Makolri

Last night my neighbor Jeon and I went to a fusion restaurant that is along my extremely short walk to work.  It doesn't really matter what it was called--and I couldn't tell you, if you asked.  Jeon was the guy who stood me up in a past post, but as it turns out, it was due to a mistake in language and not him being a jerk.  Not a jerk, and a wonderful Korean culture specialist at that!  We ate a cajun chicken salad--a dish that I have seen before on Korean menus--which was breaded chicken on a bed of greens with a honey mustard sauce for the chicken and a creamy raspberry vinaigrette for the salad.  I CANNOT justify calling this common Korean dish "cajun," but I will call it one of my favorite American comfort foods here in Korea.  We also shared a meal that looked and tasted much like General Tso's chicken.  Jeon said it was a traditional Korean dish that is sweetened with yeod, a sugar made in Korea, but made from something other than cane or sweet potatoes.  He said the dish was made popular during the Japanese occupation of Korea. I've been looking for something similar in flavor to that here for a long time.  Delicious.  In the two pictures on the top, we are drinking rice wine called makolri (MAH-koel-ri).  As you can see, it's a milky white color, which shocked me when it came out of the tin kettle.  When I hear "wine," I think of Western wine that's transparent yellow or red in color, and when I think of "rice wine," I think of clear Japanese sake.  The flavor is great; it has a light fizz and is very refreshing with no strong alcohol burn (unlike sake).  After one sip, I knew what I wanted to buy my family and friends back home: makolri.  But Jeon let me know that makolri is a Korea exclusive because it decays very quickly and needs to be kept cold continuously.  Maybe I can't make it into a souvenir, but I do enjoy that my experience has been special.  

(Please forgive the rotten formatting.)  The restaurant had old posters that were interesting, most featured children.  One has children tying up what looks like a general or maybe government leader with a length of rope and looking cheery, another with a man with a stack of paper currency on scale and children stuffing money into a piggy bank.  Another appears to worn children not to gorge themselves on candy, picturing a hunched over silhouette of a child grasping his stomach while devils holding a fork and knife look tormentingly at him.