mmmm, meat!

Naomi and I went to a restaurant that I believe could be called a Korean Barbecue (I'll have to check on that). We did not get Bulgogi, a popular spiced meat barbecue dish this time around, but I'm sure we'll go back soon so I can try that, too. This was actually the first time I've had Korean food that wasn't prepared in our cafeteria here. As I had been told many times, the "real thing" is SOOO much better than what we have in our cafeteria!
After we removed our shoes at the door, we were escorted to a private room with a low table and cushions to sit on. In the center of every low table was a hole covered by a metal disk. The owner/manager, who told me to call him An, speaks a little English, and recommended something from the menu that would be good for someone who had never tried that kind of food, so we got that. (Couldn't tell you what it was called; he pointed at some Korean words on the menu, we agreed to the Korean words, and that was it.) Then a different man came and removed the metal disk from the hole and inserted a pan of red-hot coals. He lowered a chimney from the ceiling to suck up the smoke. I was drinking a frothy glass of Hite beer.
Next, a waiter and waitress came to the table with a huge platter of dishes, which they spread out all over the table. There were 3 different types of lettuce-based salads, a small scoop of a potato salad, a few different types of kimchi and pickles, onions soaked in soy sauce with a dollop of wasabi, some random seaweed-type dishes, a bowl of red bean paste, a plate of octopus with cabbage and hot chili sauce, cloves of garlic, and a basket of green leaf lettuce and sesame leaves. It was a spread! A waitress also had a plate of thinly cut steaks, and she cooked them one-by-one on a grate over the coals. (I'm told that often restaurant guests do it themselves, but they probably thought we were too clueless and would set the place on fire! Anyway, it was sweet of them to do that for us, so we could focus on chowing down!) One way to eat the meat is to roll it with various toppings in a green lettuce leaf or a sesame leaf. Yummy!
In the photo below, there pieces of meat cooking (they start with a strip of meat like the one above, and as it cooks, they cut it into smaller pieces with scissors). At the left there are a few salads and watery kimchi of some sort, and on the right there is a sampling of more delicious food!
I love eating meals where you get to try dozens of different things, and this did not disappoint! Here's a shot of my own dish in the center. I had decorated my meat with some garlic the waitress had grilled and onions and wasabi. The garlic, onions, and wasabi were mild so they accented the flavor of the meat perfectly without overpowering it. You can also see the dish of octopus with chili to the left of my dish. I admit that I'm wary of big tentacles of octopus, but I tried one piece. It was so drenched in chili, there wasn't much else to taste.
After the meal, they took the coals away and covered the hole back up. We got some "popinsue" (sorry, I don't know how to spell it, but that's how it sounds!) for dessert.
It's a sort of strange dish - it's shaved ice with fruit cocktail, red beans, rice gluten nuggets (sort of taste like marshmellows) and a little yogurt. It's COLD and sweet and was pretty good!