08. 30. LUNCH

a super supreme pizza from god knows where

Or I’d have known if I’d paid any attention at all, but I was in my room doing something while my brother ordered the pizza. I’m not trying to be vague, but honestly I’m sure I was doing something besides staring out the window or spinning in my spinny chair. I just can’t remember. Eh, it was probably ONTD or rewatching early episodes of Flying Circus. Anyway we like getting the super supreme pizza because most pizza places have something of that name and it usually tastes the same. I’m at least sometimes willing to look up the menu online to see if there is something more appetizing, but my father and my brother are all about either delegating the duty of talking to a salesperson or just getting whatever the super supreme might be. I also hate talking to salespeople, I’ll have you know. I just figure that they won’t even remember me no matter how big a fool I accidentally make of myself, and even if they do, I won’t see them again, and even if they do, what are they going to do about it, huh? Yeah. Anyway I remember that I had to leave for the translation seminar, so I stuffed a couple slices in, inhaled, brushed my teeth, then sped out the door. Still I was half an hour late, but aren’t I always.

08. 29. DINNER

shrimp pesto pizza

The same Pizza Hut as last time with the garlic gorgonzola pizza, with the same company. It’s just that the Pizza Hut is very near the entrance to the mall and at least you know you’re not taking any wild chances with the quality of your food. Which is very important because otherwise you end up at a buckwheat noodle place where they serve the worst excuse for sushi you have ever seen. At any rate, I am in a much better mood right now because I CAN COME HOME FOR WINTER BREAK. This is amazing. Instead of nine months, all I have to spend away is around four at the most. And I’ll be home for Christmas, and for the New Year, and I can shop for winter clothes, and see it snow, and have winter foods, and I was this close to crying myself to sleep tonight but I’m ecstatic now. Six to seven more years until I’m out of school, but if I can come back like this I think I can do it. It’s a lot more lax in grad school, so maybe then I can be home for Thanksgiving too, and get stuck in traffic again and buy Asian pears and dried persimmons, and maybe I can be back for the Lunar New Year, more getting stuck in traffic and New Year foods and I can pay my little nieces and nephews for bowing — am I too old to get money for that now? — and I guess it can only get better. I hope so.

a green tea latte from Caffe Pascucci

And then we didn’t want to go home so we sat at one of the three Caffe Pascuccis at the mall (who knows why they have three, but then again you know how it is with a ridiculous number of Starbucks establishments everywhere you go, so it’s like that only better because Caffe Pascucci is dearer to my heart) and we drank. I’ve never actually had coffee there (I’ve discovered that coffee is one of the few things that have a very high probability of getting my stomach upset) (actually I don’t know what the other things are, in that case) so I’m not too sure about the authenticity of the coffee that they brew, but the green tea stuff they make is pretty good, so. Then again green tea makes the world a better place always.

08. 20. LUNCH

a Pizza Hut nonalcoholic sangria

These are actually pretty decent. The fruit slices are terribly sour (and I don’t mean to be dryly continental when I say that — they actually are terrible in how sour they are) and the liquid is a bit more layered than I’d like, but overall it’s nice and sweet and fruity. Besides you never end up finishing the drink so there is certainly enough of it to be worth the money. I was at the mall again with a friend, catching The Dark Knight for the second time. People saying “um so tdk is cool you guys but don’t take your girlfriend okay if you are on a date with her then go see wall-e instead” offends me. Wow, I just realized why I don’t have a boyfriend. It’s because I like all the wrong movies. Insight! Psh, as though it were that fixable a problem. Anyway, I did like Wall-E, but TDK is pretty damned amazing. But I’m going to be honest here and say that I nearly failed to make it through my second watching. It was just as good, and many, many things were clearer, but the entire thing is so enervating and from Dent and Dawes getting captured on, it’s just one long soul-sucking spiral of GLOOM. Which is the way it’s supposed to be, and it’s very effective in that you are completely exhausted by the end of it. Or at least I was. I feel kind of bad that I only got in three watching of Red Cliffs, though, if I got in two for TDK.

garlic gorgonzola pizza

The lemon honey dipping sauce that comes with this is terribly sweet. But overall I am liking this new “fresh gourmet” menu that they’ve got going on, the size could be a tad larger for it to be satisfying but it’s thin and it’s really good. Now all they need to do is unify the two different styles of ordering pizza, so that you can order whatever the hell you want on your pizza or ask for garlic and gorgonzola without sounding like a stupid twat. And you can do both, without having to change continents in between! Revolutionary! Seriously people, how difficult can it possibly be to offer both ways. In closing, I would like to state that I tagged this post also under “alcohol” because there isn’t a separate tag for drinks and really, that sangria should have had wine in it.

08. 14. DINNER

sauteed mussels

This was the actual birthday dinner I had with the family. Thursday evening was a solo recital for the recorder, courtesy of a son of a friend of my mother’s (I prefer longer longwinded interpersonal descriptions) — wait, let me rephrase that. Courtesy of the elder of two sons of a friend of my mother’s who also has her office next to my mother’s in the building in which the School of Nursing professors have their offices. Okay. I guess that’s passable. So I was to have made reservations for four at Mad for Garlic, near where the concert was being held, but I put it off until the day before (even now I don’t think it was an unreasonable thing to do) and all the reservation slots had filled up by the time I called (now that’s unreasonable). Fortunately when we got there at six, the time they advised, there were still seats and we made it in with no trouble. Mad for Garlic is stupidly overpriced and incredibly self-righteous, but that is fine with me because their menu is huge and their food is rather good. We started off with sauteed mussels because my mother, much like me, experiences tunnel vision whenever mussels are mentioned in her vicinity and she must have them no matter what. If she hadn’t, I would have insisted on it, besides. I want you to read this in James Franco’s voice: so good.

garlicholic rice

Man, that is a terrible picture. Excuse the blurry. The restaurant was super dark and the problem with digital cameras is that unless you have a vague idea of what you’re doing, the camera is going to give you a messy piece of crap. Then again before the more analog kind was back in vogue, we had the problem of never quite knowing if we were even managing to take the picture at all, so it’s a fair trade-off. Garlicholic rice is basically just fried rice with some garlic and other stuff thrown it, and James Franco repeats: so good. They obviously had to just to succeed, but they do this thing where you can eat all the garlic in their food, as much as you want, and still you won’t get that breathy aftertaste for hours afterwards. Wow! Magic! I swear I’m not a spokesperson, honest.

vongole mare pasta

Another of my faults: if you give me the choice and if it is possible, I will always go vongole. Even if the tomato-based sauces come topped with mountains of seafood or really good meat or — God help us — bacon, it is physically impossible for me to deny vongole spaghetti. This is kind of like how if you give me the reins, I will choose Japanese food for every single meal. The whole “we had Japanese for lunch so what should we have for dinner” nonsense does not compute. The two meals are independent of each other and both times, the superior choice is clear. Actually it might be a good thing that people don’t allow me to do this, because then I would suffer an existential breakdown from not being able to ever eat pickled crab. Huh.

grilled pizza

That it’s “grilled” says nothing about what’s actually on it, but it was in fact a big part of the reason why we chose it. It’s got mushroom and mozzarella cheese, and we would have gone for the rucola but that came with sweet potatoes and I am not the biggest fan of sweet potatoes on pizza. Later on my mother was lusting after the gorgonzola pizza that the couple at the table over were having, so if we can go before vacation’s over, we’ll be having that. The grilled pizza was pretty good too, but I think Bellamonte does it better, which doesn’t mean a whole lot because Bellamonte’s pizza isn’t world-class or anything. At least they all beat out Di Matteo, which, despite that, is still my favorite.

green tea ice cream

Dessert is rarely if ever my favorite part of the meal, and usually I’m not even particular about having it at all, but dear sweet Lord this has a good shot at overturning that altogether. This deserves three James Francos at once, count them, three: sooo gooooood. The flavor was stronger than is customary, which is a thousand times YES because Jesus God this was so rich and illegally creamy and it tasted more like green tea than diluted milk thank you thank you thank you Mad for Garlic. Fact: the picture kind of makes it look like the ice cream scoops and the tray are making the Joker face. This just renders everything that much better. HA HA HA

tiramisu cake

Isn’t this adorable? The picture is again suffering from a case of the blurs, but look at that little chocolate-powder garlic there, aw. The cake was also really good, I would have been satisfied with just a double serving of the green tea ice cream but even for someone not completely crazy about tiramisu (no, I do like it immensely, but I’ve noticed that fans of tiramisu get a little frightening when the culinary pushing comes to the shoving) it was excellent. Altogether excellent. And just today my brother’s birthday present for me arrived, which is a DVD that they’ve stopped making — honestly, the movie was released in 2005, why would you cease production like that? It’s pretty popular from what I gather — no, now I’m just lying, it’s not all that popular at all. It’s a cult hit, except here “cult” means “people who were teenage girls or close friends of teenage girls in 2005″. So he ordered it secondhand from a DVD rental store that was going out of business, and they shipped it in that rental-store plastic box that requires an authorized machine to get the disc out, oh laugh out loud. We pried it open and it is safe and sound in my hands. All miiiiiine. What are birthdays for, if not unreasonable demands? I have many others lined up for years to come.

08. 11. DINNER

bread with olive oil and oregano

I am rather glad that I am backdating all these meals because otherwise these entries might not have been so calm. We had pretty good food for dinner on the 10th (분식) and lunch on the 11th (fondue, or what may pass for it in moments of great hunger) as well — okay, let’s be honest, the fondue wasn’t actually good at all — but pretty much immediately after lunch on the 10th, the family entered one of its spells of yelling. So much yelling. We spent an entire afternoon at the museum because there was too much anger to do much of anything else, and I could feel it in my back for the whole day and all of the 11th. The standing around, I mean, not the anger. But anyway, by dinnertime of the 11th, things had calmed down somewhat so the meal wasn’t incredibly awkward or anything. Yeah, we do that sometimes. Yelling. But I digress. This Italian restaurant is called Bellamonte, another of those places we frequent as a family, and it has infinitely better food than Di Matteo. Score!

insalata caprese

Good times, good times. They told us that they couldn’t make the rucola pizza for us because the rucola that they had wasn’t fresh enough, but confusingly enough there was a whole bunch on top of the caprese salad. I couldn’t really tell that they weren’t fresh, but at any rate, aren’t the vegetables in a salad supposed to be fresher than, you know, the vegetables that get baked in a freaking oven along with massive amounts of cheese? Huh. Anyway, caprese, yay.

insalata di mare

I’m pretty sure that this isn’t the right name for it, but Italian isn’t one of the languages I even pretend to speak and the website seems to be down so I can’t look it up on their menu. We don’t usually order this, we go from the caprese salad to the rucola pizza to the seafood spaghetti with the baked top, but Dad was feeling it and he was paying so we went for it. Amazing stuff. For a restaurant that’s definitely got good food and has even been on TV a couple of times (then again, what with all these food-related shows, it’s hard to find a decent restaurant that hasn’t been on TV once or twice) the place sure is always empty. Also, I forgot to take a picture of the spaghetti with the baked top, which is a pity because it has that huge dough covering and all, but suffice it to say that it went where it was destined to go, namely down my esophagus.

mushroom pizza

And that’s not Italian for anything, but bear with me here. As I mentioned above, Bellamonte refused to serve us anything with rucola on it, except the caprese salad which totally had rucola on it, and we were too hungry to really argue with them so we just went for the mushroom pizza. I mean okay integrity is great but if you give me pizza like this I will definitely shut up. I really wanted to have the rucola, though, so that I could compare it to Di Matteo’s and laugh in the latter’s face. Then again, that means absolutely nothing because somehow they get more customers (must pay off being across the street from a university) and we will probably go there again. Damn you, habit and tradition!

팥빙수: shaved ice with red beans

I have chosen this summer’s keyword to be “정갈함”. This adjective means some supernatural combination of cleanliness, crispness, modesty, purity, and a good deal of empty space. Kind of like wearing nothing but cheap white fabric that’s been washed to a blinding level of whiteness. So in theory, I support this sort of shaved ice, the prevalence of white, the lack of fruit. But to be frank, Napoleon Bakery, your shaved ice tastes like a bowl full of bland. It’s a thin line between my ideal for this summer’s keyword and blandness, and this is still better than Burger King’s travesty so I forgive you, but you will not last long like this. It was a good move infusing the milk straight into the ice so that the shaved ice would have a flavor instead of being so many spoonfuls of water, but for some reason it doesn’t really work. Maybe you need more milk? Or some more of anything, just anything, I mean it’s very tame and it was cold and I enjoyed it, but can’t you do better for four dollars? Must you rob me of my money? Incidentally two hundred dollars was withdrawn from my account and my mother and I panicked and she sent me to the bank before she realized that it was just the automatic withdrawal for this fund that she signed me up for when she created the account. PSYCH

08. 03. LUNCH

cream of corn soup

I have a few complaints to register. Never mind that registering complaints is what I’m mostly doing at all hours of the day, but this is really important. Kind of. Well, no less important than all my other complaints. Just listen. Except you’re not the people that should be listening — get me the owner of Paris Croissant, COEX branch. Whoever decided that it was okay to “upgrade” a perfectly decent restaurant into a disgustingly overpriced venue where nothing is cheaper than fifteen dollars — wait, no, this is wrong, that doesn’t make it sound expensive enough, but it totally is, and most things are in the twenty to thirty-dollar range anyway, but my point is, someone went ahead and made a restaurant less accessible to me without asking my permission first and this angers me. Also your cream of corn soup was only decent! It was okay, but I wouldn’t murder for it! So take that!

parpadelle with tomato sauce

Obviously, the fact that I’m not really crazy about cream of corn soup to begin with has no bearing, because it’s not like I dislike it, and if you’re going to up the price by that much, the least you can do is give me soup that makes me want to raze down the rest of the mall just so that you can set out a couple more tables. But I could have forgiven this, after all it’s unsightly to complain about the cost of food especially when there are more affordable restaurants at hand. But what I really can’t stand is that you took my favorite item off the menu, you idiots! Actually they probably overhauled the entire menu, but the only thing I can distinctly remember having here and nowhere else is this — this salad, with really thin slices of beef brisket and this great dressing that came in a loooong dish and I am tearing up even though I have totally talked about all this before. The force of my rage can only be aptly expressed through Internet acronyms: HDU, Paris Croissant. HDU. IDAWTC. GTFO STFD and DIAF >:O

margherita pizza

And if you are going to tell me THAT’S BASIL sprinkled on top of your pizza I WILL END YOU. Okay so the pizza was okay. I mean no, it wasn’t! It’s just regular cheese pizza with cherry tomatoes and basil lying pathetically over it! This is not a battlefield!! I mean, for cheese pizza it was pretty good though. And the Parpadelle was acceptable. I guess. BUT NO! YOU WILL NOT ESCAPE MY WRATH! That is if by wrath you mean me typing to myself on this remote little online corner while your restaurant flourishes under the patronage of first-date couples, an alarmingly large number of which seem to crowd COEX on weekends. I mean come on, people, there are better places to go hang out than at the mall. Leave the mall to the people without dates, and you families, you guys go to amusement parks or something, take the kids outside. Gosh. Some people.

07. 24. LUNCH

insalata caprese

If you asked me to pick my favorite Italian restaurant, my answer would have nothing to do with the quality of the food offered. Alright, so their food isn’t bad or anything, but the fondness that I have for Di Matteo goes miles deeper than that. It’s the first “restaurant” that I remember frequenting, the first place that I felt that we might visit again later and know what to do. It doesn’t even have street cred, it was opened by a celebrity and it’s not a tiny hole in the wall or anything. But we first came here as family, I think, and sometimes I drag friends here just because however vaguely, I can sort of remember that once we were all ten years younger and in the exact same place eating the exact same thing. Also that leads me to believe that this was where I was introduced to caprese salad, which I little knew would become one of the great loves of my life. It’s only halfway to being authentic, but honestly I’m not going to be elitist about a topic that I’m so little acquainted with. Anyway, the taste of basil is something like enlightenment. The smell of rosemary is fulfillment and the stench of sea salt is a battle.

tomato, cheese and arugula pizza

Arugula is the correct word, right? They use the Italian names on the menu and I don’t think they have a Korean name, as far as I know. So this is what we never fail to order, every single time we’re there. And I would call this the best pizza I’ve ever had in my life, despite it being soggy, not quite thin, a little saggy, a little watery for the two mouthfuls that it lasts you. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon — the pizza, or my misguided opinion. But across the street is where my mother works, the roasted chestnuts from the street vendor that I wanted more than anything when I was ten, the School of Nursing, the children’s hospital, the bubblegum and enamel taste of the dentist’s office, the tang of blood in my throat, the rainy walks, and every time we sat down in this completely uncool restaurant just because we knew it would be there. Where else can you get arugula on pizza in this city, anyway? Nobody is a fan of diversity.