Dinner with Korean Guy

My friend Young Oh, popularly known as the Korean Guy in our household, came back from a month-long visit to Asia on Monday morning at 1:30 AM.  He called me Monday after to say that we should have dinner soon, so I said how about Wednesday?

I drove in to Hopkiton this afternoon, and met him at the parking lot at work.  We decided to go to the Westboro Korean restaurant.  This is one of my favorite restaurants, so here we are.

Young had just came back from a visit to Korea and China.  He spent a week visiting Huang Loong in China.  This is a mountain region at the Tibetan border.  The mountain ridge is about 4400 meters high.  You take a cable car to go up to mid way in the mountains, and then decide to walk up or down the hills from there.  Along the way, you will see a serious of water pools that are crystal clear cascading down the hill. Here is a link to YouTube if you are interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR662TEQ860
Young has taken a lot of pictures and he was showing it to me from his iPad.  We got so lost in the pictures we forgot to order our food. Young is a frequent customer of this restaurant and a Korean, so he can get away with it.  I had to stop him finally and told him to order our food, so the poor waitress do not have to come back again.  She got the last laugh, because she also joined us in looking at the pictures, and forgot to bring out the appetizers, so when the food was ready, everything came out at once: the two soups, fried fish, barbeque beef ribs, the beef wrap, and the 9 appetizers, all showed up at once.

This pork belly soup with (hammerhead) Japanese mushrooms and tofu is big enough for two.  I don't see any pork belly, but the tofu and mushroom is very nice.  The soup is made from bean paste, and have a very tasty bean flavor.  We, actually he, because he did all the ordering, also ordered another soup, which you will see later.

My favorite is this fried fish on a sizzling plate.  On it are a few pieces of Korean BBQ beef ribs as well.  This is something extra he asked the restaurant to throw in.  Usually it is just the fish, but the fish alone would have been enough.  There is nothing like a plain pan fried or grilled fish, slightly salted and nothing else, to bring out the clean fresh flavor of a good fish.  We use our chop sticks to carve out a big chunk of meat from the fish, the pull out the entire bone, exposing the layer of meat from the underside of the fish.  There were a lot of good eating meat.
This fish reminded me of a time when Paula and I had lunch at the Vietnamese restaurant in Fall River.  We ordered a fried fish with lettuce for wrap.  It is very similar to this fish.  We peeled out the meat, wraped it in lettuce, and that made a delicious fish wrap.  Very yummy.
I don't know what the Koreans put on the BBQ, but the beef ribs always smell so good.  And taste good too.

The picture didn't do justice to this plate of barbequed shredded beef.  It was delicious when wrapped in lettuce leaves, or just eat with rice.  This is a very popular Korean dish.

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This big bowl of fish is the Alghoo Meghoon Tang, Monk fish soup.  It look similar to the pork belly soup, but tastes entirely different.  It is fishy and spicy, and every ingredient in it is very very fresh.  And spicy. The wooden box hides a burner. The bowl of fish soup comes out bubbling hot.

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I am surrounded by food and great conversation. What a wonderful meal.

One last thing, I have to show the lettuce for the shredded BBQ beef. They are long, fresh, and nicely cold.  I do love this dish.