Walking down the street full of people, I always smelt some pleasant smell. I heard people talking with each other in loud voices, laughing and even clapping. Smoke of grilling pork billowed from the restaurants, filling the air with the sense of a culture. I can’t remember the name of the street, but this is not because I have a bad memory; this is because there are so many streets like this in my home country. I can tell that there can be a person who never ate Korean barbeque, but there can’t be a person who ate Korean BBQ only once in his or her life. Korean barbeque is full of undeniable attraction, thus grew as the biggest food culture in South Korea, even though South Korea is one of the countries where the food preference of the people are most complicated.
Even though I lived in Korea for 20 years, I am not a big fan of Korean food. When talking about Korean food, spicy spices such as ‘gochujang,’ a Korean traditional red pepper paste, can’t be excluded. However, because of some health issues, I can’t even taste spicy foods, which leads me to love one and only non-spicy food, such as Korean BBQ. Hence I am one of the biggest fans of Korean barbeque. When I was in high school, I had a crew to hunt the Korean BBQ restaurants. I and my friends researched so many famous Korean BBQ restaurants in Seoul and went to the restaurants on the weekend. Even though Korean BBQ is such a straight forward food that use only one way of cooking, every single restaurant had its own taste so we could not stop the Korean BBQ journey. Simply saying, I had the faith in Korean BBQ that it is one of the best foods in the world.