a e r o K g Eatin Reports on a Culinary Renaissance In conversation with Graham Holliday Story by Jordan Redmond Photos courtesy of Publisher
58 www.groovekorea.com May 2017
FOOD & DRINK
A
lot of food books have been written about Korean food in recent years, most of them about how to make kimchi at home or glossy cookbooks from LA or NY-based Koreans. These books scantily engage a gigantic part of enjoying Korean food: eating it in Korea. The irreplaceable atmosphere of brusque service, heated floors, and and no nonsense decor, these things, as much as the food and ingredients themselves, make the Korean dining experience. And however much Korean food has traveled, you're not likely to get offal-crammed sundae gukbap or fiery chicken feet anywhere else quite like you would here. Travel author and journalist, Graham Holliday, appreciates the little things that are the composite soul of Korean food. Having lived in Jeolla-do 20 years ago as an English teacher, Holliday came back to Korea in 2015 for a three week whirlwind tour to discover what had become of the country and food he had so thoroughly enjoyed. The result is Eating Korea: Reports on a Culinary Renaissance out on Anthony Bourdain's food-book imprint, Ecco Books, as of mid-March. The changes that Holliday finds wallop him as much as would a deep whiff of cheonggukjang. The pretenseless Korea that he knew is barely recognizable, simple meals seemingly having been replaced by fruit pizzas and a more refined version of the food. As Holliday travels around the country, he tries to make sense of just how the country has changed by visiting one-dish hole-in-the-wall joints and through his conversations with Koreans of all-stripes: from educated younger people resentful of embarrassing food smells or loutish ajeossi, preservationists of traditional Korean food looking to elevate the cuisine by using the best possible ingredients, and older folks resigned to living in a country whose culture moves at lightspeed. The scope of Holliday's experience in the short time he spent in the country is amazing. The author is an acute observer; his eye for detail and the resulting powerful descriptions of people, place, and food are a real strong point of this book. Holliday's ability to paint a scene in minute detail might become cloying to some but those who have lived in Korea for any amount of time will revel in the familiar scenes that he sets. More than a nostalgia trip, Eating Korea is a fantastic food writing-cum-travelogue with strong dashes of social observation that manage to accurately portray that ever-moving target, South Korea.
Twenty years is a long time between visits. What was your main motivation in returning to Korea to write this book? Firstly, to eat. I really missed Korean food and Korean restaurants, the whole buzz, the people, the fun of it, the variety, the smells, the noise. Since I left Korea, I’ve eaten Korean food in Vietnam, Britain, France, Rwanda, Senegal and I've cooked it myself, but it simply isn’t the same. It’s not just the food, it’s the whole experience; the surroundings, the day to day of Korea going on all around you, you can recreate the taste of some of the food reasonably well elsewhere, but all these other things going on around the food are impossible to replicate outside of Korea and as a dining experience they count as much to me as the food itself. Secondly, when I lived in Iksan, I read a book called 'To Dream of Pigs’ by Clive Leatherdale. Over the years I’ve been surprised that no-one has written a follow up. As far as I know, there hasn't been a single English language travelogue about South Korea published by a major publisher since ‘To Dream of Pigs’. I can’t think of another developed country that has had so few traditional travelogue books written about it, there’s more on closed North Korea than the open South which I found utterly bizarre. 'Korea and Her Neighbours' by Isabella Bird-Bishop was published in 1898, 'Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles' by Simon Winchester came out in 1988 and then Leatherdale’s book which dates from 1994. Fortunately for me, Anthony and everyone at Ecco Books agreed Korea needed a fresh coat of paint.