$6 Bad Lunch, $6 Good Lunch

My lunch totally sucked yesterday. I went to the normally dependable Cafe Zaiya near my office and was excited to see there was one chicken oyako-don left. These seem to sell out quickly here and I generally eat lunch later than most. When I got back to my desk and opened the container, I couldn't find any chicken. After double checking the label confirmed it was a chicken oyako-don, I poked at the yellowish-grey mass and unearthed three tiny nuggets of poultry. The dish was overwhelmed with bamboo shoots and julienned strips of pink-edged fishcake. There's a very good chance I don't know what I'm talking about, but I've come to expect chicken oyako-don to be composed of onions, scallions and egg. Nothing more, nothing else. After a few bites of rice and chicken, I dumped the rest into the garbage. What a disappointment.

Today I decided to go out for lunch. I took the bus up 5th Avenue to Koreatown and settled on Woorijip, which is a sorta fast food place with lots of prepackaged items, as well as a small hot and cold buffet. In the back they have a little counter called something like the Noodle Hut. You place your order with the ahjuma and a few moments later you have a freshly prepared bowl of noodles or hotpot. I ordered sujebi, which is a type of Korean noodle. The chewy sujebis kind of look like a cross between a flattened piece of gnocchi and dduk, Korean rice cake. The sujebis are served in a very basic fish-based broth (dried anchovies most likely), which gets thickened by the noodles. There are lots of scallions along with thin slices of zucchini and carrot. A small dish of kimchi and ohdeng accompanied. Completely satisfying, I couldn't have asked for a more perfect lunch.

P.S. This totally made me have garlic breath for the rest of the day, hooray!