I turned vegetarian this year, and being vegetarian turned out to be actually easier than I thought. At first there were a few days of frustration when I needed to prepare different dishes for my wife and I, but later she told me that she's open to eating less meat without completely ruling it out.
We both love tofu so with a lot of tofu and occasional separate preparations for her I settled into the vegetarian life. Then came a new kind of struggle: needing to go gluten free. In August I realized I was allergic to gluten in the middle of... The city of bread and pastries, Paris. THIS was a really tough one because I had relied on wheat-based carbs fill me up at the absence of meat based proteins.
But you know, we're human so we adjust to things. I adjusted to the new gluten free diet with the help of my wonderful friends who never hesitated to give me wonderful information about alternatives and new dishes to try. Life was good.
Then I went to Seattle in October for my Buddhist training. Now, the thing with Buddhist training is that it's very communal. I can't really be picking out things I want to eat, I need to eat what's given. The unfortunate thing is, for some fucking reason a lot of Korean sauces have wheat in them.
Why in the world would soy sauce, dwenjang, and gochujang have wheat in them? I never made them from scratch myself so I have no idea, but that was the world I was living in. I was also volunteering as a cook so I had no other options but to taste the food I was going to offer as alms. So my allergies flared up, my hands started blistering again, and to control my symptoms I started eating less.
By the end of October I was fine, but I was really weakened. I already have a pretty high metabolism due to my regular jiujitsu training and I wake up to 108 bows every morning, and to add to that I had been cooking for people for a week straight. The other thing is, I started to feel a lot dizzier than before when I stood up from sitting down. I realized that I needed some food as medicine.
The primary purpose of food is to be a medicine for us. We would literally die without food. We go ill without the right nutrition and just like how illness is cured with the right pills certain ailments go away with the right food. To repair my skin barrier I had some fish rich in omega 3 and ate other foods rich in anti-inflammatory nutrients.
Since then I've been taking some antibiotics that have really helped my skin barrier heal and things were looking good. Then I started having the rat problem and some other things that took a lot of wind out of me (I hope to talk more about this soon), and I realized I needed more energy again. So today I went to our Koreatown favorite, Buil Samgyetang.
Samgyetang is a Korean chicken soup that's like a liquid version of the protein. It's chicken stuffed with Korean traditional medicinal herbs and glutinous rice, and boiled to a scalding temperature in a clay pot. This particular restaurant only sells this one dish and it's basically the most authentic samgyetang you'll eat, even including samgyetang restaurants in Korea.
Another quirk of this restaurant is the personality of the owner, Mr. Joel Park. He's basically the nicest man you've ever seen in your life, and the level of service he provides almost makes him feel... Servile? To a fault? But you go there a few times and you get to learn that he is doing it because he genuinely wants to SERVE you. In all senses of the word, he wants to serve you with good food and service.
Based on the decorations I can tell that he is a Christian man. I don't know his personal life, I don't know what he does outside of this restaurant but what I do know is he's practically made this restaurant his life because I used to see him all the time when I went at odd hours. Over years he's never had a frown on his face or any kind of drop in quality, both in terms of the food and service.
Since this restaurant is basically a local institution, practically every Korean in LA knows of this restaurant and they all know his personality. What really made me appreciate him was, on one random day A FUCKING CAR rammed through the wall of the restaurant and grazed him on his leg. The restaurant wall was obliterated and his official interview stated, "the car miraculously stopped in front of a customer". In this predicament he cared about the people he was serving first.
Since then he closed the restaurant. I thought he was perhaps gone for good, traumatized by this big event. But after about two months, he re-opened the restaurant in a new location, bigger and more distanced from the street (thank the lord!). After the re-opening I saw him less at the restaurant, and I was actually relieved; he must need some time to take care of his health!
So that happened, and I had turned vegetarian, so I hadn't visited the restaurant in quite some time. I went today and I was happy to see Mr. Park at the counter, welcoming us with his signature smile and signature introduction to the tea, the broth, the side dishes, and everything else. He dropped a menu on the way to our table, and without missing a beat he picked up a new one and brought it to us. If there was a life of service, this man was living it.
And he cooked food for me so I can eat it. He wanted to nourish me and serve me. A simple meal, one of what feels like an infinite number of meals in my life, means so much to me today as I think of everything needed for this food to come in front of me on this table. With this food I owe it to the people who came before me, to live my best life of service and share nourishment to the next person.
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
