If you ever craved the experience to go “back to the roots” (pun intended) with your food and eat a basic, yet delicious meal without any additives, this dining experience might be for you.
I personally don’t follow any particular diet. Some of my friends here are vegan or vegetarian though. Unfortunately, it is quite difficult to find restaurants that offer vegan options. Sure, you could cook it yourself – but there is no fun in that if you know about the delicious, high-quality Korean cuisine you’d miss out on. A local explained it to me this way: “If there is no meat in it, Koreans won’t consider it a real meal”. Bummer.
Surprisingly enough, there actually is an all-vegan kind of food that is traditionally Korean: the food of buddhist monks. We tried an excellent menu at Maji, a place near Gyeongbokgung Palace in Seoul. Completely vegan and lush, this meal was one of the best I ever had in my whole life. The sheer amount of dishes made up for their rather small size and gave the opportunity to have one culinary epiphany after another. One of the highlights was the rice, which was cooked and served wrapped in a lotus leaf. It made for a very distinct and pleasant taste. I also recommend to safe some of the sticky peanuts for when the cinnamon tea is served. 😉
It hasn’t been for a long time that I felt that happy after a meal. And I am not just talking “full-happy” here. A deep satisfaction and happines imbued me. Maybe it was just the restaurant’s setting in a traditional Korean house in combination with the knowledge of the meal being somewhat spiritual that envoked this feeling. But even it was placebo: this is probably what food enlightenment feels like.