Chicken Shithouse: The Beauty of Korean Bar Food

Throughout my twenties, I enjoyed a drink or two, but nowhere did I work or play harder than I did in Korea.

Here bar owners try to keep their around-the-clock customers from dissolving into total drunken messes by being sure to serve good food to bring people back from the brink.

If you're on a crawl, this food is also served on the streets between bars.

As a Filipino-Irish expat kid, raised in the American South, I grew up exposed to a lot of different kinds of foods, and so I'm a pretty open-minded eater, but because my Korean friends saw me as chiefly an American, my first Korean bar food was fried chicken.

Don't tell anyone from North Carolina I said this, but it was the best fried chicken of my life--a transcendent experience after a couple bottles of soju (Korean vodka).

The first thing they do differently to make the chicken so juicy and melt-in-your-mouth delicious, is they use small, young birds to increase the skin to meat ratio. Then, the batter includes surprise ingredients such as corn starch, baking powder, and soju, which come together to make the outer coating light and crispy.

The next thing I tried was also pretty familiar and tasty. In Korea, if you order an "egg roll" in a bar, don't be surprised if they bring out an arm-sized omelet on a wooden chopping board. They whip the eggs up with vegetables (usually green onions and carrots), cook it in a big pan, and then roll it up like a yule log or Swiss roll, serving it sliced to show the beautiful spiral architecture of this food so rich in the protein all-night drinkers need.

These dishes, while accessible, are unlike the majority of the bar food, which can be categorized as soups, stews, and other stuff in red sauce.

Gochujung, a spicy and savory red pepper paste, is the soul of Korean cooking and the soul of the majority of the food you'll find when you're out. Stock is added to change the thickness of the paste, and then a wide variety of meats, seafood, and vegetables are added to the mix.

Also, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the ever-popular ddeokbokki, which puts plump, lovely rice cakes in a spicy, slightly fishy version of the sauce.

Now 95% of what you'll find swimming in these soups, stews, and sauces is delightful, but buyer beware, Koreans will eat almost anything in this red sauce, including, to my drunken surprise, battered and fried chicken feet, and yes, as my Korean friend's electronic dictionary translated a little too late--chicken shithouse.