Firestarter at Passion and Fire. This is Lemon Soju, in Tokyo.

Wednesday November 12

17:52

Firestarter

불닭, or Buldalk, is one of the spiciest Korean foods there is. Bul coming for the Chinese character for “fire” and dalk meaning “chicken”, this is a dish in Korea that is so spicy that most Koreans have tried it once, but very few make a habit of it.

Would the restaurant Buldalk in Shibuya, then, live up to its name? Or would is be another spiced-down-for-Japanese tastes experience?

Initial signs were not good - no Korean menu and a Japanese only pen-scanner based ordering system (!) means there’s likely to be few real Koreans going there, unless they’ve lived in Japan for a while. Delving into the menu, I found that to get spicy Buldalk you have to pay extra. What?! So the standard “Fire Chicken” isn’t spicy? You’d expect a restaurant to be able to cook properly the food it named itself after!

We ordered the spicy one. It wasn’t even close to what you’d expect in Korea. Yeah, my Japanese friends were shouting “my mouth hurts, my mouth hurts” and trying to use makoli (막고리) to soothe the pain - but Japanese can’t handle anything spicy. They put one DROP of tabasco sauce on a pizza, for chrissakes.

That said, it shows just how long it has been since I had real Korean food in Korea that I revelled in last night’s offerings. I haven’t had totorimuk (도토리묵) for ages - in fact it’s the first time to find it in Japan.. that alone pleased me! And even though it only had six slivers of totori, the dressing was like heaven. I gobbled it down trying not to think “I paid 1000 yen for this when I’d get five times the amount for free as ’service’ in a Korean bar in Korea.”

The delights of the night in pictures:

불닭 - Buldalk