On Korean Chicken Stew and white dress shirts.

I’ll eat anything.

I mostly eat to live, and I love to live. On a recent visit to Cheonan, I had dinner with some colleagues. We chose chicken stew (dakdoritang) from a small, local Korean style restaurant: 촌동네 (or Chon dong ne). By ‘Korean style,’ I mean you sit on the floor at your table. This is normally not a problem even at 189cm tall, but at the moment, I have patella tendonitis in the right knee.

The restaurant is hidden away. It has maybe 4 “rooms” that are separate .. we’ll call them huts as they are not connected. Three of the four rooms have just one table each and can comfortably seat 4 to 6 Koreans, or in our case, 2 Koreans and 1 relatively large Yoruba man. The main building has 4 or 5 tables. You have to call ahead and choose your stew flavor. When you show up, the table is already setup with side dishes and your main stew is on the stove. It is Korean Hot Pot.

You get some rice and an assortment of side dishes. Of course, there was Korean Salt. Some call it Kimchi as it is present at every meal.

I was not able to document as it was right after work and I only had the work camera:

On day 2 of the trip I headed out after work for dinner with some team members. We stayed around the Cheonan Shilla Stay hotel. We explored around the hotel. To the North is a red light district. Apparently typical in South Korea. Two blocks North West and there were some local options for food. I say options for food instead of outright restaurants on purpose. First, this was not a business district per se. Secondly, there were more hourly and themed hotels than options for food. And to top things off, there were 4 types of food: Korean BBQ, Fried Chicken, Korean Hot Pot and Chinese food. There was a Subway and a Starbucks for fun. There was no way we were doing those.

After circling a few times, we picked one only because it actually had a few customers in it. For a Friday evening around dinner time, we were surprised the eateries were not busy. Many had no customers. It could be that the clientele mostly used the eateries after some .. entertainment. It was 3 of us: 2 Taiwanese and me. None of us speak Korean, so we went in and pointed to what one of the other tables was eating. It was Chicken Stew. I thought “again?” They hadn’t had any this time, so we sat down and waited. Here is the dish.

This time, Murphy’s law won and my white shirt did not survive the inevitable splatter from tearing at the chicken. I would eat chicken stew again, just maybe not the next trip.

If you want to dabble, I found an authentic looking recipe.