Dinner and Alone in a Collectivist Country

Korean style restaurants typically offer one meat and an array of sides. For example, the duck place serves duck and 8-10 sides. The pig place offers multiple cuts of pork and 8-10 sides. And the cow place offers different cuts of beef and 8-10 sides.

Side dishes may include a salad like dish, kimchi, garlic and hot peppers, marinated onions, leaves to wrap your meat, a root vegetable, and a broth soup (sometimes it is the broth of the remainder of your meal (duck stew)).

When in a traditional Korean restaurant you typically eat on the floor, and cook in the center of the table over small wood, or charcoal grills. Western style is sitting on chairs at a high table, and having a menu to select food. Korean style there is only once choice, How many servings?

All this is to say that twice I have eaten alone in a Korean style restaurant. Both times I was invited to join another table. Once with a group of researchers and professors in the school of oriental medicine. Having more education they spoke enough English that communication was possible. Then I was invited by two men aged 29, and 35. They hardly spoke a word of English. What I did understand is in Korean culture people should eat together. Much of anything was lost in translation, but dinner got along well enough. All Koreans seem to have a Korean-English translator service linked to their cell phones. Often times when trying to speak or search for understanding a cell phone is brought out and they will display Korean characters with an English definition.