Crash landing on food: Primal and perennial connect to food in K-Dramas is gateway to indulgence in like none other

"Good food is like music you can taste, color you can smell." Ratatouille gets us. In this series 'Food for Film,' we pick food films/shows that make our mouths water and our souls richer.

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Like people and places, snatches of a song, the whiff of a perfume or a loving caress, taste can also be an abiding memory, everlasting association, and a potent trigger for nostalgia. There are flavours — of meals that are more often simple than lavish — that can be gratifying enough to linger on. Call me a misanthrope but a quest for such mislaid meals and forfeited flavours is infinitely more rewarding than searching for lost love, more so in our shared pandemic reality.

One such momentous spread I had was on 3 September, 2019, at Hangawi restaurant in New York, a two-minute walk from Empire State Building in Koreatown. Yes, I discovered Korean food late in life but a wee bit earlier than getting introduced to Korean Dramas. 

I am an experimental eater within the limits of self-imposed vegetarianism but having Korean for the last supper in Midtown Manhattan felt daunting. It may not be my beef, or pork for that matter, but certainly not the proverbial cherry I wanted atop the wonderful cake that had been my Big Apple holiday. 

I went along nonetheless, coaxed by my New York-based friend Noor Shaikh, who has had a great track record earlier of opening many a window for me to disregarded eateries in Mumbai. 

We entered Hangawi, as though it were a traditional Korean home, leaving the shoes behind on the rack, made ourselves comfortable on the ground level seating, and in between sips of serene shissandra chinesis, a Korean herbal tea, I had the most meditative meal ever, that too vegan.

I leafed through the menu which was all about "eating with conscience," nurturing both the body and soul and achieving harmony — a balance of um [Korean for yin] foods like green vegetables and fruits and yang or the root vegetables like radish, carrot, and potato. 

We tried ordering the right mix. Assorted steamed vegetable dumplings and pancakes, kimbap [Korean sushi rolls], and to top it all, the most magnificent bibimbap — scalding hot stone bowl rice served with an assortment of fresh veggies — that I swear I licked the very last grain of. Not to forget a dessert platter of soy cheesecake with soy vanilla almond ice cream that I scoffed at initially but polished off eventually. 

I promised myself at that very moment to come back some day for all that I hadn’t managed to try, especially the hotpot and ssam bab [or ssambap], a DIY leaves wrap put together with assorted veggies, rice, mushrooms, and bean paste.

It’s a promise that I haven’t fulfilled, all thanks to COVID-19, but the satiation that the food made me experience that day is something that I have been looking high and low for, in K-Dramas in particular, right from the very first one I saw [again thanks to COVID-19 and confinement], Crash Landing on You. Hyun Bin pierced into my heart as the North Korean Captain Ri, for far too many reasons to elaborate on right now, but most of all for cooking his heart out for his lady love from South Korea, Yoon Se-ri [Son Ye-jin]. 

Since then, my romp through K-Dramas has primarily been a journey back to Hangawi but, like every exploration, has also grown to be about a lot more.

Many of us singletons, for whom the lockdowns heightened the state of solitariness, have found happiness in escaping our immediate, not-so-pleasant reality with films and web series, and bettering life with food. Spending more time in kitchen, getting more committed to cooking, hours of going through the dishes and restaurants before ordering on Swiggy and Zomato has not just been a welcome diversion but also an expression of care and concern for your own self. A marker of the urgency to not just keep yourself well-nourished but also to affectionately indulge the cravings and desires by serving what you relish at your own table for one. Food has been a proxy therapist.

K-Dramas is where both these facets cohered seamlessly. One has managed to live an alternate life, away from the pandemic anxieties, in their humane, warm, feel-good universe where people might be flawed but inherently decent, where things might go wrong for a while, but then all does manage to end well.

I have been a new entrant to this world but from what little I have seen till now — romantic dramas rather than crime shows, and certainly no Squid Game nor food-based series — I am struck by the centrality of food in Korean life. I realise that my Hangawi dinner was only a teaser to that unbreakable commitment to cuisine that the entire nation seems to share.

The abundance of food [rivalled only by innumerable coy and/or sloppy kisses, the other hallmark of K-Dramas] has fed one’s own appetite in more ways than one. 

In the latest show I have been on, Inspector Koo, the titular character [Lee Young-ae], a dissipating cop, is pulled back into life, out of her world of gaming and alcohol, to investigate an insurance case; all with the aid of a bowl of udon, yakisoba [types of noodles], dumplings, and a glass of draft beer.

Cafes and restaurants are significant settings in practically every show. The parents of the hero Choi Ung [Choi Woo-shik] in Our Beloved Summer run a diner for drivers, their chats are about steamed fish, chicken feet, and marinated pork, and the mother often says: "Eat something before you go." A bit like our own Hansa [Supriya Pathak] in Khichdi telling one and all: “Hello, how are, khana kha ke jaana haan.”

Reply 1988 has scene upon scene of the Sung family huddled together, sitting down on the floor around food. Food is not served on a table but occupies a space that is the heart of the tiny home and the loving family. It’s where the characters connect, significant plot developments happen, life pauses, and then moves on again. Food is as vital as the heartbeats, blood, and breath.

It is an emotion, an expression of love. The mother in Reply 1988, Lee Il-wha, cooks massive amount of food for her family and neighbours. You can feel it in the many boxes of home cooked food that Yoon Ji-ho’s [Jung So-min] mother, Kim hyun-ja [Kim Sun-young], packs for her when she gets married in Because This Is My First Life. 

Food completes the circle of life in the moving finale of Hometown Cha Cha Cha as the small town of Gongjin gathers to throw a lavish feast in the memory of the dearly departed Grandmother Kim Gam-ri [Kim Young-ok], someone who loved feeding one and all.

Food in K-Dramas has been a window to a place, people, and culture that I have yet not experienced first-hand. I am awestruck by the joyousness, zeal, almost a frenzy with which food is consumed. No languid five course meals, eaten elegantly with knife and fork, punctuated by fine wine and polite conversations. Food is attacked and polished off in minutes, if not seconds. Gulp, sip, slosh, slurp, drool is what one hears as noodles get stuffed in the mouth klutzily with the assistance of chopsticks, and sucked up loudly.

Koreans in the series I have seen don’t appear to believe in dainty dining. There’s a robust wholesomeness and primal connect to eating. It’s basic instinct. Food is fanaticism or, if I may use a profane analogy, it’s like the ardour of love that knows no bounds. Booming grunts of appreciation for food in K-Dramas always take me back to Meg Ryan in that iconic diner scene in When Harry Met Sally. Only the characters in K-Dramas are not faking it like she is, and always make the viewers say to themselves: "I’ll have what they are having."

So the curiosity for alien flavours has led many of us to experiment beyond the long-popular kimchi — from Nongshim’s Shin Ramyun Noodle Soup to Masterchow Kinky Korean Hot Basil Stir Fry on Amazon, from buldak [highly spiced barbequed chicken], bulgogi [grilled and marinated pork] or jeyuk [seasoned pork] dosirak [thali] to dakgalbi [spicy pan-fried chicken] kimbap from Kori’s at Safdarjung Enclave. Pajeon [pancakes], tteok-bokki [rice cakes], jjajangbap [fried rice with black soya bean sauce], japchae [stir fried glass noodles] have all begun to load our plates riding on the popularity of K-Dramas. To our bhoot jolokia, they have given an alternative: gochujang hot chilli paste.

And just as Korean food has made inroads into India, there have also been interesting portrayals of globalisation ushering in foreign cuisine to South Korean shores. Reply 1988, set in the crucial period of economic and political upheavals, reforms, and Seoul Olympics in the late '80s, has its characters obsessing over the newly discovered American Chop suey. Almost every other city dweller in every second K-Drama is shown wedded to their coffee, having it in those familiar disposable cups, often balanced on cardboard trays as they run about town, quite like in the scenes out of some Western films. 

What doesn’t match up with us Indians is how none of the characters appear to gain weight despite such copious consumption. The five doctors in Hospital Playlist spend as much time, if not more, salivating over [and eating] what is on the cafeteria menu as they do in operation theatre. Yet they appear to be blessed with fantastic metabolism, especially Kim Jun-wan [Jung Kyung-ho] and Chae Song-hwa [Jeaon Mi-do], who have remained amazingly reed thin through both the seasons.  

Ultimately, when it comes to food, K-Dramas are like Enid Blyton books from childhood. They fuel hunger, rev up the appetite. My mother’s kitchen may not have provided me ginger ale, scones, and clotted cream or cocoa, but I did eat bread rolls and pakodas while reading about The Naughtiest Girl and Famous Five. On a wet and cold lohri evening, as I wonder whether to begin on Beautiful Gong Shim or Oh My Venus, there’s no Korean restaurant nearby to cater to my taste buds, nor a stock of Korean noodles in my larder. Aaloo tikki, jalebi, and kulhad chai will have to suffice. This COVID, with K-Dramas as my new Bible, the only sermon I have byhearted is that food equals comfort, not calories.

Read more from the series here.

Namrata Joshi is a journalist, National Award-winning film critic, and a fledgling festival programmer.

by Namrata Joshi