닭한마리

닭한마리 (dak-han-mari), literally translated means one chicken. It's actually a chicken soup with a whole chicken (don't worry, it's gutted and they took the head off) thrown in. Thursday night my friend took me to a place on one of those back alley labyrinths near Dongdaemun to find this restaurant that serves this. It doesn't seem like the sort of thing you can get at just any old place. On the way there we passed a boshintang restaurant.... I need to try that someday before I leave this country. If you don't know what it is, I'll let you figure it out for yourself, I don't want to cause any gag reflex for any of my readers unnecessarily.

When we went in and sat down the first thing they brought us was a big pot of broth and put it on the burner (lots of restaurants in Korea have a gas burner on the table because there are so many meals that cook right in front of you... think Galbi, Bulgogi, Shabu Shabu...etc). Then they brought over a whole, raw chicken. The waitress took scissors and skillfully cut it long ways and crossways and cut off the the wings and legs and threw everything into the pot. I wish I had a photo of that part, because that was probably the most impressive part of the meal. She also threw in some sort of chicken innard... I'm not sure if it was liver or kidney or what, but I don't think that's that strange... people in the US eat liver sometimes too.


As that boiled, they brought over a huge bowl of chili sauce and another bowl of... greens. I have no idea what this vegetable is, it sort of looks like really nice grass, but it tastes good. My friend made a mix for me with the chili sauce, minced garlic, some mustard and some unidentified oil. Then I threw in my greens and gobbled it up while I waited for our chicken to cook.

When our chicken was ready to eat, I found that it was rather difficult to eat. Since it was coming out of a soup, I wasn't really inclined to eat it with my fingers, but how else do you get chicken off the bone? This was my first attempt:


This turned out to be rather messy and unfruitful. So, i finally switched to scraping the chicken off the bone with my spoon and chopsticks, mixing it in my chili/garlic/ greens mixture and scooping it up in my spoon. Whatever, it tasted awesome anyway.


Then, after we ate all the chicken we could, we then threw some noodles in the pot. This sort of reminded me of Shabu Shabu. Just like in Shabu Shabu, when you finish your meat and veggies, they throw in the noodles. On a side note, I learned this week that not all noodles are the same. The word for noodle is 면 (myon... think ra-myon). But these noodles, while they are 면, they are a special kind of myon (wider) and so they are called 국수 (gooksoo). Anyway When the noodles were done cooking, I threw those into my chili/garlic/ greens mixture and gobbled those up too.

Anyway, I had fun trying a new and different Korean food. I suggest you go and try it!