Korean Style Beef
Seeing how the Vietnamese
kitchen interprets tough chewy chunks of beef with recipes supposedly
from other lands is always a feast for the senses. While downtown with a
friend on the hunt for the world’s tackiest souvenir, a brief shower of
rain just about gave us the world’s biggest soaking. We ducked into
Parksons Department Store to wait out this storm with no signs of
immediately relenting.
Rather than sitting around staring at the
rain from the cosmetics department by the door, we headed up the
escalators to the food court. Why not put the time to good use and make
a meal out of this? Besides, that window of opportunity for a proper
street food meal was just about to close on us and we didn’t want to go
hungry. And not to be mean here or anything, but it is quite amusing to
watch people step on and off a department store escalator who are not
quite used to this lazy means of floor to floor conveyence. Oh the
little things that entertain me.
Standing boldly front and center in that
food court is a Vietnamese joint advertising Chinese food with a Korean
beef item, and of course I could not pass up such fusion cuisine. The
wall mounted pictures all smacked of mall food court selections quite at
home in Des Moines or Dallas. Yes, this was indeed going to be a most
interesting taste explosion.
Even before my first bite, I knew what to
expect since this is not my first time to the Vietnamese food rodeo.
Of course the beef (I assume it was cow) was tough beyond belief. That
poor cow. It gave its life so we could enjoy succulent slabs of its
muscle, but this chewy stuff made a mockery of that animal’s untimely
demise.
Block of Rice
As I chewed and chewed and chewed and
then chewed some more, I got to thinking where have I tasted this
slightly sweet, slightly vinegary, slightly soy flavor before? This
sure was quite distinct but something I’ve definitely tasted before.
Yes, that’s it…Potato chips. You read correctly…Potato chips. The
Alaska king crab flavor ones to be exact…Identical. Well, at least with
the chips they are crunchy, chewable and digestible.
The sauce was great smeared all over the
mound of rice and of course onions are hard to screw up. Try as I might
though, I just couldn’t muster the energy needed to properly eat that
beef. That’s ok though. We had set out on a mission to find tacky
souvenirs. We may not have found what we initially intended, but at
least we got a memorable yet tacky “Korean” style souvenir lunch out of
it.
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