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Korean Culture and Cuisine, Essay Example

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The Korean population has over 70 million people that speak Korean, which is considered a part of the Tungusic branch from the Ural-Altaic language families. The language has a very close relationship with the Japanese traditional grammar and language style of speaking(EveryCulture,2015). The rich history and culture of Korean people go back as early as 500,000 B.C. in the Korean Peninsula populated by Paleolithic people (Asian Info,2015). In addition, the Korean people tradition and culture has been kept and somehow the foundation of Korean culture has remained unchanged. The Korean people have been through wars, North and South differences and many environmental, social and political changes while documenting their traditions in detail. The Korean culture and cuisine has evolved through social and political change, natural environment changes and different cultural trends. Korean cuisine has a basic food combination of steamed cooked rice, vegetables and some meats. The changes in the Korean cuisine originated from their migrations to different parts of the country from village to region to national locations. Korean traditional cooking has many side dishes called banchan such as Kimchi served with every side dish delicacy (China Business Weekly,2011). The tradition of the Korean meals has the following characteristics such as rice, kimchi, bulgoi, and spicy cold noodles. In addition, the cuisine is spicy, tasty, sour and sweet with shrimp, squid, mushrooms and vegetables (Home Cook Dairy,2011).

The Korean culture, tradition and cuisine is integrated is the fabric of their existence from generations of heritage and social tendencies that has not changed. The family combines any event for the family with a specific meal for that occasion and culture rituals that follow any celebration. The Korean people take offense when traditional dishes are not followed exactly the way it was taught by their forefathers. The entire Korean family is held accountable for ensuring these traditions are not altered, changed or any outside influence. The Korean tradition that remains in place for the family is the mandatory respect for the elderly. The ultimate respect for the elderly is everyone bowing and recognizing their contributions to the family while still be a leader of the community and family (Korean Times, 2008).

Korea has a long and rich tradition of excellent cuisine with deep roots with significant historical and cultural customs. One the major heritage accomplishments of Korea have been their ability to preserved their original customs and traditions from generations to generations. The Korean culture is based on humility, sincerity and gratitude when meeting a person, eating with friends or family and praying is important. Their etiquette is being humble by bowing which is the same as a handshake (Golden,2012). Korea is one the few countries that has been through social and political turmoil but managed to keep the foundation and roots of their ancestors in place. Some countries have many different influences from other ethnic contributors however,

The Korean people have managed to keep outside influence from changing their long established culinary identity. The Korean people originate from the Korean Peninsula where the different clans share a very common speaking language, culture and ethnic identity. The Korean people have some significant regional differences between South Korea and the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea. They both shared the same culture and cuisine traditions with a strong sense of national pride and purpose. The modern North and South Korean both keep all the traditional cultural customs in the rural parts of the country and in the city. The Korean elderly make sure that the younger generations understands the significance of keeping the culture and heritage alive and relevant. The culture of the Korean people holds the elderly in the highest esteem and celebrate their life and death as custom that the elderly should never be forgotten.

The lifestyle of the Korean keeps the culinary identity regardless whether they live in the city in apartments or in the rural area with traditional housing. The new millennium has ushered in the new technology and lifestyles changes nevertheless; the Korean people remain true to the traditional values.

Korean Etiquette

The Koreans have a humble nature that is very conscious of their speech and behavior in social settings. The husband and wife have a balance in the family with the etiquette of the male taking the lead in all situations in public. The Korean people have a naming etiquette that consist of how to address each other such as using titles instead of names (Every Culture,2015).

The best example the teacher would be respected by calling him professor or manager, or director and president. The hierarchical relationship in the Korean social world is followed regardless of business or personal relationships in the home. The Koreans have the cultural etiquette to being respectful of those that are your peers or on the same social level consequently higher status Korean people must be limited with social interactions. The Koreans will bow in respect to others they greet that position demand respect but the etiquette they use is bowing just a little bit lower for those with high statuses. The etiquette habits by Koreans of bowing has significant meaning in the Korean society and families engrain this tradition into their children for life (Korean Times,2008).

The Korean people believe that being on time is an etiquette that must not be ignored. In their culture it is believed that making an appointment or promising to attend an event is taken seriously. The North and South Koreans emphasize meeting deadlines and they believe that punctuality is a sign of respect for locals and any foreigners. Koreans believe it personal etiquette to work hard and diligently without compliant of hours or how hard the task or work. Koreans considered it rude and unprofessional to leave the job early before the executive boss.

Korean Cuisine (Royal Family)

The Korean cuisine has a fundamental foundation of rice which is the primary food of the Korean people that is eaten with literary every meal. The north has a traditional of corn, rice, wheat, barley, corn, while other cuisine traditions include vegetables such as cabbage and turnips(Thorn,2013). The Korean people may have North and South regions with different philosophical and political differences however the foundation of Korean cuisine has evolved from the dishes and techniques without being tainted with outside cultures. The Korean royal palace follows the cultural ways that all Koreans use to prepare their cuisine that are very elaborate.

The Korean culture regardless of royal palace or North or South Korean, Kimchi is a mandatory tradition made of fermented chili sauce, anchovies and cabbage that is authentic spicy and sour taste (Golden,2012). The Royal palace foods have a reputation of being exquisite, extravagant and meticulously prepared by Korean women. The traditional of drinking has its significance in the royal palace because the pouring of a drink is considered a matter of respect for the elderly. The Korean drinking culture has a long history never pouring one’s own drink. This ritual is an act of respect because the pouring of a drink for the elder, one must put their hand over their heart to show a sign of earned respect of the elder(Steinberg,2012).

The Korean royal palace families kept the tradition of Korean food in tact by training women to learn all the cultural and heritage concerning Korean cuisine. These women had different palace positions specifically to learn the history and all the different aspects of Korean food preparation (Visit Korea,2015). The cuisines were documented and learned by the royal families passing down the original recipes and traditions of the Korean cuisine. The kings and queens had the power to control the entire community or region eating regiments by demanding all food follow the thousands of years of tradition. The peasants did not enjoy the same level of extravagant food as the royal family but the recipes were the same.

The royal family has the basics meals of steamed rice, kimchi and fish with characteristics of lots of spices, fermentation and variety of side dishes (Visit Korea,2015). The royal families can be credited for ensure the traditions and Korean cuisine remains unchanged well into the future. In addition, they can be credited for keeping all the Korean etiquettes and traditions in place for future generations. In the Korean culture the etiquette of eating was a part of the cultural experience that was passed down from generations to generations. These cuisine moments were used to shared food recipes, social behaviors, historical, mythical, social and political ideas(Steinberg,2012). The royal queens and kings found that the cultural traditions must be handed-down allowed the peasants to eat the same Korean meals but not in the same grandiose fashion as royalty. The king and queen has the power to change the tradition however, they have been taught to follow the tradition of Korean cuisine, culture and heritage with opposition.

Korean Culture

The most important tradition that has been passed down for many generations is the family comes first above everything in Korean lifetime. This is an essential tradition of the Korean family culture which is never challenge from clan to clan. The father is always the head of the household handling all affairs outside of the home which women are not allowed. The father takes care of the shelter, food, and chooses the martial relationships of the entire family. The religious aspect of Korean family culture is following the teachings of Confucius. There is a set hierarchical of the family that starts with the eldest son who will earn his manhood as the right arm of the family but respecting father’s decisions. This hierarchical model has influence from the Confucius teachings that stress family, community, duty, truthfulness and family honor. The personal feelings, dreams and hopes of the individual in the Korean family is never more important that the goal of the family well-being first.

The Korea culture have an enriched, enduring and beautiful background that has been built over centuries keeping the traditions the same without integration of other cultures. The family traditions are evident because Korean people do not put their parents or grandparents in the nursing home. They spend their lives committed to the help and welfare of the parents and they never forget them with annual memorials on the day of their death. The Korean family praises the elderly ensuring they are involved with every activity and event as advisors. However, the father is the head of the household but the grandparents have a tradition of quietly making decisions to help the father. The father as the head of the household is more than just a gender tradition because the male of the household will be held responsible for the actions of their children. As result, the incorrect behavior of the wife or children will not be held responsible because it’s the father that must make sure everyone is living in the Korean tradition.

There is a specific order that makes the Korean culture work because the traditions such as dressing remains the same as their forefathers. These artful and artistic clothing represents their character and personality as Korean people. The women embrace their place in the long traditional of the household dominated by the men. The Korea’s women culture has a tradition of wearing a conservative dress called hanbok. The women’s daily look involves a hanbok with a plain blouse and a very full skirt that reaches down to her ankles. The women’s blouse is traditionally wrap and tied at the waist with long full sleeves to prevent any thoughts of improprieties. The women wear a petticoat to increase her thickness to hide the body and the men wear baggy trousers which all outfits are artfully crafted. The culture of dressing by the Korean people is representative of their way of life by remaining true to the Korean heritage.

Asian Info. (2015). The people of Korea: Brief History. Retrieved from http://www.asianinfo.org/asianinfo/korea/people.htm

China Business Newsweekly. (2011, Feb). Korean food foundation; Emmy-award winner Kelly Choi to reveal the delicious secret of Korean cuisine. China Business Newsweekly Retrieved from ProQuest Database at http://search.proquest.com/docview/850517044?accountid=34899

Every Culture. (2015). South Korea: Identification. Retrieved from http://www.everyculture.com/Ja-Ma/South-Korea.html

Golden, C. (2012). Craving Korean: for an authentic taste of the new ‘it’ cuisine, start your food adventure in L.A.’s Koreatown. Here’s where to go and what to try. Sunset , (3). 64.

Home Cooking Dairy. (2011). Top 10 most popular Korean foods. Retrieved from http://www.homecookingdiary.com/2011/06/top-10-most-popular-korean-foods.html

Korean Times. (2008, Mar). Tips on Korean custom of bowing. Retrieved from http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/special/2010/08/177_23339.html

Steinberg E. (2012). Korean Cuisine: An illustrated history. Asian Perspectives: The Journal of Archaeology for Asia And The Pacific ; Vol. (1):132. Retrieved from General OneFile

Thorn, B. (2013). Consumers’ taste for Korean cuisine grows. Nation’s Restaurant News, Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/1435039490?accountid=34899

Visit Korea. (2015). Travel highlights. Retrieved from http://english.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_6.jsp?cid=259177

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Korean street food: A culinary journey through korea

The tantalizing world of Korean street food beckons food lovers from all corners of the globe. With its vibrant colors, bold flavors, and unique textures, Korean cuisine has gained immense popularity worldwide. From sizzling skewers of meat to piping hot bowls of noodles, Korean street food offers an irresistible culinary adventure. In this blog, we embark on a mouthwatering journey to explore the diverse and flavorful street food culture in Korea. Get ready to indulge your senses and discover the hidden gems of Korean street food.

Brief overview of Korean cuisine and its popularity

Korean cuisine is renowned for its emphasis on fresh ingredients, balanced flavors, and healthful cooking techniques. It has gained tremendous popularity in recent years, with Korean restaurants and dishes appearing in cities around the world. Korean cuisine's popularity can be attributed to its bold and savory flavors, the health benefits of its traditional ingredients, and the growing interest in global flavors.

The cultural mosaic through street food

Korean street food reflects the diverse regional flavors and cultural influences present throughout the country.
Each region offers its own specialties, ingredients, and cooking techniques, providing a glimpse into the cultural mosaic that makes up Korean cuisine.

Unveiling the Treasures of Korean Street Food

Traditional Street Food Delights

Explore iconic street food dishes like tteokbokki (spicy rice cakes), sundae (blood sausage), and hotteok (sweet pancakes).
Discover the ingredients, cooking techniques, and historical significance behind these beloved street food classics.

Modern and Fusion Creations

Witness the emergence of modern and fusion street food in Korea, blending traditional flavors with global influences.
Delve into popular modern street food items like cheese corn dogs, ramen burgers, and unique culinary mashups that push the boundaries of taste.

Traditional Korean Street Food

Image credit: via pinterest

Overview of traditional Korean street food

The vibrant street food scene in Korea has a rich history and is deeply rooted in the country's culinary traditions. Korean street food is known for its affordable prices, convenient availability, and mouthwatering flavors. Street food stalls, known as pojangmacha, can be found throughout bustling markets, shopping streets, and even residential areas.

Popular dishes like tteokbokki, sundae, and hotteok:

Tteokbokki: A beloved street food dish consisting of chewy rice cakes cooked in a spicy gochujang sauce. It is often accompanied by fish cakes, boiled eggs, and vegetables.
Sundae: Not to be confused with ice cream, sundae is a traditional Korean blood sausage made with a mixture of pork, glass noodles, and various seasonings. It is usually steamed or boiled and served with spicy sauce and vegetables.
Hotteok: A sweet and chewy pancake filled with a mixture of brown sugar, cinnamon, and chopped nuts. It is griddled until golden and enjoyed piping hot.

Description of ingredients and cooking techniques:

Tteokbokki: The main ingredient is tteok, which are cylindrical rice cakes made from glutinous rice flour. The sauce is made from gochujang (fermented red chili paste), soy sauce, sugar, and other seasonings. The dish is typically stir-fried or simmered.
Sundae: The sausage casing is made from pig intestines stuffed with a mixture of finely chopped pork, glass noodles, vegetables (such as green onions and garlic), and seasoning. It is then cooked by steaming or boiling.
Hotteok: The pancake batter is made from a mixture of wheat flour, water, sugar, and yeast. The filling is made by combining brown sugar, cinnamon, and chopped nuts. The pancake is pan-fried until crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside.

Insight into the historical and cultural significance of these dishes

Tteokbokki: Originating from the Joseon Dynasty, tteokbokki was originally a royal court dish but eventually became popular as a street food. It reflects the use of rice, a staple ingredient in Korean cuisine, and the love for spicy flavors.
Sundae: Sundae has its roots in Korean sausages brought by Mongol invasions during the Goryeo Dynasty. Over time, it evolved into a popular street food dish that represents the resourcefulness of Koreans in using various parts of the pig.
Hotteok: Introduced during the early 20th century, hotteok is believed to have been influenced by Chinese stuffed pancakes. It has become an iconic street food snack that brings warmth and comfort, especially during the colder months.

Regional Variations in Street Food

Just as Korea boasts a diverse landscape and regional cultures, its street food scene varies across different regions. Each region offers its own unique flavors, ingredients, and local specialties, making the street food experience a culinary adventure.

Focus on Seoul, Busan, and Jeonju

Image credit: honestfoodtalks via web

As the capital city and culinary hub of Korea, Seoul is a treasure trove of street food delights. Its bustling markets like Namdaemun Market and Gwangjang Market are famous for a wide variety of street food offerings.

Signature street food dishes include:

Gyeran-bbang: Soft and fluffy egg bread filled with a whole egg, often enjoyed as a quick breakfast.
Jokbal: Tender and savory braised pig's trotters seasoned with soy sauce and spices.
Eomuk: Fish cakes served on skewers or in a warm soup, available in various flavors and textures.

Image credit: mangoplate via web

As a coastal city renowned for its fresh seafood, Busan offers a unique twist to Korean street food. The Jagalchi Fish Market and Gukje Market are popular destinations for street food enthusiasts.

Milmyeon: Cold and chewy wheat noodles served with a spicy and tangy sauce, topped with various vegetables and often seafood.
Ssiat Hotteok: A variation of hotteok with a filling of seeds such as pumpkin, sesame, and sunflower, adding a delightful crunch to the pancake.
Gukbap: A hearty soup made with beef or pork, served with rice and often enjoyed with kimchi.

Image credit: bonappetit via web

Jeonju is known as the food capital of Korea, renowned for its rich culinary heritage and traditional flavors.Hanok Village and Nambu Market are prominent spots to explore Jeonju's street food scene.

Bibimbap: A classic Korean dish consisting of a bowl of rice topped with an assortment of vegetables, meat, and gochujang sauce.
Kongnamul Gukbap: A comforting soybean sprout soup served with rice and various side dishes, representing Jeonju's emphasis on simple and nourishing flavors.
Jeonju-style kimbap: A unique variation of kimbap, a rice roll with various fillings, often incorporating Jeonju's famous bibimbap ingredients.

Modern and Fusion Street Food

In recent years, Korean street food has experienced a dynamic transformation with the emergence of modern and fusion creations. Inspired by global food trends and creative culinary experimentation, vendors have started offering innovative twists on traditional dishes and incorporating international flavors.

The globalization of food culture and the increasing popularity of Korean cuisine worldwide have played a significant role in shaping modern street food in Korea. Global food trends, such as the rise of food trucks, the popularity of comfort foods, and the fusion of different culinary traditions, have influenced Korean street food vendors to experiment with new flavors and techniques.

Examples of popular modern street food items:

Cheese Corn Dogs: A modern take on the classic corn dog, this street food delicacy features a hot dog on a stick coated in batter and deep-fried to perfection. What sets it apart is the addition of a generous layer of melted cheese on the outside, creating a delightful combination of flavors and textures.
Ramen Burgers: A fusion creation that combines elements of Korean and American cuisine, the ramen burger replaces the traditional burger bun with two discs of fried ramen noodles. The patty, often made with beef or pork, is sandwiched between the crispy ramen "buns," offering a unique and satisfying eating experience.

Impact of social media on the popularity and accessibility of these dishes

Social media platforms, such as Instagram and YouTube, have played a significant role in popularizing modern and fusion street food in Korea. Food bloggers, influencers, and viral videos showcasing these innovative street food creations have created a buzz, attracting both local residents and international tourists. Social media platforms have made it easier for vendors to showcase their unique offerings, increasing the accessibility and visibility of these dishes to a wider audience.

Street Food Markets and Festivals

Korea is famous for its bustling street food markets, where vendors showcase a wide array of mouthwatering delicacies. These markets are vibrant hubs of activity, offering visitors a sensory experience filled with delicious scents, colorful displays, and lively atmosphere. These festivals showcase a wide variety of street food vendors, providing a unique opportunity to sample different dishes and explore the diverse flavors of Korean cuisine.

Famous markets such as:

Gwangjang Market:

Located in Seoul, Gwangjang Market is one of the oldest and largest traditional markets in Korea. It is renowned for its incredible street food scene, with numerous stalls offering a wide range of delectable treats. Visitors can enjoy classics like bindaetteok (mung bean pancakes), mayak gimbap (bite-sized seaweed rice rolls), and yukhoe (Korean beef tartare).

Myeongdong Street:

Situated in the heart of Seoul, Myeongdong Street is a bustling shopping district that is also famous for its street food. Food carts and stalls line the streets, offering a variety of snacks and treats for visitors to indulge in. Some popular street food items found in Myeongdong include tteokbokki, hotteok, and Korean-style chicken skewers.

Street Food Etiquette and Tips

Korean dining etiquette emphasizes respect and communal dining. Common practices include using both hands to receive or pass dishes, using chopsticks and spoons appropriately, and waiting for the oldest or most senior person to begin eating before starting yourself. Showing gratitude and compliments to the cook or vendor is also appreciated.

Specific guidelines for enjoying street food in Korea

Observe the queue: If there is a line at a street food stall, join the queue and wait patiently for your turn.
Be mindful of the space: Street food stalls can be crowded, so be aware of your surroundings and avoid blocking pathways or congesting the area.
Dispose of trash properly: Use designated trash bins to dispose of wrappers, cups, and other food packaging. Keeping the street clean is important in Korean culture.

Tips for finding the best street food vendors and identifying quality offerings

Follow the locals: Pay attention to where locals are lining up or frequenting. Locals often know the best spots for delicious street food.
Look for popular vendors: Long queues and high turnover of customers are usually indicators of a popular and reputable street food vendor.
Cleanliness and hygiene: Check for cleanliness in the preparation area, utensils, and the vendor's overall appearance. This can be a good indicator of the vendor's commitment to hygiene and food safety.

Advice on navigating dietary restrictions or allergies while enjoying street food

Research common ingredients: Familiarize yourself with common ingredients used in Korean street food and check for any potential allergens.
Communicate dietary restrictions: If you have specific dietary restrictions or allergies, communicate them clearly to the vendor. They may be able to suggest alternatives or provide ingredient information.
Opt for made-to-order options: Choose street food items that are prepared fresh and made-to-order. This allows for better control over ingredient substitutions or exclusions.

Navigating street food with consideration for etiquette, quality, and dietary restrictions ensures an enjoyable and safe experience. By embracing Korean dining customs, being mindful of your surroundings, and seeking out reputable vendors, you can fully immerse yourself in the delightful flavors of Korean street food while respecting the local culture and community.

Korean street food is a vibrant and diverse culinary realm that showcases the rich flavors and culinary heritage of Korea. From traditional favorites like tteokbokki and hotteok to modern fusion creations like cheese corn dogs and ramen burgers, Korean street food offers a captivating range of flavors, textures, and aromas. Each region within Korea boasts its own specialties and unique street food experiences, reflecting the country's diverse culinary landscape.

If you're a food enthusiast or an adventurous traveler, Korean street food is an absolute must-try. Embark on a culinary journey through bustling street markets, vibrant food stalls, and exciting street food festivals. Immerse yourself in the sights, sounds, and tantalizing aromas as you savor the delicious offerings that Korean street food has to offer. Whether you find yourself wandering the bustling streets of Seoul, don't miss the opportunity to immerse yourself in the world of Korean street food.

DISCOVER KOREAN THROUGH SNACKS

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South Korean and Japanese Cuisines and Identity Essay

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There is a famous quote saying that you are what you eat. Of course, it should not be understood literary, as our food cravings do not predicate our biological nature. The line rather describes the combination of values one is likely to carry, which can be evaluated according to their food preferences. Most countries have their distinct cuisine that was forming during many centuries. Food is not only the source of human nutrition processes, but it is also one of the brightest cultural examples. In such a way, one can predict certain traits or values of other people based on their food choices.

East Asia is one of the world’s regions that has a very distinct cuisine. People from this area associate themselves with their nationality, which includes food preferences. Japanese, Chinese, and other Asian restaurants are spread worldwide, and their kitchen cannot be confused with that of others. This paper reviews examples of South Korean and Japanese food that served as markers of national identity in the past. Yet, they are losing this determining role due to political shifts and the process of globalization.

Modern Korean land is divided into two halves, representing a separate country with an opposite economic structure. However, the food culture remains similar due to Korea’s long history as a single state, which experienced its internal cultural development and foreign influence. Nowadays, most research on this country is done regarding South Korea since its northern neighbor is not open to the world.

Colonial Past

In the past, Korea used to be one of the Japanese colonies. Although the two cultures had similar culinary products, many of them had differences in ingredients and making. For instance, soy sauce is a product that is currently viewed as traditional in East Asia, yet not many people are aware that the modern recipe is Japanese. Korean households used to brew their soy sauce, which was later replaced by the Japanese version 1 . This happened because Korean culture was not viewed as superior, and local citizens attempted to look better in the eyes of their rulers. Food as a part of this culture also had to correspond with Japanese civilization’s high standards. This is a bright example of associating food with identity, as Koreans wished to become closer to the superior nation by changing their food habits. Nowadays, another trend adds to the local soy sauce phenomena, as it is produced industrially instead of homemade. Koreans identify themselves as busy people who have no time to cook difficult recipes, which is the same for the rest of the modern world.

Modern Aspirations

As the country became independent and economically strong, Koreans received a need to promote their national pride. It is now normal to be proud of Korean culture and food in particular. Thus, the recent case of the first Korean astronaut created a precedent for developing a special recipe of kimchi, a national food, that could be taken to space 2 . Journalists compared this event with the tradition when mothers gave kimchi to their sons who left home. This is an example of how modern Koreans identify themselves through their national food, saying that they are more than proud to be a part of this culture, which has to be taken to outer space to sign their identity.

Unlike Korea, Japan did not experience the same foreign influence, except for the times in the XX century, when it had to assimilate to become an equal partner in the world’s economy and trade. Nowadays, Japanese culture is regarded as one of the most famous, yet still difficult for a foreigner’s understanding. For instance, the Japanese see raw food as the one ready for consumption, which has much to do with their perception of nature and its resources 3 . The philosophy of harmony with nature and oneself is one of the key principles of Japanese culture, which is achieved to keep past values.

Nowadays, boundaries between countries dissolve due to the economic processes, making different cultures blend. Japanese and Korean food are widely represented in the West, giving people from other cultures an opportunity to admire it from childhood. This trend makes the saying about food being a part of the identity to lose its positions. Although I acknowledge that this was the case in the past, modern reality demonstrates that Koreans can consume a lot of American food, and vice versa.

While food remained one of the national identity elements in the past, it was subject to changes for political or economic reasons. Nowadays, independent countries find pride in their food as a traditional element. However, the process of globalization threatens to exclude national cuisine as an identity feature.

Bestor, Theodore C. “Cuisine and Identity in Contemporary Japan.” In Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society , edited by Victoria Lyon Bestor, Theodore C. Bestor, and Akiko Yamagata, 273-285. Oxon: Routledge, 2011.

Cwiertka, Katarzyna J. “The Soy Sauce Industry in Korea: Scrutinizing the Legacy of Japanese Colonialism.” Asian Studies Review 30 (2006): 389-410.

Sang-Hun, Choe. “Kimchi Goes to Space, Along with First Korean Astronaut.” The New York Times , February 22, 2008.

Katarzyna J. Cwiertka “The Soy Sauce Industry in Korea: Scrutinizing the Legacy of Japanese Colonialism.” Asian Studies Review 30 (2006): 390.
Choe Sang-Hun, “Kimchi Goes to Space, Along with First Korean Astronaut.” The New York Times , February 22, 2008, para 2.
Theodore C. Bestor, “Cuisine and Identity in Contemporary Japan.” In Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society , ed. Victoria Lyon Bestor, Theodore C. Bestor, and Akiko Yamagata (Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 275.
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IvyPanda. (2020, November 5). South Korean and Japanese Cuisines and Identity. https://ivypanda.com/essays/south-korean-and-japanese-cuisines-and-identity/

"South Korean and Japanese Cuisines and Identity." IvyPanda , 5 Nov. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/south-korean-and-japanese-cuisines-and-identity/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'South Korean and Japanese Cuisines and Identity'. 5 November.

IvyPanda . 2020. "South Korean and Japanese Cuisines and Identity." November 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/south-korean-and-japanese-cuisines-and-identity/.

1. IvyPanda . "South Korean and Japanese Cuisines and Identity." November 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/south-korean-and-japanese-cuisines-and-identity/.

IvyPanda . "South Korean and Japanese Cuisines and Identity." November 5, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/south-korean-and-japanese-cuisines-and-identity/.

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The Very Best of Jonathan Gold

A tribute to the late legendary critic by those his work inspired

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Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning restaurant critic known for his way with words , multifaceted mind, and dogged dedication to Los Angeles — the city he loved and lived in — died on Saturday at 57 . He was a husband, father, and critic at the Los Angeles Times ; many, especially fellow writers and those in the food world, are still bereaving.

His longtime colleague and friend, the writer and former critic Ruth Reichl, wrote to Eater that she “can’t sleep” and is “devastated” by the loss. “He really got that food was a gateway into the people, and that food could really define a community . He was really writing about the people more than the food,” she told the New York Times critic Pete Wells.

Writers and editors from across the country were touched by Gold’s empathetic, excitable reviews, all of which contained references that reached far beyond food: British punk, Beyoncé, immigration, the Dodgers, jazz standards, Kobe Bryant, the sculpture artist Charles Ray, and “ your late Uncle Morris ” all had a shot of popping up in one of his pieces. Here now, writers share their favorite passages from Gold’s oeuvre.

Francis Lam, writer, editor, host of The Splendid Table

When I think of Jonathan purely as a writer, as someone who sees something about the human experience and articulates it in the most perfect way, I always think of this passage about eating live shrimp :

I have consumed thousands of animals in my lifetime: seen lambs butchered, snipped the faces off innumerable soft-shell crabs, killed and gutted my share of fish. I had, I thought, come to terms with the element of predation inherent in eating meat — and I am thankful to the beasts that have nourished me. But this was the first time I had ever come up against one of the most basic of nature’s postulates: You live; your prey dies. In order to eat, you must first rip into living flesh . . . not by proxy, not from a distance, not with a gun or knife, but intimately, with your teeth.

I thought about the Hindu cabby who had driven me back into town from a Singapore seafood restaurant years ago, lecturing me the entire way on the spirituality inherent in a single prawn, and I thought about my vegan friends who refuse to eat anything that once had a face.

I bit into the animal, devouring all of its sweetness in one mouthful, and I felt the rush of life pass from its body into mine, the sudden relaxation of its feelers, the blankness I swear I could see overtaking its eyes. It was weird and primal and breathtakingly good, and I don’t want to do it again.

A great writer sees things and makes us see ourselves differently because of them. This was one moment, of thousands, where Jonathan made us understand ourselves more clearly.

So I was always in awe of him for that, and that was even before I understood what his real project was: not just to make us understand ourselves more clearly, but to make us understand each other more clearly, to bring humanity closer together. God, I’ll miss him.

Gustavo Arellano, writer, columnist, author

My favorite Mr. Gold review of all time was, of all things, a Tex-Mex spot: Arturo’s Puffy Tacos in Whittier :

My friend Julie is one of those kitchen samurai you sometimes hear about, a woman who spends her year flitting from hotel room to hotel room, imposing her will on corporate-owned restaurants in every corner of the world. The nature of the job can be brutal — she is required to instruct experienced Chinese chefs on the finer points of dumpling construction, French chefs on pâté, and sushi masters on the proper way to make a spicy tuna roll. She can go weeks without leaving the megahotel at which she is currently employed, existing on staff meals and postmidnight bar snacks. When she daydreams, as she did over a platter of spicy bo ssam at Kobawoo the other day, it is often about the local Mexican food she grew up eating on the rough west side of San Antonio, Texas...

Los Angeles, oddly enough, shares in the history of the signature San Antonio delicacy. Its own puffy-taco emporium, Arturo’s Puffy Taco out in Whittier, was founded by the brother of the famous Henry not long after the San Antonio restaurant first opened its doors. (The proprietor of Ray’s Drive Inn, where the puffy taco may well have been born, was father to both Arturo and Henry.) The customers seem to be mostly expatriate Texans, packed into the tiny adjunct dining room under the signed photographs of Tejanomusicians and basketball referees, putting away mounds of food that tower over the red-sauce-encrusted tables.

Gold becomes a convert, compares picadillo to terrine, and the review ends with him wondering why he had never heard of Arturo’s in his many years of criticism. Then comes the reveal: His wife, LA Times arts editor Laurie Ochoa, tells him she used to get them all the time growing up, and wondered why she had never told him about it.

”Twenty-five wasted years,” was Gold’s concluding line. History, food, love, and Gold undercutting his own status as LA’s food god. God, I miss him already.

Jeff Gordinier, food & drinks editor, Esquire

From 1993’s “Pie’s the Limit” in the LA Times : As with all good hamburgers, a Pie ‘n Burger burger is about texture, the crunchy sheaf of lettuce, the charred surface of the meat, the outer rim of the bun crisped to almost the consistency of toast. When compressed by the act of eating, the hamburger leaks thick, pink dressing that is somewhat more tart than it may look. Soft, grilled onions, available upon request — please do — add both a certain squishiness and a caramelly sweetness. The slice of American cheese, if you have ordered a cheeseburger, does not melt into the patty, but stands glossily aloof from it, as if it were mocking the richness of the sandwich rather than adding to the general effect. The burgers here come jacketed in white paper and are compact enough to generally remain intact through three-quarters of their life — it’s kind of a genteel thing, a Pie ‘n Burger burger, a Pasadena thing.

Isn’t that perfect? I grew up on the border of San Marino and Pasadena, a few blocks away from Pie ‘ n Burger, and used to ride my bike there as a kid. What was always interesting — and moving — about Jonathan Gold’s reviews for people who lived in Southern California was that jolt of recognition. Hey, whoa, the gentle sage of LA food came to eat at our local place — and he expressed love for what we love! He got it! It gave you a sense of community pride.

A crucial thing to remember about Gold is that when his writing began to appear in Los Angeles, there was no internet. For years, a lot of hungry folks in Southern California heard about great Oaxacan and Thai and Sichuan spots the same way you might hear about great new bands: via word of mouth. Then J. Gold showed up on the scene and, as Ruth Reichl has pointed out, it felt as though all these vibrant neighborhoods started being introduced to each other through his work. Oh, there’s excellent Armenian food right up the hill? Oh, there’s a world of deliciousness a few minutes away, in Monterey Park? His writing probably helped foster millions of meetings and conversations that otherwise might never have happened. Now you can use Google to chart your culinary path around a city like Los Angeles, but in the 1980s (and afterwards) J. Gold was our Google — only a lot more persuasive and a lot more poetic.

Julia Kramer, deputy editor, Bon Appetit

When I was a student at Pomona College, I read Gold religiously. I still remember the night my boyfriend and I drove to Glendora for doughnuts at Donut Man after reading this piece :

Have you ever seen a strawberry doughnut from the Donut Man? It is an iceberg of a doughnut, a flattened demisphere big enough to use as a Pilates cushion, split in two and filled to order with what must be an entire basket of fresh strawberries, and only in season. The fruit is moistened with a translucent gel that lubricates even the occasional white-shouldered berry with a mantle of slippery sweetness, oozing from the sides, turning the bottom of the pasteboard box into a sugary miasma in the unlikely event that the doughnuts actually make it home. The tawny pastry itself is only lightly sweetened, dense and slightly crunchy at the outside, like most good doughnuts, with a vaguely oily nuttiness and an almost substantial chew. It is the only doughnut I have ever seen that is routinely served with a plastic knife and fork. It is worth every penny of the $2.50 it costs.

John Birdsall, writer, author

I used to have a printout of this 2004 column pinned to the wall above my desk. I styled at least two early pieces I wrote on this.

A single passage is hard, since it’s a piece where the thoughts wrap so tightly around each other it’s like pulling a single twig from a nest, but here, after Robert Sietsema, drunk on the Basque brain shredder Amer Picon , makes a shameful comment to a bartender in East Bakersfield who reads the both of them:

She sneered at the lameness of Sietsema’s come-on, a world-class sneer, a sneer that would have served her well behind any bar in Silver Lake or on the Lower East Side, and the two of us were as smitten as any two drunk, married guys could ever be at 3 in the afternoon.

“You two are from out of town,” she said delicately. “Tourists.” She flicked the hair out of her eyes.

“You brought a wrapped loaf in with you, so I know you’ve already been to the Pyrenees Bakery. You probably stopped in at Luigi’s — for what? A plate of beans? Spaghetti with sauce? — but you had your main lunch at one of the Basque restaurants. My guess is Wool Grower’s, because you two are too pathetic to have gotten up in time for noon lunch at one of the better places. You have a bagful of Dewar’s peanut chews in the car. After this, you’re going over to the Alley Cat, because the place is for losers, because you think the neon and the Hirschfeld mural are ‘cool.’ Tonight for dinner, you’re going to . . . not here, because otherwise you wouldn’t be here now . . . to the Noriega. Definitely the Noriega. And I don’t blame you for going there: Tuesday is prime-rib night.”

On her way back to the regulars, she turned in our direction, pulled up her blouse, and flashed us. It was a friendly gesture, and we appreciated it. Even if she’d had us mostly dead to rights.

What was astonishing then, as now, is that this was Gold’s restaurant review column. He breaks every convention of the form still manages to pack a mention of, what, 12 dishes in here? He drops them like wasabi peas along the surface of a bar: distracted by the spectacle of his drunken picaresque, you eat each one up without noticing, and when they’re gone you wish you had just a few more to nibble on. Gold puts himself at the center of a low-life binge where even the simplest food — peanut candy, for fuck’s sake! — suggests that rapture exists everywhere and is possible anywhere.

Pete Wells, restaurant critic, the New York Times

Like everybody who’s written about Jonathan Gold over the past few days, I’ve struggled to convey the sheer breadth of his work. Yes, he was unmatched at finding cuisines that were brand new to Los Angeles. In the 1980s, before the Census Bureau had registered the influx of Salvadorans, he already knew who made the best pupusas. But he also wrote about cheffed-up creations. His take on the Peruvian-Japanese fusions cuisine of Nobu Matsuhisa is still the definitive one.

And some of my favorite writing of his doesn’t have much to do with cuisine at all. His tastes in low-end dining were no more snobbish than they were in rarefied dining rooms where everybody pays with a Platinum card. He was drawn to places that were sui generis , where you could spend a few hours in a world that didn’t exist anywhere else, and sometimes that meant late nights in weird spots where the food was beside the point.

For example, this passage on a Polynesian extravaganza in Rosemead called Bahooka, which outlasted many classic paper-umbrella venues from the Trader Vic’s era but closed in the early years of the genre’s revival. You can find Bahooka in Gold’s classic 2000 guidebook, Counter Intelligence , assuming you can locate a copy of the book, which is out of print. Bahooka is listed in the index under “Tiki-American”:

Bahooka’s is the kind of place you’d expect to find near a scruffy tropical seaport—all rusted nautical gear, stolen street signs, and scarred dark wood. Lit like a navy-base bar and with more bobbing tropical fish than you’d find in a Jacques Cousteau special. Lifeboats hang out back — after the bar closes on a weekend night, you’ll always find a giggling kid or two waving from inside of one. There are fish in the foyer, fish tanks surrounding three sides of each booth, and fish swimming inside the glass-topped bar, but not much fish on the menu, unless you count some cod that seems to have sum all the way from Iceland through a sea of old oil. Fish puffs go with a Monsoon or a Jet Pilot or a Flaming Honey Bowl better than you might think, though the leaden deep-fried balls of food aren’t anything you’d want to look at by the light of day. There is no rumaki. Sorry.

When the steel-guitar lowings on the P.A. start to sound good, it’s time for a Shark’s Tooth or a Cobra’s Strike. Halfway into one of those, a sticky order of Exotic Ribs may seem like just the thing, because the ribs are moist, soak up a lot of alcohol, and come with fries, sweet baked hams, or cobbettes. The cobbettes, definitely the cobbettes. You can also get teriyaki chicken breast, ham with sweet-and-sour sauce, roast beef, or fried golf balls or shrimp, but you won’t. What will happen is that your date will suck up the last of his or her Jolly Roger Bowl and carve your initials in the booth. Don’t worry, it’s happened before.

Helen Rosner, food corespondent, the New Yorker

From 2006’s “Bring the Funk,” published in LA Weekly : There is a rhythm to an izakaya meal that is unlike any other. Glasses of cold sake and big bottles of beer appear at regular intervals, then bits of raw fish and grilled meat and savory custard are served individually or all at once. It’s a waltz-time snack-sip-chat, snack-sip-chat dynamic that can go on for the length of a Mahler symphony... animal-vegetable-mineral, warm-hot-cold, sweet-salt-funk... until, before you know it, the restaurant is empty, the lights have been turned high, and the waitress is suggesting that you might want to start finding your way home. It is cruel, the end of the evening at an izakaya.

Gold was never cynical, always precise, but a precision that had a wildness in it. I love this passage — from one of the LA Weekly reviews the Pulitzer committee cited for his 2007 award — because of how beautifully he ties together food and feeling. It’s never just what’s on the plate: it’s the patterns, the ebb and flow, learning and teaching, the wide emotional arc of being a person at a table in the fortunate position of being fed.

Gabriella Gershenson, writer, recipe editor for the forthcoming The 100 Most Jewish Foods

The first time I read Jonathan Gold’s work, it was an epiphany. At the time, I wasn’t a writer, I was a reader. As a reader, I never really paid attention to who was doing the writing, just to what was on the page. It was information to be consumed and I took for granted that it was just there. All of that changed one day when I was reading a restaurant review in Gourmet magazine, and the prose was so vivid, I wanted to know who had written it. It was Jonathan Gold. He introduced a paradigm shift that changed everything for me. I suddenly cared as much about who was telling the story, and how they were telling it, as I did about the story itself.

I wish I could remember what the review was on, or what the quote was… something about a chef’s artistry on the plate. Gold’s passing last weekend led me to a fruitless search in the hobbled Gourmet magazine online archive to find that passage. While I was not successful, I did fall down a rabbit hole of other stories Jonathan Gold had written for the magazine. He was poetic: “Hotel rooms are empty spaces yearning to be filled — with work, with sighing, with sex; cool, perfect voids screaming for completion,” he wrote in an appreciation of Hilton hotels . He was funny: ”I waved toward the canapé, telling him that I had always considered truffle oil to be the Heinz ketchup of the overbred,” he wrote about an encounter with Gordon Ramsay. He was deep: In a story on Hawaiian cooking , he wrote that ”a proper luau, like a proper bouillabaisse or a proper paella, is an ultimate expression of community through food.” It seems fitting that the sentence that struck me so many years ago has become apocryphal. What’s most important in the end aren’t the words themselves, but the fact that they, and the person who wrote them, changed the way I see the world.

Brett Martin, correspondent, GQ

From 2009’s “Snook Attack: La Chente,” published in LA Weekly : Have you ever encountered pescado Zarandeado? Because it is as intimidating as an entrée can get, a vast, smoking creature split open at the backbone and flopped open into a sort of skeleton-punctuated mirror image of itself, wisps of steam rising around the onions and lemon slices with which it is strewn, served on the kind of plastic tray you may remember from your high school cafeteria, which is probably the only vessel broad enough to handle the fish. As served at Mariscos La Chente, a Westside restaurant specializing in the seafood dishes of Sinaloa and Nayarit, it is so menacing that you scarcely know whether to eat it or beat it to death with a stick.

A Gold review was the ultimate MacGuffin — a pretense for heading out in a direction you would never have gone on your own, except that the prize at the end wasn’t an illusion. It was a fish.

This, the lede of an LA Weekly review of Mariscos La Chente, a Mexican seafood restaurant on Centinela Avenue, was “Snook Attack” and was one of several pieces Gold wrote over the years tracing LA’s cultish obsession with pescado zarandeado.

There are two lessons here: One is about the maintenance of enthusiasm, a harder thing than you might imagine, but something with which Gold never seemed to struggle, at least not on the page. The other is about truth: Gold’s writing may have been pyrotechnic, but it wasn’t Gonzo. You got to the restaurant and, by god, you wondered whether you should beat that fish with a stick. He needed neither hyperbole nor fabulism because, he proved again and again, as long as you were willing to go out that front door with open eyes and hungry belly, the world was more than enough.

Kat Kinsman, senior food & drinks editor, Extra Crispy, author Hi, Anxiety

From “Alone at Last,” published in Gourmet in 2000 : One small confession: I think the New York Hilton may be my favorite hotel. Because the New York Hilton understands me and people like me: I am a man who enjoys creature comforts in moderation, but most of all, I like to be left alone. In the Hilton — and in the many hotels like it throughout the world — I feel like a citizen. The Hilton fits like a good blue suit off the rack. And in the Hilton I always feel as if I am somebody else, somebody whose company thinks my time is important enough to put me up in a $225 hotel room in midtown Manhattan, somebody who owns a good-quality raincoat from Brooks Brothers or another fine American firm, somebody whose boss probably won’t object too much to the $125 ($125!) steak dinner for one at Maloney & Porcelli, which one of those airline magazines called “One of the Great Steak Houses of the World”... somebody who just might need a bacon cheeseburger at a quarter to three in the morning. … At the Hilton, I am neither seen nor judged and there are no clipboards. But my room is equipped with Telephone with Dataport, Thermostat (adjustable), Clock Radio, Hair Dryer, Iron, Ironing Board, and Work Desk with Lamp. The Scald-Proof Shower/Tub has water pressure enough to knock me back a step when I turn it on, and it never, never runs cold. There is J&B in the minibar and ice just down the hall and a piano bar downstairs if I am in the mood for mild entertainment. Everything is perfectly, impeccably clean, as if I were the first man in the world. And it is enough.

It’s not often than Jonathan Gold graced the East Coast with his presence or his prose, so I sop it up greedily. He also tended to truck in the extraordinary — the dish worth driving hours from your home and comfort zone to experience. It’s jarring and glorious to see him, in this piece from the May 2000 issue of Gourmet , embrace the deliberate anonymity and smooth-edged blandness of a corporate hotel because it seems almost taboo for a man of his drive and appetites to celebrate such a thing. Gold reveled in shared humanity, evidenced often by the “you” present throughout his writing, and it’s somehow tremendously freeing to know that even he needed a break from it all on occasion.

Paolo Lucchesi, food and wine editor, San Francisco Chronicle

Oddly sad about Nate Dogg. His smooth yet vicious crooning was as vital to the early '90s as Biggie's lisp or Cobain's howl. — jonathan gold (@thejgold) March 16, 2011

Gold tweeted this on March 15, 2011, on the occasion of Nate Dogg’s death. For a reason that I never quite thought too much about, I have never forgotten that tweet — the images and sounds of those three musicians in perfect juxtaposition. There’s a Hemingway-esque clarity and ease in each of those 23 words, but now that we’re reflecting on the countless things that made Gold so special, I think these 23 words say an awful lot about his greatness as a critic.

First, there’s the choice of inclusion: In expressing the essence of early ’90s music, alongside the two titans (Biggie and Cobain), he rightly celebrates Nate Dogg, the lesser known guy who sank in the background, singing hooks, a guy who was ubiquitous but not traditionally A-list. Yet Gold elevates him, taking a critical long view and declaring him every bit as essential as better-known headliners. And there’s the descriptors themselves: Vicious crooning, a lisp, a howl. Those utterly simple, evocative and unexpected details, in their absolute specificity, are haunting. Vicious crooning. Most of us writers would settle for the easier cliches — Biggie’s lyricism or flow, Cobain’s pain, his moans — and never know the power of going deeper to find the detail that captures something so precisely — and easily.

Alison Roman, contributing writer and editor, author of Dining In

From “Mr. Baguette Takes on Mr. Lee,” published in 2004 in LA Weekly : Henry Ford applied the concept of the assembly line to automobile manufacture; August Escoffier to the vast hotel banquet kitchen. The McDonald brothers broke American diner cooking down into a set of simple, easily replicated procedures and transformed the world’s restaurant in dustry in the process. Starbucks formalized espresso drinks. La Brea Bakery proved that it was possible to devote a vast industrial assembly line to the making of slow-rise artisanal bread.

But there has never been a testament to the virtues of standardization quite like the assembly line for Vietnamese banh mi at Lee’s Sandwiches, a small chain of restaurants centered around bright kitchens, clean as an operating chamber, that seem to stretch into infinity. A study in balletic grace, teams of sandwich makers, all in white, slice hot baguettes in half, chop off the pointy ends, then neatly layer meat and condiments that are sized to the skinny bread. Bakers march across the kitchen bearing trays of freshly baked French bread for the sandwich makers. A sign in the front window, perhaps inspired by the display at Krispy Kreme, flashes Hot Baguettes in burning red neon.

This whole review of dueling banh mi spots he wrote in 2004 is the first thing I remember reading and thinking, I’m going to go find these places and I’m going to go eat these things , for no other reason other than I wanted to hang out with the person who had written the article. I figured if I, too, ate these sandwiches, then somehow we’d be considered members of the same imaginary club, and I really, really wanted to be a member of that club. I didn’t even really like sandwiches! That’s how good he was.

He was the best and I trusted him implicitly (still is, still do). I’ve said repeatedly that the only bad thing about New York is that we didn’t have a Jonathan Gold, because how the hell are we supposed to know where to eat?

Brett Anderson, restaurant critic, the Times-Picayune , New Orleans

Soundgarden’s first EP, Screaming Life, may have seemed like just another obscure indie record when it came out in ’87, but in retrospect the first bow-shot of the modern rock era was fired on the first ten seconds of that limited-edition, blue-vinyl Sub Pop masterpiece (in the opening measures of the song “Hunted Down”). Thayil’s riff consisted of bottom-string guitar notes that didn’t bend, exactly, as much as they refused to commit to a single pitch; Matt Cameron’s drumming was spare and sort of thuddy, but also laid-back in a style common to metal drummers of the time but not to underground art bands. The bass lurked subliminally deep, and most of the space above was occupied by the powerful, piercing cry of singer Chris Cornell, who sounded like a goddamn trumpet. It was a record capable of making you forget everything but the overwhelming need to shake your long hair in front of your eyes.

When I began my first weekly restaurant column for the Washington City Paper, in D.C., in January of 1996, one of the many obstacles I struggled to overcome — I had never tried sushi, despised raw tomatoes and couldn’t operate chopsticks — was an ignorance of working food journalists who churned out prose in the knowing, culture-striding, slightly off-the-rails style of the music writers who inspired me to get into newspapers in the first place. Among them was Jonathan Gold, who at the time regularly wrote long features for Rolling Stone and Spin magazine, the premiere U.S. pop music magazines of the day. I’d heard Gold wrote some about restaurants in LA, but it seemed so impossible to me that his food writing could be as thrilling as, say, the Soundgarden profile he wrote for Spin in 1994 . (Follow the link and note that the opening paragraph, set in Australia, name-drops curry stands and Malibu.)

There were no punk brainiacs writing about food back then — or so I assumed before I ultimately found my way to Gold’s Counter Intelligence columns on the LA Weekly ’s website. As it turns out, Gold’s food writing was — well, anyone familiar only with it will recognize his voice in the passage above, forever emblazoned in my memory thanks to the whip-snap of the “goddamn trumpet.” Gold’s food columns regularly coiled around some set of observations, many of which sent me running (in those pre-Google days) to my reference library, only to offer up grin-inducing release, often in the form of an easily relatable revelation, like “the overwhelming need to shake your long hair in front of your eyes.” Jonathan left us way too young, but I’ll forever marvel at how long he sustained such brilliance.

Charlotte Druckman, writer, author

Here are two passages of his music writing, where you can see the brilliance of his prose, but you also get to see his range, how he started, his early driving force — and passion — and that he could NAIL a profile.

The first, an except from his feature on N.W.A. for Spin in 1989 , shows you how much he knew about a specific genre of music, and the second, his profile of Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails from Rolling Stone in 1994 , shows him writing about a very different genre and how he zeroes in on a single performer:

Public Enemy is hard. Too Short is hard. Eric B. and Rakim are hard: raw, noisy, uncommercial. Hard beats are what you hear pounding from Oldsmobiles, boomboxes, skateparks and hardly ever from the radio; spare, percussive backing tracks composed with cheap-sounding drum machines and short snatches bitten from old soul singles.

L.L. Cool J used to be hard until he recorded a love song, which no self-respecting rapper will ever let him forget. Run-DMC were hard until they jammed with Aerosmith. KRS-One of Boogie Down Productions, whose first album included an ode to his 9mm repeater pistol, wanted to stay hard so bad that he posed with an Uzi on the cover of his last album — an album whose hit single was “Stop the Violence.” The brutal calculus of hardness forgives lapses in taste, but never in form. “There’s a principle involved,” Ice Cube says. “The Weekly wouldn’t run a picture of a baby getting its head cut off; N.W.A wouldn’t do a pop song.”

Hardness arose as a rap aesthetic at about the same time much of the music became essentially suburban. While artists from Harlem and the Bronx were still producing good-time party jams, middle-class kids from Queens and Long Island began to form the contemporary image of the rapper as an articulate gangster with a chip on his shoulder, a young black man hard by choice. (Every rapper suburban middle-class Def Jam mogul Rick Rubin ever had a hand in producing is hard: Run, L.L., PE, Slick Rick, even the Beastie Boys.) Hard rap, like punk, brought together a self-selected community of kids by becoming an image of what their parents feared most.

To paraphrase the late poet Philip Larkin, hatred is to Nine Inch Nails what daffodils were to Wordsworth.

Reznor is a master of control and a perfectionist to the extent that when the stage lighting did not work out to his satisfaction at the beginning of The Downward Spiral tour, he spent two days reprogramming the system’s computer software. “It was looking like a Genesis concert,” he says. “Somebody had to get the job done.”

In the light of day, maybe yelling at a soundman or discussing marketing strategy with his manager John Malm, Reznor looks pretty robust for a rock & roll guy. He has ruddy Midwestern cheeks and an athletic ease you might associate with the quarterback of a small-college football team. Perhaps surprised by his rude health, strangers meeting Reznor for the first time often describe him as normal. (He is more likely to describe himself as a “computer dweeb.”)

Onstage though, splayed like a St. Sebastian without the torturing arrows, Reznor resembles nothing so much as the Bronze Age man they dug from that glacier in Austria a couple of years ago, give or take a pair of fish-net stockings: rough-edged bowl cut, leather cod-piece thing, garters, tunic and pre-industrial boots. Though the subject of control is as central to Reznor’s collected works as the subject of marijuana is to Snoop Doggy Dogg’s — an early press release for Pretty Hate Machinetook pains to point out “Trent Reznor is Nine Inch Nails” — Reznor appears powerless onstage, buffeted by harsh, glowing fog, martyred to the noise and to the crowd, enraged by a world he does not understand.”

You and me, we could be there, in that audience, right now, 24 years later.

Matt Rodbard, editor Taste, co-author Koreatown: A Cookbook

You find your way into a dark parking lot off Berendo, walk up a wheelchair ramp that seems to lead to a dance studio, and walk through a deserted courtyard, down a hall past a dishwashing station and up a small flight of stairs into DGM (short for Dwight Gol Mok) , a movie director’s fantasy of a smoke-filled Korean student tavern.

This is the start of Gold’s blurb for Best Kimchi Pancake from what many (me, possibly Matt Kang) consider Jonathan’s LA Weekly mangnum opus — a benign-titled Jonathan Gold’s 60 Korean Dishes Every Angeleno Should Know listicle that was actually the deepest dive into one of LA’s most-interesting food culture/sub culture. I used this article (it ran several thousand words) as a roadmap when reporting Koreatown , and was lucky enough to dine with the guy on a couple occasions, his flowing red hair ending up in our plate of sticky pork ribs at Ham Ji Park. I suspect Koreatown was Gold’s favorite food destination. It’s so alive and always changing and just the best in a city of bests. He’d never admit this of course. Rest In Peas!

Tom Sietsema, restaurant critic for the Washington Post

Jonathan was so clearly in love with the city he covered, both old and current Los Angeles. His 2011 shout out to Musso & Frank Grill in the LA Weekly manages the neat trick of telling his audience everything they need to know about the place — why it matters, what to order, its place in history — in just a few lovely sentences. To read them is to be there, with Jonathan sitting across the table from you:

If you walk into Musso expecting to have the same kind of steak you had last week at Morton’s, you probably have the wrong idea. Because before the restaurant became a martini-fueled Hollywood clubhouse, the place where Faulkner blew out his liver and generations of character actors learned to show up on Wednesday for the chicken potpie, the restaurant was practically a showcase for what was then considered California cuisine, a genteel marriage of the local produce, abundant local fisheries and masculinized lunchroom cooking: avocado cocktails smeared with sweet, pink dressing and frigid bowls of chilled consommé; fried smelts and dainty plates of crab Louie; kidneys Turbigo. This is what the cosmopolitan life was like, before Cosmopolitans. Or if you happen to be of a certain bent, you could always try a long, drowsy lunch of Vicodin, jellied consommé and Welsh rarebit, followed by a desert-dry Gibson and a long nap — an experiment in what one friend of mine calls gout-stool cuisine.

Andrew Zimmern, television host, author

Jonathan Gold defined our food world in many ways. He was an explorer, an advocate, a mentor for individuals communities and cultures. He turned phrases and put forth ideas that changed the way the rest of us considered the cultural value of eating. His impact on dining in America is beyond measure. Personally I lost a lighthouse. Gold’s earliest work, before he won the Pulitzer and went on everyone’s radar helped me sharpen my own viewpoints and inspired me to trust my gut, eventually affecting all the work I do today. We swim in food, food is life, and it’s a cultural barometer without peer. One of my favorite quotes is one that parallels my thinking and experience.

I think the point of obsession with food means we’re healthy as a species. When we’re hungry, everything tastes good, hunger is the best spice. When you’re in a area that has few resources, you work incredibly hard to have something. And then you make the something taste good. The greatest food in the world comes from the inventiveness of great privation. What emerges is all the miraculous fermentations and all the strong flavors. You put it together in the right way, it’s delicious. That defines survival, and our human species.

Willy Blackmore, editor at Popula

From 2009’s “Moles La Tia: Beyond the Magnificent Seven,” in LA Weekly : Still, I always end up with the quail in the traditional black mole, so dark that it seems to suck the light out of the airspace around it, spicy as a novela and bitter as tears, a mole whose aftertaste can go on for hours. La Tía’s mole negro appears so glossy and rich that I am always tempted to test its consistency by stabbing an index finger into it, and the resulting stain lingers as long as the empurpled digits of patriotic Iraqi voters. The last time I was as inspired by glossy black, it was part of Charles Ray’s infamous sculpture Ink Box, and it was enshrined in a major museum of art.

I remember reading his review of Moles La Tia for the first time and having a kind of run, don’t walk feeling. There’s a sense of immediacy and almost urgency to the writing — like you (and it’s always you with Gold) simply have to eat this right now. That kind of earnest enthusiasm that came through in his raves always had me making dinner plans.

Jordana Rothman, food editor, Food & Wine

The first of the few times I met Jonathan Gold was in the backyard of Ivan Orkin’s ramen-ya on New York’s Lower East Side. Over the past few days I have been comforted to hear from friends and colleagues with similar stories: Encountering Jonathan Gold could be a stupefying experience, not only because he was a legend but also because, after all of our awkward bumbling, he’d always turn out to be so… gentle. Later, for the Los Angeles Times , he’d write about the evening at Ivan Ramen :

The taste, the crunch, and the purpose of the dish was very much that of a splendidly greasy okonomiyaki, and in fact it was called Lancaster Okonomiyaki on the menu, honoring both the Pennsylvania Amish birthplace of scrapple and the name of the Japanese snack it was meant to evoke. (I admire his restraint in not naming his creation Scraffles, Scrokonomiyaki, or Wapples, although admittedly all of those sound more like exotic skin ailments than they do like food.) It was a good dish.

This of course is many paces from the gorgeous prose and seeker sensibility that earned Gold a Pulitzer, that made him every food writer’s hero (and also, frankly, made the rest of us feel featherweight in comparison.) In his work, Jonathan Gold could rally cry, could daydream, could lob, could pierce. You might tap along while reading, as though it wasn’t a restaurant review but the lyrics to a song, sometimes Cab Calloway sometimes N.W.A.

But I love this one for its simple admiration, the way it shakes the hauteur out of food writing. Only Jonathan Gold could call something a “good dish” and have that be exactly right. Perfectly enough.

Corby Kummer, senior editor, the Atlantic

From 2006’s “Home of the Porno Burrito,” in LA Weekly : I was tipped off to El Atacor #11 by an unsigned e-mail a couple of months ago, a message instructing me to Google the phrase “porno burrito.” I did. A healthy percentage of the results pointed toward the restaurant. The potato taco may be El Atacor’s enduring glory, but its fame in the online world comes mostly from its Super Burrito, a foil-wrapped construction the size and girth of your forearm, which drapes over a paper plate like a giant, oozing sea cucumber or, perhaps more to the point, like an appendage of John Holmes. It is impossible to look at a Super Burrito without marveling at the flaccid, masculine mass of the thing. It is probably even harder to bite into it without laughing.

Jonathan Gold’s voice was like no other food writer: witty, rhythmic, erudite, slightly formal because he liked it that way and it let him make fun of himself. It’s worth subscribing to the Los Angeles Times to get access to more than ten. The Pulitzer Prize page devoted to his award gives a heaping helping of the pieces that won him the first Pulitzer awarded to a food writer, with the bonus of loading ten pieces with one click. A full and wonderful trove of his Counter Intelligence columns for LA Weekly were collected in a book I’m ordering another copy of before they sell out.

Joshua Gee, editor of Snack Cart

It’s cliched to say that a writer changed my life. But Gold wrote a specific essay that changed the actual course of my life. In early 2012, I had just gotten out of a bad relationship, and left an apartment we shared in Boston. Friends in both New York and Los Angeles were lobbying me to move to their respective cities. A member of the LA contingent sent me Gold’s essay on the anniversary of the LA riots . It blew my mind:

It’s one thing to decide whether you feel like burgers or pizza for dinner; another to choose between bangus, empek-empek, or brains masala. It was hard to tell whether the most exotic of the restaurants was the place that advertised “Fil-Italian cuisine — stranger than fiction!” or the hot-dog stand specializing in a kind of red-hot previously unobtainable outside of Rochester, N.Y.

Before the riots, Los Angeles had been notorious in some circles as a kind of multicultural nightmare, a fever-swamp of global capitalism on a path to becoming the city portrayed in “Blade Runner.” An entire school of urbanism, sometimes called the “L.A. School,” had emerged to study our sunny dystopia.

But change in Los Angeles is often easier to track by looking at its restaurants rather than its boardrooms, and from the business end of a pair of chopsticks, extreme diversity didn’t look so bad. Sometimes equality, democracy and tolerance are virtues you fight for on distant battlefields, and sometimes they are as close as the frozen-food aisle at Vons.

I didn’t know who Gold was, but the essay made me ache to be the kind of person he was writing for. It hinted at the vast culinary and cultural landscape of Los Angeles. It showed me all I still had to learn about food. That essay brought me to Los Angeles. When it was time to leave, I started Snack Cart partly to force myself to keep up with Gold’s weekly reviews. Reading restaurant reviews from around the country, I came to realize how different Gold was from the rest. Most critics tell us where to eat. Jonathan Gold told us who we are.

Bill Addison, Eater’s national critic

On Wednesdays in 2006 I would fire up my desktop computer at the San Francisco Chronicle , where I worked as a food critic under Michael Bauer, and start my morning with a ritual: reading the latest Jonathan Gold review that had gone live on LA Weekly’s site. The review that ran the first week in December that year was called “ Flesh and Bone” ; it was a review of Wolfgang Puck’s new Beverly Hills steakhouse called Cut. The lede left me short of breath:

A whole fillet of Japanese beef, as wrapped in ninja-black cloth and carried around by the beef sommelier at Wolfgang Puck’s steak house Cut, is as ghostly white as an alabaster slab, like steak as seen in a photographic negative, like something Francis Bacon might have carved out of soft stone. Cooked, a single mouthful of Japanese rib eye from Kyushu pumps out flavor after flavor after flavor, every possible sensation of smoke and char and tang and animal you can imagine until your teeth have extracted all the juices. If you happen to be at Cut, and you happen to have in front of you what would ordinarily be a perfectly splendid corn-fed Nebraska strip steak, aged 35 days, seared at 1,200 degrees, then finished over oak to a ruddy, juicy medium rare — or even an example of American wagyu rib eye — you would take one bite of your neighbor’s Japanese Kobe steak, cooked the same way, and look around for rocks to throw at your own hunk of meat.

I wasn’t at all surprised when he won the Pulitzer the following year, and that the Cut review was among the submissions for the prize. But on first reading, on that mild San Francisco morning back in December 2006, I just remember the excellence he inspired coursing through me like benign lightning: “Do better, Bill. Every week, do better.”

Gold became America’s defining food critic by reminding us each week to broaden our own definitions of community. He built his reputation by lovingly detailing the cuisines of the world, often served at mom-and-pops housed in strip malls scattered around the Los Angeles metro area. But the review of Cut reminded me that his poetic mind, saturated in all the artistic disciplines, could yield wonder describing restaurants of any genre.

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Vera is a Senior Content Writer at a Singaporean lifestyle publication, ConfirmGood where she covers stories on all things food, lifestyle, and perspectives.

Throughout my career as a content writer at various lifestyle publications in Singapore , many a time have I been tasked to write a review for a restaurant .

A review of a restaurant is incredibly important to the business. Given that 94% of diners refer to reviews before making a decision to eat somewhere, the power reviews have to sway the consumer’s decision is immense.

Having been in this profession for a while now, I can safely say that I’ve seen my fair share of good and bad examples of restaurant reviews. And boy, do I have something to say!

But before I go into the details, let’s start with the basics. How should you structure your restaurant review article?

Restaurant review format

1) lay the table.

Just as how you’d set up the table in preparation for every meal, you need to set up your article in preparation for your readers’ eyes.

Provide some background information about the restaurant, its owner(s), and what it specializes in. Check out the opening paragraph of our Carne Burgers Singapore Review :

The introduction of a restaurant review of carne burgers singapore.

The reader is immediately hit with some key facts that establishes the restaurant as a reputable business. If a sustainability-focused restaurant run by a Michelin star chef doesn’t entice you, I don’t know what does.

A well-written introduction is essential as a hook to capture your reader’s attention right from the being and keep them engaged til the end of your review.

2) Start serving your mains

Now that you’ve invited your readers to the table, it’s time to show them what the restaurant has to offer.

A majority of the body of your restaurant review should showcase the best dishes the establishment has to offer. Check out what we showcased in our Seoul Garden a la carte menu review .

We featured the best dishes in our seoul garden restaurant review.

As a buffet restaurant, Seoul Garden has a wide selection of cooked and uncooked food items on its menu. But we only featured the most popular and best-looking items. And these are the Wagyu Picanha and Salmon slices.

You should always feature the best items that the owner wants to feature and take good pictures of them ot feature in your restaurant review. The first impression always counts 👀

Some things that should be in in this part of your review include what the dishes are, why you ordered them, and what makes them great. Describe the sight , smell , flavours , and texture of the dishes you’re reviewing. You’ll be surprised by how effective these descriptive paragraphs can be in selling the restaurant.

Example of how you describe food in a restaurant review.

Quick tip 💡 Prepare an arsenal of words you can use to describe food so you can easily pull them out to use in your article.

3) Wrapping things up

End off by summarizing why you enjoyed (or did not enjoy) the food. I’d strongly recommend adding some quirky final thoughts to leave your readers with a cute aftertaste.

You can look at what I wrote for my review on Restaurant Salt.

Tips on writing great restaurant reviews

1) learn from the best restaurant review sites.

As with learning any new skill, look at what others have already done.

A great source of restaurant reviews are lifestyle publications. They are generally divided into different sections like travel, finance, and food. ConfirmGood’s food blog showcases some of the best places to it in Singapore.

Check out the various articles we’ve put out to learn how to write great restaurant reviews. Learn the vocabulary, structure, and writing style.

2) Look at Tripadvisor and Google restaurant reviews

This one may come as a surprise to some of you. Why would you want to refer to reviews left behind by random people? After all, these aren’t professional food writers . What’s there to learn from?

If you take a look at the list of reviews you see on such sites, you’ll notice that some of these reviews are exceptionally well written. You can pick up pretty useful vocabulary from them. I guess some people really take writing reviews on Google really seriously 🤣

A tripadvisor restaurant review example.

Another reason why you should look at restaurant reviews is because you get to learn about what is important to a customer. Perhaps being led to the table properly is important to some. To others, it’s really just the quality of the food. See what pops up most often and take note of it.

If a restaurant hires you to write a review about them, you should include these factors in your article when promoting the business.

3) Take the best photos

A photo of carne burger used in our restaurant review article.

Taking great pictures of the food you are reviewing is absolutely necessary. Words alone cannot do the job of convincing your readers to eat at a particular restaurant.

Humans are visual creatures and well-taken shots of the restaurants’ best dishes can help sway your readers’ decision.

4) STOP USING “DELICIOUS”, “GREAT”, “GOOD”

Expand your food vocabulary.

If you want to write great restaurant reviews, you can’t describe that flaky pastry that oozes creamy custard fulling as delicious.

You aren’t doing the melt-in-your-mouth tender steak any justice by calling it amazing.

So just stop ❌

Again, refer to the article I listed above for some good examples of words and phrases you can use to describe food.

5) Include the restaurant’s story

A restaurant is more than its menu.

It’s also about its history, its owners’ histories, culture, and even purpose.

Establishing the restaurant’s story in the introduction of your review can help pique your readers’ interest in the place.

6) Pay attention to cultural nuances

To add to my previous point, you should always be mindful when writing about food.

Do not refer to dishes as ‘ethnic’, ‘exotic’, or worse, ‘oriental’.

Food carries with them the long history of struggle and achievements of the culture which they are from. You need to be respectful of that.

7) It’s ok to not like the food

You don’t have to lie when writing restaurant reviews.

This may even cause the restaurant to receive harsher negative reviews as they were overhyped by your article. So don’t be afraid to be honest about how you find their food. Just don’t trash them unnecessarily.

You’re all set to start writing an awesome restaurant review !

Those are my top 7 restaurant review writing tips. I hope you’ve found them useful. Becoming a food writer is not going to be easy. But this article is a great start for you!

To get more writing tips to help improve your writing, check out Writing Wildly’s amazing writing blog !

More resources

How to write an awesome & engaging blog post for a business, top 21 finance & investment blogs in singapore, 10 reasons why content writing is important for business & marketing.

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K Food Express - Cerritos

Updated by business owner 3 months ago

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Pork Belly Cup-bop Kk

Kimchi Fried Rice

Beef Bulgogi Cup-bop

Fish Cake Soup

Beef Bulgogi Kimbap

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Donkatsu Cup-bop

Fried Seaweed Roll 4pcs

Chicken Cup-bop

Donkatsu Sandwich

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13349 Artesia Blvd

Cerritos, CA 90703

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COMMENTS

Essay on Korean Food
Korean Food Korean food is unique. It's known for its spicy flavor and the use of other seasonings to enhance the taste. Dishes are usually flavored with a combination of soy sauce, red pepper, green onion, bean paste, garlic, ginger, sesame, mustard, vinegar, and wine. The Korean peninsula is surrounded water on three sides, but connected to ...
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The price. In terms of price, K-Food Heaven was very reasonable. The dishes were priced competitively compared to other Korean restaurants in the area, and the portion sizes were generous. For example, my "Bulgogi" plate was priced at RM30, which I thought was a fair price considering the quality and quantity of the food.
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The Korean cuisine has a fundamental foundation of rice which is the primary food of the Korean people that is eaten with literary every meal. The north has a traditional of corn, rice, wheat, barley, corn, while other cuisine traditions include vegetables such as cabbage and turnips (Thorn,2013). The Korean people may have North and South ...
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July 20, 2023. The tantalizing world of Korean street food beckons food lovers from all corners of the globe. With its vibrant colors, bold flavors, and unique textures, Korean cuisine has gained immense popularity worldwide. From sizzling skewers of meat to piping hot bowls of noodles, Korean street food offers an irresistible culinary adventure.
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Until the 1980s, ethnic restaurants constituted 10 percent of all restaurants in the Netherlands (statistics, 1998). In the past decade, ethnic foods have become extensively available and increasingly popular in Dutch consumer food markets (Iqbal, 1996).
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There are some images associated with Korean food, but the most well- known Korean food is absolutely Kim-chi. Kim-chi is a traditional fermented Korean food. According to the Health Magazine, Kim-chi is one of the top 5 healthiest foods in the world. It has full of Vitamins A, B and C.
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The Korea JoongAng Daily hosted its first photo essay contest for elementary, middle and high school students on the theme: "Promote the beauty of Korea to foreign countries." ... (chewy rice cakes, seasoned with chile paste), one of the most popular street foods, is traditional Korean food. In contrast, tanghulu, a recently popularized ...
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Korean Food Culture. According to Oxford dictionary, the definition of culture is the art and manifestations such as humanities, literature, music and painting of human intellectual acquirement considered common. It is also set of learned behaviours, beliefs, values and ideas that are feature of particular population.
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korean food essay. Sort By: Page 1 of 50 - About 500 essays. Better Essays. Korean Food. 1575 Words; 7 Pages; Korean Food. 1. Synopsis There are many kinds of Korean food in the world. The purpose of this report is that introduces Korean cuisine, the history and current tendency of Korean food. This information is derived from the writer's ...
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In Routledge Handbook of Japanese Culture and Society, ed. Victoria Lyon Bestor, Theodore C. Bestor, and Akiko Yamagata (Oxon: Routledge, 2011), 275. This essay, "South Korean and Japanese Cuisines and Identity" is published exclusively on IvyPanda's free essay examples database. You can use it for research and reference purposes to write your ...
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Unique features of the restaurant Aside from the great food and service, Delicious Eats also has some unique features that set it apart from other restaurants. For example, they have a daily happy hour with discounted drinks and appetizers, and ... Essay Sample SPM: Review of Korean Restaurant Similar Posts Leave a Reply Your email address will ...
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4) STOP USING "DELICIOUS", "GREAT", "GOOD". Expand your food vocabulary. If you want to write great restaurant reviews, you can't describe that flaky pastry that oozes creamy custard fulling as delicious. You aren't doing the melt-in-your-mouth tender steak any justice by calling it amazing. So just stop.
K-STREET
41 reviews and 64 photos of K-STREET "We came here last minute and this is suchhhhh a great Korean spot! I had su long tang that came out boiling , and that was everything I needed. The Bulgogi was on point too! It wasn't even packed here and I'm surprised because this food is very delicious. The food came out at a reasonable time. Our server was so friendly and attentive I loved it!
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GHAMA ZONE KOREAN
Love all of it. The only Korean cuisine restaurant I'd go in all of Austin and outside of Austin. Very professional, informative and friendly servers as well as their manager. My family and I enjoyed all our food and love how the chef cares so much how the food turned out. Carefully catering to their customers. Clean and feels like fine dining ...
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K FOOD EXPRESS
Quick service mom and pop Korean street food establishment. I ordered over the phone and my order was readily available at my arrival. They had a small dining area with a bunch of novelty korean items like instant ramen and snacks. It's super cute and I can see the potential in the future. I ordered two kimbap and was pleasantly surprised.
CAFE ANTRESOLE, Elektrostal
Cafe Antresole, Elektrostal: See 104 unbiased reviews of Cafe Antresole, rated 4.0 of 5 on Tripadvisor and ranked #3 of 30 restaurants in Elektrostal.
CAFE VOSTOCHNY EXPRESS, Elektrostal
Review. Share. 4 reviews. #20 of 28 Restaurants in Elektrostal ££ - £££, European. K. Marksa St., 30a Mall Tsentralny, Elektrostal Russia. +7 496 575-49-78 + Add website + Add hours Improve this listing. 4.0. There aren't enough food, service, value or atmosphere ratings for Cafe Vostochny Express yet. Be one of the first to write a review!