Weird food

Today, I think I had the most bizarre meal I've had in quite some time...possibly ever; and most of you know that, coming from me, that's a pretty bold statement.

It all started this afternoon when Emily and I decided that we wanted to have sushi for dinner. We hadn't yet been to a sushi restaurant near our new home, so we thought we'd check some online reviews and experiment with something new. We sound a place about five miles away from our apartment called Tokyo Sushi that had a couple of good reviews, so we thought we'd check it out. For those of you who don't know, Norcross has a very high concentration of Latinos and Asians. We live in a part of town that is primarily Mexican, so we have a lot of good Mexican and South American Restaurants very close by. To get decent Chinese or Japanese food, we have to travel to an area that is mostly populated by Asians. This part of town is very close to where we live, we hadn't really been there yet.

It was quite different...throughout most of it, almost all of the signs are written in either Japanese, Korean or Vietnamese. Coincidentally, we couldn't tell where on earth Tokyo Sushi was located. We ended up finding another place close by...I don't remember the name, but it isn't important because I couldn't pronounce it anyway. It was a Korean (??) sushi bar. The sign on the outside said: Sushi, BBQ, Seafood. Since the sign mentioned BBQ, I figured it would be fairly Americanized. I was wrong.

This place was straight up Korean...I mean Korean to the point that I didn't know what the heck was going on. Our server's English seemed to be confined to the words "water" and "yes" and the phrase "ready for check?".

We ordered our food, spicy salmon roll, spicy tuna roll, 2 cucumber rolls, a prawn tempura roll and a plate of chicken teryaki. Since we had both skipped lunch, Emily and I figured this would be plenty of food for the two of us with maybe a little left over. Unfortunately, I was not aware of the complimentary Korean appetizers.

A few minutes of placing our order, our server returned with two small salads. (Basically some lettuce with a couple shavings of carrot and cucumber topped with lite soy sauce). This is standard at some sushi bars, so I wasn't terribly surprised. After another little while, our server returned with eight tiny dishes filled with some of the most bizarre food combinations I have ever seen.

I have no idea what some of the even were, but I will try to recall them to the best of my knowledge:

1. Tiny broccoli florets garnished with a couple slivers from a crab stick (??) and a small dollop of hot sauce. This was surprisingly good...but it gets worse.

2. Kim Chi. For those of you who don't know, kim chi is "fermented" (i.e. "spoiled") cabbage mixed with very hot spices and some other vegetables. It looks disgusting, smells like crap and tastes even worse.

3. Tofu topped with something that looked like spoiled pico de gallo. Emily managed to choke down two of these things without losing it...but boy, was she struggling. She said the pico looking stuff was kind of spicy.

4. Some kind of clear noodles (NOT soba noodles) with a few slivers of something that looked like grass. Emily said it felt like she was eating earth worms.

5. Something that looked like lightly sauteed onions. Neither of us tried these.

6. Two squared of what appeared to be opaque gelatin (think of making unflavored Jell-O using water you got from the toilet of a downtown 7-11) topped with more of the pico de gallo looking stuff. Emily says (she's obviously a lot braver than I) it tastes like "salty Jell-O...kind of like snot".

7. Some of the most bland potato salad I've ever had. (In retrospect...it probably would have been pretty good with a little soy sauce.

8. The last one had what I'm pretty sure was soybean sprouts.


We were not expecting this appetizer entourage. Emily and I stared at each other, and the dishes, for about five minutes like, "What in God's name are we supposed to do with this stuff??" We finally worked up the courage to try several of them (two in my case...maybe five or six in Emily's), but we were still awfully confused, at first I even thought that maybe she screwed up our order...of course that was highly unlikely, as we were the only customers there.

One cool thing about the restaurant was this little button that was attached to our soy sauce holder. It said "push button for service", but it wasn't wired to anything (a wireless call button at a restaurant..??). Our water started to get a little low and we hadn't seen our waitress in awhile, so Emily reached over and hit the button. We instantly heard a chime throughout the restaurant and a board lit up with the number of our table. Almost immediately, a woman came over and with a pitcher and refilled our water.

After eating our salad, followed by tasting some of the appetizers and consuming a bowl of miso soup, and our main course of five sushi rolls and some chicken teryaki, we pushed the call button once again. Like clockwork, our server appeared and said, "Ready for check?". We nodded. She got the check and we paid and left. I said to Emily, the sushi really was excellent" (and it was!). She nodded. I said, "Let's never come here again". She said, "Yeah, that's a good idea".

If anyone knows anything about Korean food, will you please shed some light on the strange barrage of foods that we were given...?