Alcohol is my culture!

Alcohol is my culture!

Over the summer, I spent time learning more about food and alcohol as part of my “learning more about the world” era. This semester, coursework and deadlines be damned, I kept treading along my quest to eat and drink well.

There was no concerted plan—just a guiding feeling that I wanted to keep trying new restaurants and bars. In the end, I ended up trying ~30 new places this semester.

Standouts include…

• The fluffiest, chewiest lox bagel I’ve ever had (@Apollo Bagels),
• heartwarming udon noodles from Raku,
• a delightful corn pastry from Lysee,
• and a scarily accurate Japanese cold noodle cocktail from Double Chicken Please

Underlying all this exploration, I also carved out time for a weekly pilgrimage to Cho Dang Gol. 😉

Random access memories (meals)

In the end, the common denominator I could all these places is ME: an upstart Korean American college student in her early 20’s, trying new restaurants based on her friends’ recommendations. As any recently converted foodie, I want to express some kind of individuality / good taste with my restaurant opinions.

So, how do the restaurants I visited + enjoyed really reflect back on who I am?

I think it has to do with whatever I have in common with the friend who recommended the place to me. Each recommendation itself comes from a story—Double Chicken Please came from the resident Gang Lab alcoholic, who broke up with an ex-girlfriend in college because she drank too much. Raku, from a summertime friend I’d gone clubbing with. Lysee, from a mentally unstable but brilliant robotics friend.

My best guess on who I am based on the food I like, is that I…

• Value “humor” - innovation and creativity in flavor combinations
• Find comfort in warm Korean flavors
• Appreciate drier, grain-forward pastries over puddings Which makes sense given that I grew up eating my immigrant mom’s cooking.

But also, when I think about how I ate the same pork grain bowl from Ban Ban Shop for 4 months straight, I wonder where my particular balance of exploration vs. exploitation lies.

Exploration vs. exploitation: DCP vs CDG

Over the summer, I had a conversation with a distant toxic acquaintance, who had revived a two-year-long silence to shit on a gastronomy-forward recipe I’d shared for being a sanitized and overly scientific way of approaching food. He argued that the goal of food and cooking should be to provide comfort, and that “Western cooking” lacks that.

Similarly, I think this argument touches on a similar point—how much should food and drink ‘explore’ and push the boundaries of flavor and texture beyond the scientific, as opposed to ‘exploiting’ and elevating existing ingredient combinations to perfection?

This dichotomy mirrors the difference between Cho Dang Gol vs. Double Chicken Please:

Double Chicken Please crafts drinks effusing the characteristic flavors of savory, solid foods (eg, “cold pizza,” “japanese cold noodles,” “key lime pie”) into still-tasty cocktails.

Cho Dang Gol’s tofu stews are hearty, classic, immensely flavorful, and insanely comforting: they feel like a warm hug.

In my opinion, both are good!

Pepero Day

I was walking back from orchestra rehearsal, feeling sentimental over distant-grown relationships. I realized it was 11/11 (Pepero Day!), and felt like re-investing in the people still in my life by buying all the Pepero I could find from Hmart.

I got three of my friends together to rank the flavors.

In our rankings, our personalities shone through.

• My nostalgia for strawberry pepero and love of the game
• Raghav’s commitment to science, overly precise numbers, and tinge of contrarianism
• Dan’s pretentious unpretentiousness and love for the exuberant
• Isaac’s straightforward unpretentiousness and honesty

In lieu of a more granular flavor analysis, we even came up with some superlatives for them.

It was a memorable night.

Takeaways

What have I learned from all my indulgence?

Food is a vehicle of culture

• Though I’ve historically preferred drier foods, being friends with a guy from Southern China has helped me learn to appreciate oily food—rich and flavorful foods

Food is a science and an art

• Being friends with a pretentiously unpretentious alcoholic has wisened me to the world of cocktail gastronomy - the art of recreating the essence of other flavor combinations within the morphology of an alcoholic drink

A change in perspective

Funnily enough, I used to view food as a purely frivolous endeavor which only obstructed me on my health journey.

Over the past year, I’ve redefined my relationship with food as being a vehicle for social connection through a representation of culture, while satisfying the human need for sustenance.

In the same way we put in effort for relationships, I want to gain a baseline working understanding of all the components of life, including food and drink.

• I predict the way to escalate my current engagement with food is to use what I’ve “consumed” to try and “create” (eg, through cooking).

Drinking and living?

Earlier in the summer, while I was in my “wanting to flow out my life through axioms” phase: I asked my dad for feedback on my “live truthfully” axiom, asking if he had any of his on. He shared that his would be “정신 차리고 살자.”

I asked him how drinking alcohol fits into that axiom, to which he replied:

“Alcohol cools down my brain that is always occupied by too many things. So, it helps sometimes.”