Korean Barbecue with Indonesians in China

As you can tell from the title, last night was another international night for me. Spent the evening with the five Indonesians students and enjoyed a little Korean Barbecue all while staying in my same Chinese city. Now I haven’t been to too many Korean barbecue places in America (we have more Mongolian barbecue places I think) and I’m not even sure if they have them in Korea. (Could be one of those fake things, like Japanese hibachi steak houses in America, which they don’t have in Japan.) But they are all over China, and they are delicious.
When we got to the restaurant it was so packed (at 5:30) we had to wait outside for about 20 minutes. In the wintertime it would have been wonderful, but in summer it was torturous. That’s because outside the restaurant they have a small cart filled with burning hot coals which they constantly replenish for the grills inside making the already hot temps pretty unbearable.

At a Korean barbecue place each table has their own small grill in the center of the table. Not very big, the grill is completely covered (unlike, say, a more traditional beach BBQ grill) and heats up in seconds. Within minutes of sitting down, a guy came to our table with a bucket of hot coals. We all tried to get out of the way as he lowered it into the center of the table and put on the grill top.

This is something that would never, ever happen in America. After all, the “hot coal guy” basically spent his evening shuffling around from table to table carrying a bucket of red hot coals. If he, or his tongs, slipped then someone would get majorly burned. The waitresses also continually change the grill tops on all the tables and walk around the restaurant with these steaming hot disks of metal. Sometimes it’s nice to live in a country that isn’t sue happy and during the night I didn’t see one person get burned. (Although it has to happen every now and then.)
The menu was filled with pictures of raw meat and you just pick which type you want. The meat tends to be fatty, so it cooks better, and we ordered an array of beef, pork, chicken wings and lamb.
Then the meat comes and it’s up to you when/how to cook it. The meat is thinly sliced so it cooks very quickly.We had a few chicken wings (wrapped in tin foil) but for the most part you just lay out the meat and cook away. In addition to the meat we got a basket full of lettuce and a large number of sauces, powders and side dishes. This is so you could make your own lettuce sandwich. The sauces were sweet, savory, spicy, and the side dishes were Korean things like picked veggies, a strange grapefruit-like fruit in sauce and some other strange looking things I was too scared to try. The restaurant kept us well stocked in the sauces and lettuce all night.
Once your meat is grilled you just throw it on a piece of lettuce, add some sauce or powder and then eat away. I’ve been to Korean Barbecue before and not been so impressed. After all, the meat is thin and usually poor quality. But this place was great, and the meat was not bad at all, and the fresh lettuce was a really nice touch. (It’s almost impossible to get lettuce that isn’t cooked in China, as they aren’t big on salads of sandwiches. After we finished off the meat I ate the rest of the basket of lettuce much to the amusement of others. Seriously, it’s been a long time since I’ve had uncooked lettuce.)
The reason I went out last night was to celebrate Hengky’s (in the picture above) last day. Hengky has been studying Chinese for a year and a half and his Chinese is really good, but his English is excellent too. When I started taking Chinese class he was my only classmate. So for 4 months it was just he and I in class. (Well, mostly it was just him as my teaching schedule doesn’t allow me to go to every class, but only a few classes a week.) Since then he has gotten a million times better than me and was in a higher level this past semester, but we would still hang out in the hallway during break time and have the occasional dinner together. Right after dinner we had to say goodbye and now I’m all sad again.