Backstage with the Musicians

Tommorow we travel to Solingen, Germany for a concert. People often have romantic notions about a musician's life - the truth is most of what we do is travel. Getting to the gig is what occupies our time - standing on stage doing what we do well is hardly a problem. I have no problem playing century old Moldavian Jewish violin pieces on stage in front of hundreds of people. It is what I do. Getting to the stage is the problem. So tomorrow we fly on GermanWings airlines - a cheaper alternative to renting a mini bus and driving eighteen hours. Except that we can't take our violins on board as hand luggage unless they are in soft cases. Who the heck carries a violin in a soft case? OK... we get to airport, take violins out and carry them in moldavian bags on board, stick our cases into a duffel bag and hope for the best. This is why it pays to work with cheap violins. In Germany we are playing with Jake Shulmen-Ment, one of the best Klezmer violinists. He can never travel on German wings - his violin is worth about... enough to buy a car. Mine can buy a pair of sneakers on sale. My violin, however, is louder and has yikhes. Speaking of fiddlers, we played a gig in Budapest last weekend at the Fono club.

It was a concert of some of the Hungarian folk bands who were at the center of the Dance House movement in the late eighties and nineties - Téka, Őkrős, Béla Halmos and Ferenc Sebő, singer András Berecz, and others - to add some "where are they now?" footage for a DVD series derived from the old Hungarian TV folk music program. With musicians, the concert is not the actual exciting part of these events - it is hanging around backstage with your friends that defines a good experience. This was the best: a while back Texas bassist and all around mensch Mark Rubin talked about how the hang is central to a musician's experience. For Hungarian music, this was a hang to end all hangs. First of all, the backstage jamming is what a musician wants to hear - the stuff on stage is always too polite and... rehearsed. And onstage you never get to hear the interesting bits - like Ferenc Sebő, who with Béla Halmos kick started the whole trad music movement in Hungary in the 1970s - diddling around with french hurdy gurdy melodies.

And typically for Hungarian gigs, there was virtually nothing to eat, so we know enough to bring our own. OK... they had pogacsa, dry bread biscuits... but bad backstage food is usually enough to make any musician blow his stack abroad... but not here. We are used to it. Flute playing genius Róbi Kerényi pulled out a sack of bacon, onions, and bread and quickly became quite popular with the crowd. Yes, this really is what Hungarian males like to eat - hunks of sliced, raw bacon with onions.I have never seen Róbi eat any other meal in the twenty years I have known him. He is a serious bacon connosieur. And a monster flute player. Since the participants in the concert were from bands that had been fluidly interchanging members for thirty years, it was a chance for some of the guys from Di Nayes to play Transylvanian music with their old buddies from former bands.

Feri got to show off his cimbalom chops playing some Bonchida material with Pali from Táka. And since I don't actually go to formal concerts as much as I used to - in the Dance House scene we always got the best music sitting around a table at the bar during dances - I haven't been seeing a lot of my old buddy András Berecz. András is one of the last of the generation to have learned his singing from older village singers - outside of Transylvania you don't find many young men singing in the old style. And he's loud. Loud but exquisitely controlled, as you can see in the videos I posted of backstage rehearsing and jamming during the break.

That last slow tune has a special significance to me. It comes from Ördöngösfüzes, a village in the northern plains region of Transylvania. When I first bought a boxed three LP set entitled "Hungarian Folk Music" in 1972, there was a recording of the village band playing this piece. It was my first experience of the slow, majestic, powerful screaming fiddle music characteristic of Transylvanian folk bands. So what am I doing here in Hungary? Still chasing after this sound. This one.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Tommorow, February 18, has always been a Big Day in our family. For one thing, it's my Mother's birthday: Happy Birthday Mom! And also, because on my Mom's birthday 54 years ago, she had me. Yes, my Mom and I share a birthday. She's still healthy and gets around, still rides nine miles a week on her bike when weather permits, and she still cooks a mean lecso. It's a birthday we share with Paris Hilton, Michael Jordan, and Barry Humphries (Dame Edna Everage, my possums...). Buying birthday presents when I was a kid always seemed real - one for Mom, and one for me? It led to a tradition where I would buy birthday gifts for everybody in my family on my birthday and it eventually became a general holiday representing birthdays of all shapes and sizes. I asked her about what it was like having a baby on her birthday. She said it was like passing a cinder block. She wasn't lying. I was a big baby.When I was back in New York during the winter I went through boxes of old papers and books tossing out about 75% of all the stuff I stored at my parent's house - I mean, who needs to have my old research materials on Yoruba linguistics and my friend's bound MA thesis about Togolese talking drumming? A decade's worth of anthropology dertitrus? Five cardboard boxes of air-check cassette tapes dating from my ten years as DJ on Boston radio station WMFO? I felt a lot better after dumping a lot of my old acquisitions, but of course I kept a few choice mementos, photos, and stuff I never even knew I had. In one box of old school books I found a couple of old black marble patterned notebooks dating to my first and second grade classes in school. I must have been about six or seven at the time. I actually remember the classes when we were being taught to write. It was kind of an aha! moment when I figured this out. I never knew I would end up becoming a writer and not a fireman or a dinosaur scientist, but there you have it. My first attempts at prose already showed a curiosity towards the elusive nature of existence:"Why do tin bands keep cats and squirrels from climbing up the trees? Becase they would slide down." I keep wondering what context that would have played in my early education. At the time I can remember packing to evacuate New York during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and I can clearly remember the day President Kennedy was shot... but somehow my school notebooks remain firmly focused on animal pest control. I went to P.S. 71 in the East Tremont section of the Bronx. It was located next door to the old storage library of the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian. I grew up thinking that the sight of old buffalo skin tipis and bark wigwams were a normal thing to see out the window every morning as you had your cookies and milk in school. Which may, perhaps, explain this passage from my second grade notebook:Now, as anybody who knows me can attest, I have never sold any of my children, so obviously it was a lesson well taught. Obvioulsy we had read some kind of cowboy and Indian story and it is an answer to a quiz. But it sheds an interesting light on how cultural outlooks were spread in New York City schools back in the 1960s: "Because white men don't sell their Children." I really wish I knew what the question to that answer was. Another page jumped out at me for being strongly prophetic:

I play a fiddle, and I forgot a word. That pretty much sums up my life over the last 54 years. (It only tells part of the story. I play a Macedonian gaida, a Black Sea Turkish kemence, and a metal bodied resonator guitar too, and I forgot how to speak several languages that I was once conversant in, including Greek, Zulu, and Quechua pretty well completely. And iron is still very hard. Another page presents what may be the first documented case of blogging in my writing career.

Dated April 22, 1964 and signed by my Dad (for homework purposes, obviously) this one describes my visit to the 1964 New York World's Fair in Queens: "The World's Fair has many different pavilions. Some of them are like the future. Some of them show things from different lands. the Worlds Fair has 168 pavilions. the New York pavilion is the largest pavilion. The Tower Of Light is the second largest. The Tower Of Light has a 1 billion candle power beam." Some of them are like the future... well, from where I am sitting, the version of the future we got seems to have lowered the bar on futures in general. I am still waiting for my jet pack, and for the car from the Ford pavilion that was pre-programmed to go wherever you wanted it to go without any driving skills whatsoever. OK... we finally got video-phones (thanks Skype!) but I and many of my generation still harbor some resentment from having been cheated out of our jet packs.They promised us jet packs, damn it! But instead, we got pop culture. I remember the buzz the week the Beatles first played on the Ed Sullivan show - we kids weren't allowed to watch the show the first night out of a fear - voiced by the Italian Moms on our block - that they might wiggle their hips in the scandalous way Elvis had when he first appeared on Ed Sullivan. It didn't happen, and the next week we were allowed to watch the Fab Four. It obviously made an impression.

Yes, its the "Beatles Sinfenie Ocrestre! Conducted by Paul McArtini." As for my birthday... tomorrow is the Hungarian celebration of "Torkos Thursday" - a day when many of the restaurants in Budapest cut their menu prices in half for the day (or part of it.) We're heading to the new Master Wang's for Chinese food, which is probably similar to what my Mom will have on her birthday. And, as I hit the cusp of 54, I still have two beautiful women to look after me. That's better than luck. Take, Ikh bin a zeyr mazeldike Yid.

Mangalica Pig Festival, Budapest. Special Treyf Edition!

I’ve been home in Budapest for a week, busy rewriting and editing my mysterious Transylvanian masterpiece… and suffering from a knockout common cold, so I haven’t really gone out at all since I arrived. Budapest is blanketed in a thick layer of snow and the going is slow. But this weekend is the annual Mangalica Pig Festival in the city park near my house, so with a dose of freshly imported Nyquil and an extra sweater, I dragged myself into the wintery park to gawk at pork. Hungarians love pork.

No, that’s an understatement. Hungarians adore pork. Hungarians worship pork. Pork is what Hungarian heaven is made out of. Hungarians are top quality smoked bacon transformed into Human flesh. Having just spent two months in the health conscious USA where I could feast on beef and fish and lamb, I haven’t been all that happy about my meat choices on the old homestead. Pork, pork, chicken, and pork. I have not quite been able to make the transition yet. I still want greens in the winter, salads, and other illogical choices in a land where people still eat according to the seasons. And it is now bacon season.

Now, as a non-observant Jew, that shouldn’t bother me. I eat pork. I eat cheeseburgers. I recently ate raw sea cucumber and sea squirts, so something that even has a spinal cord should not faze me no matter how treyf it is. I did, in fact, pick up an ample supply of high quality oinkerie while I was laid over in Rome, but I needed some kind of special jolt to get me back into the Hungarian Way of Meat, and the Mangalica festival was just the thing. Mangalica is a particular local breed of wooly haired pig known for its luxuriant fat, a factor that goes a long way in Hungary, where lard, bacon, and salami are staples consumed daily, and in many cases, hourly.Just when Hungary entered the EU, it took the EU patent on a number of locally produced products that henceforth could only be labeled as Hungarian produced products, such as Tokaj wine (screwing the producers of Italy’s Friuli wine region, who produced their own form of Tokaj but are no longer allowed to use the name) and generally known in Hungary as “Hungaricum.” Mangalica as a pig breed was originally Hungarian, but fell victim to the use of industrial strength porkers during the communist years and almost went extinct, until the breed was revived during the 1990s by bio farmers in Hungary and Austria – thus it gets the Hungaricum label but not the EU protection. No matter, it’s just a pig with curly hair and grainy fat.

Good grainy fat. Fumie and I had a mangalica meat cook-off last year with middling results: it’s a bacon and lard pig, not really a meat porker. But that doesn’t stop the Hungarian producers from promoting the hell out of it, and well they should – good mangalica salami, bacon, or crackling is a thing of beauty. I was pleased to see the homies from my Mom’s town of Veszprem representin’...

There is nothing a Hungarian needs in the middle of winter more than a good outdoor festival to get the blues out of the air. The normally dour Magyar soul opens up at festivals, especially around things that Hungarians are familiar with - bacon, fiddle music, and palinka are a good starting point. People were laughing and singing and dancing… I came up on some of my oldest friends playing Transylvanian folk music in the courtyard of the Agricultural Museum.

Geza (my old bassist from DNK,) Pintyu, and Pubi on lead fiddle had been playing for three days in the snow, pumped with wine, palinka, and plenty of freshly fried mangalica pig skin and bacon which were constantly being offered by the coterie of traditionalist butchers who had hired them to play for their central quarter of the festival. Since they had to play outdoors in the cold and snow, they brought their worst instruments to play outside. But no matter... Pubi plays as well after drinking for three days as he does when he's sober. As we musicians say... he has more chops than a butcher shop. It was perfect – these guys are some of the most accomplished Hungarian folk musicians, they have all played on the world’s best stages, for the State Folk Dance ensembles and for world music festivals, but here they were just having fun in funny hats with brandy and fried pork and and bacon, the way a Magyar is supposed to have fun in the snow. This is music the way I like it: honest, greasy, and freezing its ass off.

Rome: The Eternal City of Airport Transit Hotels

Getting back to Budapest was not the easiest part of my journey. I flew out of Newark on Alitalia, and arrived in Rome at 7 am on Saturday morning with two hours to nose around before connecting to my flight to Budapest. Fumie had flown separately, so her flight was via Lufthansa connecting in Frankfurt. I figured I would grab a chunk of cheese at the duty free, hop on the plane, and be home. Of course, things don’t work like that. Budapest was snowed in with two feet of snow falling the night before and more coming down, and the airport was closed, all flights cancelled. So my day flowed by waiting for another flight, running down to the luggage carousel to collect my bags, rebooking a new flight outside in the public arrivals area, checking in my bags, and going through the security process again… and again… and again throughout the day. The Alitalia staff was helpful in their slightly confused, monolingual way. The representatives of Malev? Non-existent on the ground, they made themselves manifest as telephoned refusals to provide meals for the stranded passengers milling around the terminal. They didn’t have the decency to call the gates to tell the airport personall when a flight was cancelled or delayed.

The Alitalia staff simply shrugged and said “Well, you know… it’s Malev… they never pay” as if anybody who didn’t already know about Malev must have been on some other planet for the last century. Malev… isn’t that short for 'malevolent?' Should any company that ran out of money years ago still be allowed to operate? A company that even Russian oil millionaires seem wary of taking over? Fumie called from Frankfurt, where she was delayed: Lufthansa had issued all passengers a ten Euro meal voucher. As anybody who has flown anywhere via Germany knows, there really is no food in German airports – except wurst. Frankfurters or Bratwurst, not much else, and never very good. Poor Fumie. In Rome, at least, we had wonderful coffee bars and Panini galore… I broke down and ordered a pizza combo.

At Fumicino, the pizza isn’t spectacular, but it did come with real wild porcini mushroom. And I got an Alpine sandwich with speck bacon in the bargain. Not shabby at all. Eventually, after being rebooked three times through the day, our final chance of catching a final five pm flight fell through. With no idea of what to do, and expecting to sleep curled up in a corner of the baggage claim area, I went to the Alitalia ticket counter to rebook my flight yet again and was told that Alitalia would be sending me to a hotel to spend the night. Since my flight had been booked through Alitalia I was lucky: those passengers who booked through Malev were only offered a room at a special airline refugee rate. I hauled my bags to the overnight baggage guard room and hopped on the shuttle bus. So at the very least I get to see some of Rome… or at least Ostia, the beachside suburb near the airport (although it actually is a part of the municipality of Rome.) I was in a good mood when I arrived… Here is the view from my balcony:

While Budapest sat under two feet of snow, I had palm trees and balmy spring mediterranean weather. I had dinner and went for a walk. The food at the Hotel Satellite was buffet style and quite possibly the worst I have ever eaten in Italy, but then that alone made it special and, after all, it was free. My favorite thing to do in Italy, however, is visit the supermarkets and I had just enough time to run down the street to a “Simply” market. Having run through the security checks so many times, I had a good idea of what I could and couldn’t bring and what to expect, and since I was already passed into the European Union, I could go hog wild, which is what I did.

Italian supermarkets seem like the happiest places on earth. I grabbed a zampone – a smoked pig leg stuffed with cotechino sausage, usually served at New Years with lentils and now on sale – and asked the deli staff how to cook it. They could speak English, surprisingly unlike the airport staff, and soon I had four butchers all trying to find the best way to prepare pig leg.

I grabbed a few cheeses that were half the price of the ones on sale at duty free. I popped in a few jars of anchovies and a couple of salamis. I would have picked up more but there is a limit to how much even I can carry alone… So now I am back... still busy for the next week with writing... but I already miss my folks back in the USA... and can't wait to visit them again.

Bukharan Jewish Lunch in NY's Diamond District: Tam Tov

It seems like a long way from the Silk Road, in the New York Diamond district, nested between watch repair shops and diamond resellers is a small and happy oasis of Central Asian Jewish cooking, the Tam Tov Glatt Kosher restaurant. The Tam Tov serves the Bukharan Jewish cooking that has satisified the Persian speaking Jews of Uzbekistan for a long time - the Bukharan Jews are one of the oldest documented ethnic groups in Central Asia, dating back possibly to Assyrian times but more likely to the end of the Persian exile around 500 BC. Since even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Bukharan Jews had been leaving Uzbekistan en masse and emigrating to Israel, New York, and Australia. An invite from Pete Rushevsky, klezmer tsimbl player extraordinaire, led up a creaky staircase three floors above 40 West 47th Street (near Rockefeller Center subway on on the B train) to one of the more unique traditions of Jewish cuisine.Pete has been keeping a professional eye on the changing face of New York's Jewish music communities as director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance in New York. The Bukharan Jews have long been the professionals in performing the Shashmakam tradition of Bukharan classical music, a traditon that today has emigrated with the Bukharan Jews and is still a living part of their cultural identity. Bukharan restaurants often feature singers and instrumentalists on weekends and serve as centers for the Central Asian Jewish communities abroad, and the Tam Tov is no exception. Pete got to the Tam Tov first and started by ordering what he said was the best avocado salad in the city, served with excellent home-made lepeshka, the round Uzbek bread we discovered a few years ago while in the Ukraine. Bored of the latkes and borscht repetetiveness of Ukrainian eateries, we started eating at the halal Muslim Uzbek cafes that can be found at most city marketplaces in the Ukraine. And that's where we discovered lagman soup.Lagman is the far western version of a Chinese noodle soup - the "men" derives from the pan-asian term for pulled noodles, la mian - but it incorporates western elements as well: tomato soup stock, beef, and thicker wheat noodles, and my guess was that Tam Tov uses linguine.

Pete next ordered a couple of Uzbek rice pilaf dishes, the regular Uzbek plov (pictured above) with beef and carrots, and a "Bukharan plov" which had incorporated chicken bits with chopped cilantro and parsley.

Nearly every table had an order of manti dumplings. These were the classic Asian dumpling that migrated into Russia with the Tatars and Mongols and became known as pierogi, pelmeni, vareniki, or chibureki to the west, and manti in Turkish or mandoo in Korean. Like many, they are pretty simple and filling staples - the Tam Tov version is filled with beef and onions and perked up with a bit of Israeli shrug sauce from a jar on the table. Another nice touch was the french fries: Pete had been singing the praises of the Tam Tov Bukharan french fries... which he said were covered in chopped dill and garlic. Our waitress didn't know what Pete was talking about and from the look on her face, she quite obviously thought the man was insane. Dill? On fries? But eventually she said "OK. You want us to make them ... ummm.. like Bukharan style?" and out they came dressed with diced garlic and parsely.I would try this at home if I ever made french fries at home, which I don't. Now, as many of my readers know, I am often wary of Kosher resturants - I have been to many of them that were mainly fuel stations for the Orthodox, a place to absorb enough kosher calories until the trip home for a real meal. The problem is that the people who prepare most kosher restaurant food simply never have had food that rises above the level of merely palatable, and since they never eat outside of their community, how would they even know that their cooking is mediocre? This is most obvious among the Ultra Orthodox Hasidim, many of whom wont even eat the cooking of other Hasidic kitchens not supervised by their own rabbis. The matzoh-stuffed chicken leg that feeds half of Brooklyn's Jews is not a symbol of good Jewish cuisine. The endless Israeli salads... a cheap and easy way for kosher caterers to avoid actually cooking food. As for tradition? Grandma's cooking is great, but we can't sit at Grandma's table all the time. I have eaten a lot of kosherei in my time, and very little of it made my mouth want to sing the way the Tam Tov did. This is good food: the fact that it is kosher is probably just a side benefit for most of the customers who come for a unqiue, filling, and surprisingly inexpensive meal for midtown Manhattan.

Remember: you go into a doorway, walk up two flights of stairs... past the teenage girls speaking in Russian and the orthodox Jewish guy singing in the hallway in Persian... and do what Rushevsky does: order an avocado salad to go. It really is the best in the city.

Life is a Bowl of Chinese Wonton Noodle Soup.

In a week from now I will be sitting back at home in Budapest... wishing I was on East Broadway eating chinese wonton and noodle soup. It is always like this. I can easily leave the United States of Fox TV, of the mind numbing shopping malls and the squalid Starbucks coffee shops and the strange puffy stuff they think is bread, but I have the hardest time leaving the Chinese noodle soups. Fumie and I spend hours weekely trying to piece together the recipes for the proper soup stock, we run all over town chasing after some dry pasta that may or may not provide something "like" the classic Hong Kong fresh Cantonese noodle bite, but it is hopeless. You want Chinese noodle soup? You have to go to a Chinatown to have it.

The best thing about Chinese noodle soup may well be the price. You can fill yourself up for under four dollars, five if you want a chunk of roast duck or char siu pork tossed in. Yesterday Fumie and I made a beeline for one of our favorite places at 70 East Broadway in the heart of the Fujienese Chinese neighborhood: the East Corner Wonton Resturant.These are the places that your parents never took you to. You can easily recognize them by the ducks and ribs hanging in the window, and they seem to be on every street corner in lower Manhattan, adn quicte honestly, I am amazed that there isn't a Chinese noodle shop on every street corner in the entire world... we don't want your cheap goods and shoddy plastic shoes, China. We want your noodles. And your Roast duck. On Rice. We will give you five dollars of hard american currency for it. We will let you control Google.com if you will add some crispy spare ribs in sauce with that. Heck, we will hand over the entire American economy for it if you throw in some steamed chinese broccoli with oyster sauce. We are not proud. It's called pragmatism.

Suddenly, one-sided globalization seems like a much more comfortable concept. Chinese noodle soup comes in various forms, from a filling and cheap noodles and shrimp wonton version to noodles, shrimp, and any of a variety of roast meats seen hanging in the window. Duck, roast pork, stewed tripe, roast cuttlefish, and even those squiggly things that we think are pig intestines - I've had them, they are good, but I have never had them in a place where anybody spoke enough English to explain them to me.

I have a weakness for stewed beef, which means beef tendon, a gelatin-rich cut of cow leg that makes my skin feel like a baby's bottom. My advice for eating in a Chinese soup joint is - if you think you will not like something, and if the waiter feels he needs to warn your round-eyed lao wai ass about it, it is probably really good to eat. When the waiter says "You no like that" just remember to listen to him in reverse: you like that.

So go for the gelatinous stewed beef tendon... the squiggly pig guts... the orange cuttlefish... and always order the "chinese vegetable" with oyster sauce! You can thank me later. And trust that the world of New York's Chinatown knows exactly how to present itself. A bit later we striolled around and visited some of the local shops... excellent kitchen ware cheaper than anywhere lese in the world. And also the Chinese pharmacies, which offer cures for a dizzying array of ailments that all of us can use.

Korean Fish Heaven: Dokdo, Palisades Park, NJ. UPDATED WITH SEA SQUIRTS!

My old buddy, Marshall Tito, the guiding spirit of Former Makedoslavian Republic of Yugodonia (FMRY) drove up from the bowels of New Jersey last night a bit late to make it into the glowing lights of New York City for dinner, so we headed out into the borderlands along the Hudson in search of something to eat. Now, Madame Tito is not a fan of Asian food... but she was at the hotel taking care of cute little Tito Jr., so something Asian was definately going to be on the menu.

The towns along the Palisades Cliffs in New Jersey have always been a string of suburban ethnoid enclves, and the old Italian and German emigrant neighborhoods are now diminished and the nabes turn overwhelmingly Spanish towards the south, and Korean towards the more affluent north up towards the George Washington Bridge. After cruising around Fort Lee, NJ - and passing a couple of inviting Korean BBQ places, Vietnamese pho joints, and never finding the Malaysian restaurant we were searching... we turned tail and made it down the hill to Palisades Park, the single most densly populated Korean suburb in the area. You want serious Korean? Palisades Park.Walking along Broad Street is like walking along a street in Seoul. Dozens of Korean delicatessens, bars, bakeries, and restaurants... we've been here before. Since Marshall Tito (or Walter, as his friends sometimes call him) felt like something light, we passed on the BBQ, and looking into one brightly lit place, Tito saw some... crispy fish being served. Crispy fish! Aha! Who doesn't like crispy fish?We were seated and immediately knew it was going to be good... our hostess could barely communicate in English. That is not rare in NJ Korean places, but it almost guarantees fantastic food and great service. Live octopus and sea squirts swimming around in a tank... another good sign. A gaggle of middle aged Korean men smoking cigarettes just outside the door. Must be good! No other round-eyed customers... an excellent marker of quality! The menu had a few items listed in English, most all of which was unfamiliar... cod liver casserole? Pollack roe stew? A column of "Live Fish Dishes?" Welcome to the Dokdo, a Korean seafood restaurant, located at 280 Broad Avenue beneath a Dentist office acorss the street from the Palisades Park Police Dept. at the corner of Broad St. and East Central Blvd. (Tel: 201-242-9999)Koreans are proud of their food, and it is one cuisine that does not compromise or get watered down into an American version. The Koreans of New Jersey are a prosperous bunch - and they want the best when they eat. Fresh fish is essential. When we saw a bright room full of Koreans wolfing down fish, we knew we had hit paydirt. We naively thought we might start with some sushi, maybe try a fish stew, but eventually Marshall Tito simply relied on the time honored technique of pointing at other people's tables and saying "I want that." It always works. We finally agreed with our hostess to split the cheapest seafood combo at $60 for two persons. I mean, heck... for two? Why not? Koreans like to cover the table with small dishes... going out is always some kind of banquet. All we knew was that on the other tables there was a crispy fish. And then it began. An unending procession of seafood. Incredible seafood. Never have I had so much... so goooood. First they brought out some seared salmon sushi and edamame with pickled onions. I have never, ever, eaten anything that had artistically drizzled sauce on the plate, so I was skeptical... for a second. Ony a second. Amazing... better than any sushi I have had on this trip... and that would be the last we saw of rice for the rest of the meal. Next... a flurry of small dishes appeared. they are delicious, especially the guys. ... which are sea snails, shelled at the table by our hostess. Steamed monkfish roe, the foie gras of the sea. Monkfish may be ugly, but they taste great. Now comes a pair of fresh, very fat oysters with an artistic garnish of herring roe? Some grilled mushrooms? Shrimp tempura? A small bowl of something white was produced which the waitress could not explain... we were instructed to stir it up and slug it down in one shot and chase it with a shot of shoju, the clear Korean liquor. Then I realized that it was a yam starch concoction... putting my mind to rest that somebody had been jerking off a fish in the back room. But, hey, since a cod doesn't count as homo, boruch, omeyn, down the drain.Next came clam soup in clear pepper broth, a plate of corn caserole, and a bowl of raw seafood in cold broth with cellophane noodles and red pepper. Some of these things had tentacles... some didn't, some were recognizable, some were not, all were incredibly good. I don't know if they sneaked any sea squirt in there, but if they did, it tasted good and I thank them.This was a surprising and fantastic dish - sort of a Korean seviche, but with octopus, scallops, cuttlefish, and squid... and just in case we didn't have enough squid, a new salad of iced large squid slices, herring roe, lettuce and red pepper paste now appeared. After admiring it, a waitress came and tossed it for us. We must have seemed like two farm boys, marveling at the fact that there were ice cubes in our salad. If you don't know what to do, the staff will jump in and show you. Whoa! This was getting to be a lot of food. I was already complementing Marshall Tito on his blind luck in choosing of spur of the moment Korean joints, comparable to his amazing victories in Vis and his miraculous escape from Jajce, when out comes a bit more... grilled eel.

How are we ever going to finish this? We are stuffed to the gills with crusteacens and mollusks and cephalopods and things even lower on the Linnean scale of evolution when our waitress/hostess shows up at the table with this:A massive platter of thick cut Korean style sashimi, known simply as hwe, or fish. Tuna, salmon, sea clam, pollack, yellowtail, octopus, squid, white tuna... piled on a bed of shaved radish vermicelli. Lucky I didn't finish all the periwinkles! Korean sashimi is cut thicker than Japanese sashimi - it is a hefty mouthful, and there is a lot of it. Other tables had a mountain of some thin cut white sashimi on a huge bed of radish noodles, but this was perfect for those who think that sashimi is only a light meal. It wasn't. It was chunk o' fish. You get the soy sauce and wasabi to go with it, but you also get a spicy red pepper sauce to dip it in which makes a world of difference, and you can chase it with clam broth, buckwheat tea, or soju. Boredom does not occur in Korean cuisine. Yes, I am glad to report, we did finish it... slowly. Eating at a Korean restaurant serves the purpose that going to a bar does in Europe: it is a night out, you take your time, you enjoy talk with your friends, you drink a bit, and make the evening last. And if you think you are getting bored of regular Japanese sushi and sashimi, try the Korean version. After all, Dokdo is the Korean word for the Liancourt Islands, a couple of rocks in the sea of Japan that have been the bone of diplomatic contention between Korea and Japan for decades. And might I suggest sashimi to both sides... the boneless contention?

UPDATE Januray 26: a few days later I went back to the Dokdo with Fumie and my sister Pam. The hostess recognized me from my first visit, and she then convinced the owner to updgrade our combo plate order to the special Korean specialty combo for four people... and I can say it was every bit as good as on our first visit. The new selection was quite different, and it had a few of those seafood bits that we non-Koreans don't usually order. As Fumie said, these were just the things a Japanese would never put in front of a round-eye guest. The Koreans don't have any such hang-ups. These are Korean delicacies, so your Korean hosts are delighted for you to try them. The idea is to get your brain around the idea that you are happy to try them. This is Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods territory... some of the stuff that I would never have ordered but once it was put in front of me... well I just had to try it. Like the sea squirts.
These were actually... interesting? They had an intense seafood flavor, a bit amoniac, a bit bitter... they had an outer skin that was smooth and leathery, and you had to suck out the orange meaty bit. It was bit like like eating seafood from a toy football on the halfshell. Well... I have done it. I ate sea squirt. After that, the sea urchin gonads - uni in Japanese - were easy.Simply buttery, rich, soft roes, never mind that they come from something in the starfish family. Like I said... going ever lower into the Linnean catagories we finally cam to this: sea cucumber. Sea cucumber is essentially a giant sea worm. Now, even though I have lived ten years with a Japanese woman who eats all kinds of creepy crawlies I have never thought I would be sitting at table eating giant sea worms, but there is a first time for everything. First of all... these things are blue. Animal protein blue. That is not a common color in meat.I have never eaten blue meat before, and most likely, neither have you. Second: sea cucumbers are not very smart. I mean, they are called sea cucumbers, not sea professors or sea lawyers. Even after they have been sliced, when you touch them with your chopstick they move a bit. I may well be the First Jew In The World Who Ate Raw Sea Cucumber. It can not possibly get more unkosher than this. Well, looks never stopped me. In they go!Aha! Superclam! Or tasty little ball of hard, chewy snot. The jury is still out on this one. I was the only one to eat these - everybody else tried them (or claimed to) and left the rest for me. Whether out of spite, adventure, or a natural boy scout's urge to gross out the girls at the table I almost finished the order. Almost. They had a surprisingly tough, chewy, almost crunchy texture, very salty, almost bitter... Now I know why things like this are such good fish bait. So remember: if you try the Dokdo... it is great. Even the creepy crawlies.