronage mainly composed of old white men. The smell of books might have been replaced by the smell of pasta and cheese (this place was previously a bookstore), but Chef Velio Deplano and his partner Ray Memari have kept Antica Osteria in that hidden, rustic, peaceful feeling of a bookstore. The gentle orange light made me excited like a drifting sailor seeing a lighthouse. Normal bread and butter, not bread, vinegar and oil, accompanied our post-ordering conversation, followed by some airy garlic bread. A tiny voice in some little corner in my mind whispered that the garlic bread was waiting for the salad to travel down the pipe, but who could resist such beautiful orange color. We made sure that the garlic bread’s presence on the table was as fleeting as its texture. 😉 The insalata campagnola was great by itself anyway. […]
Continue reading Rustic Italian in the old tavern
 Jen‘s been pushing me to push this post out of the drafts, just as I’ve been pushing her to publish her very first post on Where’s the Seitan?, her blooming, Chicago-based vegan food blog. Her lively, conversational writing draws you in, just as Jen herself. 🙂 When she reaches a million views per month, I hope she’ll still like to share a meal and talks about movies with the humble me. During lunch break on Tuesday, after a fantastic plate of fresh fruits and cucumbers at the cafeteria (if I eat at St. John cafeteria long enough I’d turn into a fruitarian), we could hardly wait until dinner to eat something real, so we dived into Yelp and Google Maps in search of a “good but inexpensive” place (Jen’s request) closed enough to the bus stop. Coins were tossed, rock-paper-scissor was played, phone calls were made, decisions were revised, and a reservation was confirmed: 7:15 pm at Andiamo. Our group has diversity: one strict vegan, one vegetarian who loves goat cheese, one omnivore who is allergic to all dairy except butter, one omnivore who doesn’t like […]
Continue reading Andiamo buonissimo and Jen’s new start
 In Santa Fe, a student-friendly 15-dollar 3-mile cab ride can bring you to a student-sophisticated 15-dollar 3-course prix fixe lunch. It’s just a matter of trusting your cab driver. We were too lazy to read the maps downtown or to plan a lunch spot, sorta in the picky mood for good food in a refined atmosphere, and hungry. We blankly browsed through the recommended list given to us when the conference started, but everything looked oddly the same: just black ink. It wouldn’t hurt, so we asked our taxi driver. At first, she mentioned a couple of Mexican fares, but Bumble Bee’s burrito was still fresh in our mouth mind from the night before. Then she brought up Il Piatto, a cozy resto italiano a few blocks away from the buzzing Plaza. Her sister likes to go there. So did we. The 15-dollar prix fixe lunch must be the draw-in factor of Il Piatto, but its patronage crowd remains the middle-aged-and-overs, who can nonchalantly drown the Wednesday afternoon sun in their wine glass, gleefully talk about their family for hours without worrying about their family, that […]
Continue reading For some fine Italian plates
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