Korean Comfort Foods: Kimchi Fried Rice

I still remember the first time I ate kimchi fried rice.

It was my first week at ELS, the language institute I taught at, in December 1990. Everything still felt new then—the streets, the sounds, the rhythm of the workday, even the weather. Two students from a class I had observed asked if they could take me to lunch. In those days, students often did that. It was one of the unexpected kindnesses of language teaching in Korea. Sometimes it was partly for extra English practice, and I’m sure that was part of it then too, but in those first uncertain days it felt like something more generous than that. It felt like a welcome.

 

Down the street from ELS, there were several little restaurants that seemed to exist for the lunchtime rush of teachers and students from the nearby hakwons. At noon, they filled quickly with voices, steam, metal chopsticks, and the coming and going of people who had only a short time to eat before hurrying back to class.

 

That day was gray and overcast. There was a chill in the air and a fine drizzle that made the street shine. The restaurant my students chose was already crowded inside, so to handle the overflow, there was a tented area set up outside, something like a pojangmacha attached to the building. Inside were a few tables, close together, and a kerosene heater that gave off a wavering warmth. I can still picture the damp afternoon light pressing against the plastic walls of that tent and the feeling that, somehow, I was already being drawn into a world that was no longer entirely foreign.

 

Then the food arrived.

 

A server brought out an iron pan the size of an inverted hubcap and set it down over a portable gas burner at the table. It was heaped with kimchi fried rice, glowing red, topped with fried eggs. The smell came first—hot oil, rice, spice, the deep sour warmth of kimchi. Then the first bite: the sharp, fiery tang of the kimchi, the savory richness of the rice, the small bits of ham tucked throughout, and the egg pulling it all together.

 

Some tastes stay with you, no matter how many years pass. That was one of them.

 

But what I remember now is not only the taste. It is the feeling of that meal—the closeness of the tables, the drizzle outside, the kerosene heater, my students across from me, smiling, watching to see what I thought. It is one of the things I came to love most about Korea: the way food is so often shared, the way a meal can be both ordinary and deeply human at the same time. Eating together is never just eating. It is a kind of fellowship. A way of saying you are here with us now.

 

In those first weeks in Korea, I was welcomed in many ways, but some of the most lasting came through meals like that one. Looking back, that first pan of kimchi fried rice was more than lunch on a drizzly afternoon. It was one of my first real tastes of Korea—warm, spicy, communal, and full of grace.