On our 10th wedding anniversary we got off to a excellent start by going for lunch at a steakhouse that didn't open until 5pm. So we walked around the corner to this cheeky little Korean joint and had lunch there. I should be more honest and say that we tried to have lunch there. It was open, so that wasn't an issue and I really like Koreans because they don't take any shit from anybody. In one of his awesomely true and funny books the late PJ O'Rourke calls them 'the Irish of Asia' meaning I take it, that they're pretty tough and name lots of their sons Patrick or something.
We went in and sat down, whereupon we noted the table had a large stainless steel 'thing' embedded into it with knobs and controls. We're smart, so we concluded this stainless steel thing could be a BBQ, but more likely some kind of rudimentary satellite up link device that simultaneously cooks meat and tracks North Korean missiles. Of course, if it was such a device, it would only get used as a BBQ because there's no need to track missiles that simply explode on the launch pad or just kind of make a flaccid wind noise before slowly falling over, then exploding and killing off the year's stick and fungus harvest, thus leaving the North Koreans stickless and fungusless for another year.
When the waitress came over I told her it was our 10th anniversary and by her awkward smile it was clear she had no English. But we pushed on and ordered by pointing to the numbers on the menu. After what we thought were starters, but what might have been candles or Star Wars figurines, the waitress brought over a metal basket full of red hot burning coals. Then she leaned in and took the cover off the sat-nav and placed the coals in the desk. She then put a kind of hot plate over the scorching hot coals, fired up the gas and walked off. My wife looked at me with that kind of look - you know the one - where she looks so worried that you feel guilty enough to consider jumping out of the window confident that everything will be fine as long as you break the fall with your Nasal Dorsum.
So for the main course it was a sirloin steak for me and ribs for my wife. But then the waitress brought over all the ingredients: a whole iceberg lettuce in a bowl with whole raw carrots, a salad, some sauces in little bowls, the raw meat, a pair o' tongs, a huge pair of scissors with bright orange handles and what became known as the 'mystery dish' which consisted of some stringy red stuff mixed with unidentified white disks of mystery goodness. The waitress then said "Enjoy your meal." in practiced English and walked off again. I looked at my wife and said, "What do we do now?" and she said something really weird, she said: "Hopefully just wait."
While I sat there trying to decipher what exactly is meant by the phrase: 'hopefully just wait', we did indeed wait, but alas there was no hope. We waited for the food to cook itself and so yes, my wife's admittedly cryptic utterance was at least being partially fulfilled. But it was equally awkward because it was one of those restaurants where the waitress stands sentry-like only a few metres from where you're eating. Only you're not eating - she's standing sentry-like watching you while you have a panic attack as your eyebrows are being burned off. The panic is directly linked to the fact that you've come to a restaurant where you have to cook your own meal at a desk. A desk that might also be giving you superficial burns as you chew your Luke Skywalker and 'hopefully just wait'.
We sat there staring into the hot coals with the panic all over our faces. But the human face is a map of emotions and this map is universal, so I was confident the sentry, despite the cultural gap, wouldn't interpret our faces as 'people of European heritage having the time of their lives'. When she came over and started cutting strips of meat off the ribs and placing them onto the hotplate, I was once again reminded that the real universal language isn't love, it's facial expressions and ours were saying 'Holy fucknuckle, what the hell am I gonna do now?' I asked her what to do with the rest of the food and she smiled and said something I didn't understand. This was stressful because out of politeness I didn't want to insist on knowing whether in Korea it was normal to - I don't know - place an iceberg lettuce into a fiery cauldron of hot coals and burning gas? But I wasn't only stressing about the lettuce, most of the other ingredients were pretty intimidating in their rawness as well.
The waitress left again and there we were, putting food on things they shouldn't be put on, dipping the wrong things in the wrong sauces, wrapping whole carrots in lettuce and eating them with our hands because there was nothing else we could think to do with them. I thought about my cross-cultural training at university - what would be the equivalent? What could help me understand how our waitress was feeling as she stood close by and watched us destroy 1000 years of fine cuisine? I pictured a Korean couple on their honeymoon, buying meat pies at a beachside shop in Australia. They casually sit down down at a table, take out the pies and then rub them into each other's necks.
The waitress came back two more times - only to replace the hotplates because we were burning the food so badly the dining room was filling with smoke.
Turns out lettuce doesn't respond well to a hot wok either.
Koreans are polite, but we could tell they were laughing on the inside. And as we left, I'm sure I heard an entirely justified cacophony of polite Korean tittering.
