Seefood restaurant

I was working in Seoul, South Korea in the late 1990’s and by this time my first wife was with me.  One night, she decided that she would like to go to a seafood restaurant for dinner.  No problem – sounds great.  I love seafood and there are seafood restaurants all over Seoul.  So we decided to go out to one of the places near our apartment.

We found one that we had never been to before and we knew it was a seafood place as one of the walls to the street side served as an enormous aquarium and inside there were other various aquariums with typical aquarium entities: fish, squid, sea cucumbers, etc.   Based on the décor, I assumed that this was more of a traditional Korean seafood place and was really looking forward to having a nice meal.  

So, once we were seated, the waitress comes over and hands us the menus.  Yeeeaah….ok, here’s a bit of a problem.  The menus were only in Korean and my Korean ability at that time was…poor.  Like “very poor” and no matter how much I tried, I simply slaughtered the language and never progressed beyond the basics.  That is, I might have been able to say the word for “fish” (a rather general order in a seafood restaurant), but didn’t know the names of the varieties of fish, nor could I comprehend Korean script on the menu.  But hunger being a great motivator that it is, spurred on my determination to have a nice meal.  I mean, I was really looking forward to calamari and prawns, etc. with some ice cold beer.  So it was time to resort to hand gestures and pointing.

“I’ll have one of those” pointing to a fish in one aquarium “and “a couple of those”pointing to some others in another aquarium.  “Hey are those sea cucumbers?”  I asked the waitress as though she understood anything of what I’m saying.  Interestingly, as I sat with my arms swinging around like Robbie the Robot from “Lost in Space,” pointing to various aquatic entities that I wanted to sample was that every time I pointed and ordered something the waitress would ask me if I was positive that I really wanted it.

“I’ll have one of those…” pointing to a fish

“you sure?”

“huh?...uh...yes, yes…” ignoring her question “and what is that? Octopus? I love octopus! We’ll have one of those..”

“you sure?”

Mildly insulted “yes, yes, quite sure thank you…and we’d like to try one of those swimming in the corner there….”

“you sure?”

“of course I’m sure” trying not to sound too colonial about it, but the questioning was becoming rather offensive “in fact, we’ll take five of them!  What’s that down there?  Sea cucumbers? I’ve never tried that.  We’ll have that as well.”

“you sure?”

“Now look here.  I’m the client and your waitress! Now tell the chef our order.  Bali bali!”

By then, I had basically ordered an aquarium of food – most of which I probably didn’t want anyway, but was too insulted to take the order back.  “Am I sure?! HAH!” rolling my eyes and making snide remarks about the wait staff with my wife, I couldn’t imagine what exactly the problem was with ordering food. Perhaps we were the first foreign customers that they had and were trying to make sure we knew what we were doing – as if we didn’t know.  This wasn’t the first seafood restaurant I’d been to.

The waitress then returns at lightning speed with a bottle of soju (although I originally wanted a beer, I became so caught up in the ordering and noticed that everyone else in the place was drinking this, so why rock the boat?) and several small bowls of…something.  Each bowl had some sort of seafood delicacy in them, but it was presented in a manner that did not enable me to distinguish one fish from another. It was not served as sashimi or sushi, but chopped up and served in lovely little dishes with rice separately.  Very interesting, very quaint, but not very descriptive or helpful to the diner.

Well, while I was studying the sea cucumber wondering how to eat it and more importantly what it would taste like, my wife was occupied by the other bowls on the table.  Although, not completely accustomed to eating with chopsticks, she rather skillfully reaches to the center bowl to try the white/pinkish meat thereof and delicately places a piece in her mouth and…freezes stiff as a board.  Still poking and prodding the sea cucumber, I glance up and see that she is staring off into space in front of her, chopsticks still in hand, but motionless, turning pale as the blood drained from her face, with only her lower jaw moving from side to side…not chewing…just moving from side to side.  In fact, if she hadn’t been moving her jaw, I would have thought that she was poisoned on some sort of Japanese blowfish.

“What’s wrong? Does it taste bad?” I lean over asked in a hushed voice

She says nothing and only sits there with her jaw moving from left to right and now her right eye is beginning to twitch.

“Are you ok? What’s wrong with you? Are you choking?” I asked again.

Now with pursed lips, she sharply shook her head back and forth.  One eye opening in distressed anger while the other one twitching.  Her mouth was still closed, but her jaw began to move up and down as though she was trying to tell me something. 

Customers sitting closest to us slowly put down their chopsticks and began to watch with great curiosity; assumingly to make sure that my wife was indeed not choking.  Glancing back and forth between my wife and the customers, I hissed

“What the hell is wrong with you?  People are looking at us.  If you don’t like it, just drink some water.”

Her nose crinkled with heated eyes glaring at me and again not a word from her mouth, but I could hear her murmuring something.  She looked at the bowl and then and me with an expression that asked “what don’t you understand?”

“What? You don’t like what you tried? No problem.  Just spit it out into your napkin.”

As her eyes fluttered between rolling back in her head and frustrated exasperation at my inability to comprehend the situation, she violently shook her head “no” and her careened her head towards the bowl so much that the veins began to show in her neck, more and more patrons began to watch in beguiled amusement at my wife’s impromptu impression of an epileptic fit.

“You are such a child.” I harshly whispered.  Then sanctimoniously quoted what I believed to be some US State Department rule about tourism “We are guests in foreign country. We are representatives of our homelands! We must demonstrate our culture and be courteous to their ways and cuisine.”   Jabbing my index finger in the air “I shall demonstrate to you how to eat this” and plunged my chopsticks into the bowl. 

Looking around the restaurant at the patrons who were quietly watching us, I smiled and gave a debonair wink that combined “how you doin’?” with “I want demonstrate how much I appreciated the “ways of the orient” as a true connoisseur of the culinary arts” and as I pulled a long strip of the meat from the bowl and brought it to my mouth, out of the corner of my eye, I saw – almost in slow motion – that it was still moving like a worm dangling from a fishhook and for inexplicable reason – perhaps it was the momentum of my arm – I put the writhing “delicacy” in my mouth. 

It was octopus.  LIVE octopus.  Now, let me explain. When I pointed to all the fish in the aquarium, I foolishly assumed that it would be cooked to one degree or another OR that it would be prepared like sushi.  Instead, what they did was pull it out of the aquarium, clean it, chop it up and serve it.  Hmm…not quite the same as sushi.  Of course, it is equally important to remember that octopus have little suction cups on their tentacles, meaning that when one places it in one’s mouth the tentacle grabs hold of what it touches…for example…the inside of your cheek, or most commonly…wraps around your tongue making sure that you cannot swallow it.

Now as odd as it may seem, at that moment, while wrestling with our food, I was not forming an opinion on the natural survival instinct of the octopus and its suction cups.  No, not at all.  In fact, words alone cannot express the horror and panic that goes through your mind as your dinner surprises you and fights back, grabbing your tongue clinging for life as you try to swallow it and you are staring at a bowl of moving food.   As the real kick to this, you have voluntarily placed this entity into your own mouth, thus altering the dining experience as a whole.  

So as the two of us sat there in some sort of mild convulsions, the waitress come over to the table smiling at the sight of us…dying…and says

“drink soju”

Murmured voice “eh?” with one eyebrow up (“eh? What?”)

“drink soju”

Murmured voice with little shake of the head (“why?”)

“soju help”

Murmured voice and squinting the eyes (“What are you talking about?”)

“drink soju! Soju help!” she demanded

So we drank a shot of soju and I’ll be damned, it did exactly as she promised.  Soju helped. Having contact with alcohol, the muscle released its’ death grip on my tongue and allowed me to swallow it.  Hurrah!  Long live soju. 

As we sat there, relieved of the tongue grabbing dinner, I began to breathe normally again and thought about what to do next.  Looking around at the other patrons and their food, this is obviously the way it was supposed to be served.  So as the other dining patrons returned to their meals and conversations, I then began to contemplate my previous dining lecture about being respectful to other cultures, etc.   Staring at the bowl of still moving octopus, I began to think that it would offensive to just leave it there.  I mean, maybe it was really expensive and just to leave it on the table and walk away would be considered a dire insult.  “No, no we MUST eat it” I convinced myself.

“Would you care for some more?” I offered my wife

Putting her glass of water down and staring at me “I beg your pardon?”

“You should take some.  I think we should finish this so as not to offend.”

“WE?”

“Well…yes…you and I.”

“You’re joking”

“No, no…maybe it is a delicacy and will be really offensive to leave it here on the table.  I mean there is a lot of it here.  Who knew an octopus could be so big” I said jokingly still holding the bowl towards her.

“I’m not eating that and I do not care who it offends”

“Look, I know this is not what we wanted, but we ARE in a different country…..”

““It’s ALIVE you ignoramus! I almost gagged to death.”

 “oh come on!  You don’t want me to eat this alone, do you?”

“Do you speak English?” she lashed out, enunciating every word for my benefit she replied “I…am….not….eating….it”

Faced with various decisions, I began to quickly ponder my options.  First, perhaps offend the locals because of not wanting to eat a local specialty.  Second, offend the locals by creating a scene with my wife in a public place because she will not help me finish eating the live octopus.  Third just try to swallow my pride and good sense (or in this case, simply swallow my dinner) and eat the octopus alone.  Fourth, join my wife’s cultural defiance and leave the octopus.  *sigh  Option three it was.

Calling the waitress over.  “Excuse me miss.  I’m going to require a couple more bottles of soju and I think that we’ll skip dessert for today.  Thank you.”