From the Stable to the Table: Equine Cuisine Part 2

Last Friday night, a group of nine foreigners descended on the back alleys of Sin Jeju (New Jeju) near Halla Hospital to search for a very special sort of restaurant. After several weeks of attempting to marshal up enough interest from a few of my fellow foreigners, the night had finally arrived, and now, walking through the frigid winter we were wandering through aging blocks of flats, trying to find a place that one of our ranks had been to long before, but apparently forgotten the precise location of. Finally, after asking a number of the locals, we found what we were looking for- Malgogi Chanmun
, a horse restaurant with a specialty in malgogi hoe, that is, raw horse. Since the moment I had heard of its existence, I had wanted to try this. The fact that even the less adventurous individuals who had tried it all agreed that it was delicious made this prospect even more appealing. An unfortunate number of months passed in between, but finally we had settled on a night and gone out for horse sashimi.

The cost of this delicacy (I assume it must be a delicacy, because of the cost) was around $25, which included three courses. Shortly after popping open our bottles of soju and starting in on the standard marinated horse banchan, the first course was delivered to our tables. It was rather thick for raw meat (compared to, say, carpaccio), and was flecked with sesame seeds. The middle-aged woman who owned the place showed us how we were to consume it, sandwiching it between sheets of dried seaweed, and dipping it in a wasabi/soy sauce mixture. She seemed to believe that this demonstration, though perfectly clear in pantomime, required her to lovingly shove it in to our friend's mouth as an example to us. I dunno, maybe she was interested in him. She told us that this course was very much like tuna, and I definitely see the parallels. In fact, just very recently in Japan, a tuna shortage led to the consumption of horse sashimi as a substitute. The dried seaweed laver was a bit overpowering, but without it, the soy-and-wasabi mixture did a wonderful job of bringing out the sweetness of the meat. When eaten completely unaccompanied, it had a very bizarre texture, like wavy fish, that was a little off-putting, but completely masked when coupled with the seaweed or sauce.

The first course.


The first bite.


The next course, the proper horse tartare, usually came with a raw egg cracked into it, but my friend did the best she could to stop this, though I am almost certain that the kitchen didn't listen- it came out fairly sticky. This dish consisted of much more roughly chopped meat topped with poppy seeds, and laid out on julienned Asian pears. The best part about this is that, in something that struck me as belonging much more in Santa Fe than Korean, they brought out a fried egg as a side dish. Without the fried egg, the tartare was very good, and surprisingly a bit more tender than a similar preparation of beef would be. The Asian pears matched quite well with the meat, but I have to say that nothing was as strangely delicious as the mix of the raw horse and fried egg. It was almost like comfort food, something Southern, to be served in a diner.

Horse Tartare


A (Not-Too-Appetizing) Close Up


The Egg 'N' Horse Combo


It was a bit anticlimactic to have begun the meal with the most exotic dish and then proceed to a simple stew, but it was nonetheless delicious. The stew, galbijim, is in my opinion one of the better Korean stews of the vast multitude that exist, as it is light on the vegetables and heavy on the meat and mushrooms. The rib meat used in the dish again defied my previous notions of horse meat being tough and stringy. It had been stewed long enough to give the broth of the stew a shimmering glossy appearance, but not to reduce the meat to stringy ribbons. The meat was lean (presumably due to the amount of fat that had soaked out into the broth), though occasionally I'd scoop a a chunk comprised of more than half horse fat, which I found pretty tasty, but my friend actually spit out after accidentally eating a piece. Once we had picked out all of the meat and the scarce vegetables, the owner poured a bowl of horse bone marrow broth into the remainder, and provided us with a palette of multicolored noodles for it. The noodles were black, orange, and purple, which were made from buckwheat, tangerine, and cactus respectively. Did they taste any different? Not particularly, but they at least looked kind of cool.

The Horse Rib Galbijim


An abundance of horse fat


The multicolored noodles in marrow broth


I really enjoyed the raw horse meat, an opinion which was shared by a great majority of the table. Alicia's reaction was a bit different. To each their own, I suppose. I definitely will be repeating this experience whenever my pocketbook will allow. And as an indirect result of this meal, I have become aware of some substantially more bizarre foods here. When we told a Korean friend of ours about having eaten malgogi hoe, he was able to offer up a few other suggestions. Like fried whale. Or the occasionally deadly toxic puffer fish sashimi (if you watch the Simpsons regularly, you know what I am talking about), which I had been saving for Japan, but now that I am aware that it is offered in Korea, I just might try it here. There are a few more which, in my opinion, are far more strange and horrifying than anything I've eaten so far... but I do need to hold on to a few surprises, right?