For many visitors, Korea's food is one of the highlights of a trip. The country's distinctive cuisine gets surprisingly little coverage internationally, and each mealtime can feel like a voyage of discovery. Korean food was uniformly mild until the seventeenth century, when chillies arrived on the ships of Western traders. Nowadays, if you don't like, or have little experience of, spicy food, be warned that there's very little respite from it - most meals come with lashings of red-pepper paste (gochujang), and some take the heat to eye-watering extremes.
Galbi is a carnivore's dream come true. Here, you get to play chef with a plate of raw meat commonly placed on a grill over charcoal, and a pair of scissors to slice it all up. As excess fat drips off the meat onto the briquettes it releases the occasional tongue of flame, which lends a genuine air of excitement to the meal.
In dedicated galbi restaurants the dish is usually eaten sitting on the floor, but many cheaper places have outdoor tables, and on warmer weekends Koreans even drag their own mini barbecue to a park or riverbank for an alfresco picnic. In all cases, it's traditionally washed down with a bottle or three of soju - Korea's answer to vodka.
Most restaurants serve beef (so-galbi), but some places offer pork too (dwaeji-galbi, or samgyeopsal for fattier belly roll), and always with a range of free side dishes, known as banchan. Ranging from three to well over twenty, these include the obligatory gimchi, as well as bowls of pulses, tofu, leek, potato and tiny fish, all lovingly prepared and replenished at no extra cost. A boiling bowl of egg broth and a tray of leaves are also usually thrown in for the group to share - galbi is not a meal to eat on your own - and each person is given a bowl of chopped-up greens and a pot of sesame oil.
In Confucian Korea, it's common for the "lowest" adult member of the party - usually the youngest female - to cook and dish out the meat. To eat it, first place a leaf or two from the tray onto your left hand, then with your chopsticks add a piece of meat, a smudge of soybean paste and a few morsels from the banchan; roll the leaf around to make a ball, and you're ready to go.
No country on earth is as closely entwined with its national dish as Korea is with its beloved gimchi: a spicy mix of fermented vegetables, which is served as a complimentary side dish at pretty much every restaurant in the land. Many traditionally minded families still ferment their own gimchi in distinctive earthenware jars, but home-made or not it's an important part of breakfast, lunch and dinner in most Korean homes. Lots of people even have a dedicated gimchi fridge, quartered off to separate the four main types. The two most common varieties are baechu gimchi, made with cabbage, and ggakdugi gimchi, which are cubes of radish in a red-pepper sauce, but there are others made with cucumber or other vegetables.
Although generally spicy in nature, bland types of gimchi certainly exist - some have no more kick than a mild vinaigrette. However, salt, garlic and a hearty dollop of red-pepper paste are almost mandatory in a good gimchi, though additional ingredients vary from home to home and restaurant to restaurant. Many of the best recipes are shrouded in secrecy and handed down through the generations, but some of the most popular components include onion, brine, ginger and fish paste. Needless to say, the effect on the breath can be dramatic, to say the least.
Fermented gimchi was once used as a means of maintaining vegetable intake through Korea's long, bitter winters, but even today the health benefits are proclaimed proudly by Koreans. Foreigners often have a tough time adjusting, but love it or loathe it, there are few better ways to endear yourself to the locals than by chowing down on a bowlful of gimchi.
Literally meaning "mixed rice", bibimbap consists of a bowl of rice topped with seasoned vegetables, red-pepper paste, minced beef and a fried egg. It was originally a religious dish derived from the five principal colours of Korean Buddhism - red for the paste, yellow for the egg yolk, white for the rice, blue for the meat and green for the vegetables - and is one of the easiest dishes to find in Korea. Some restaurants serve it in a heated stone bowl (dolsot bibimbap); those in the countryside may make it using only vegetables sourced from the surrounding mountains (sanchae bibimbap); and certain establishments in Jeonju have elevated the dish to an art form, serving it with a whole witches' cauldron of fascinating ingredients - including pine kernels, fern bracken and slices of jujube - and up to a dozen individual side dishes.
Ten top dining spots
Baru Buddhist temple food, Seoul.
Korea House Royal banquets, Seoul.
Abai Sikdang Noodle sausages and a ferry trip, Sokcho.
Jagalchi fish market Busan.
Eating Hearty food by the harbour, Tongyeong.
Eel Alley Stamina-giving eel dishes, Jinju.
Jongno Hoegwan The best bibimbap in the land, Jeonju.
Gomanaru Feasts of flowers and leaves, Gongju.
Haewa Dal Geurigo Seom Fist-sized sea snails, Udo.
North Korea Anywhere and anything, for sheer excitement value.