Tuna Surprise!

The other day, Nana and I had a hankering for sushi, and while we've had some pretty good stuff at the U9 (a chain Japanese-ish restaurant), they always insist on bringing weird stuff with the platter, too. So we thought we would check out what appeared to be another Japanese place in our building (the pictures of raw tuna on the sign were pretty promising)--especially since our lunchtime success at a little sandwich shop downstairs had left us emboldened to try something else new. (I swear, the cole slaw and sketchy beef patty made it taste VERY vaguely like Primanti's. Oh, how I would kill for Primanti's!)

Anyway, the restaurant. No picture menu, it turned out--in fact, not much of a menu at all. Our dinner choices consisted of tuna, tuna, or tuna, sliced and raw, in various portions (the cheapest of which was 18,000 won per person). But, hey! We chalked it up to cross-cultural experience, sat down, and opened our collective wallet wide.

Now, the good news is that the food was excellent. After an utterly inexplicable aperitif consisting of one shot of cold whole milk, we had several different cuts of several different kinds of tuna (ahi, yellowfin, albacore), all very high quality, and thanks to some gesture-laden instruction from the server, figured out that we were supposed to dunk the tuna in either salt oil or soy sauce before we laid it on a sheet of dried seaweed (with a dab of wasabi, of course). She did not, however, show us that we were supposed to eat the resulting contraption with our hands, and no doubt got a good laugh out of whitey fumbling needlessly with chopsticks. Bonus: the tuna came with a creamy roasted corn casserole of some sort and a really tasty salad.

When the corn casserole was scraped clean, then, and the last bit of tuna devoured, Nana and I, very satisfied (but very much $36 poorer), stood to pay the tab, at which point the waitress all but shoved us back into our seats. To our utter and lasting horror, she returned with another heaping plate of raw fish! Which means that the 1-person, 18,000-won portion would have been plenty for us, in fact not much more than dinner for two at the KBBQ! Curse you, Korea, and your ban on two people sharing one plate!