When I was a kid, my dad used to wake me up well before dawn on a Sunday morning to go fishing. We would drive to a pier in Long Beach while it was still dark outside and take a boat out to a barge where we’d fish for eight hours as the sun came up. We didn’t say much. We just stood there with our fishing poles on the gently bobbing barge. Mostly I imitated my dad: the way he grabbed a live sardine and stabbed it with a hook, the way he drew up the line with a rhythmic pull, the way he examined the fish before tossing it into a bucket. Occasionally he would fillet a fish right there and eat it with some Korean chili paste that he’d bring in a small tupperware, smoking as he ate. He would buy me chicken soup and a coke from the little snack shop on the barge. My dad loved father-son time. I’ll admit I was a little less enthusiastic. Especially at 4am.

The bonding would begin not at the barge, however, but at the breakfast table. Before every outing, my mom would wake up thirty minutes before I did to cook us a special boys-only breakfast. Sometimes it was a grease-pit breakfast sandwich: fried eggs, spam, and cheese between two white buttered toast smothered in mayonnaise and ketchup, downed with a tall cup of milk. On special days, however, she would begin simmering a big pot of Korean beef bone soup the night before. Seolleongtang is a hearty, simple stew made from boiling beef bones for up to 12 hours to produce a milky white broth that’s seasoned only with some salt, pepper, and fresh green onions and eaten with rice and kimchi. This is a man’s meal, my dad would say with a full mouth, promising me that it would keep us strong and satiated for half a day. I drank every last delicious drop of the broth as if the growth of my femurs depended on it.

I’m back in Korea for the first time in twenty six years, and more than anything I wanted to eat seolleongtang here. A friend’s sister recommended the original Inamjang, located on a small, unremarkable alley near downtown Seoul. When we arrived around noon, the place was packed with men in their 50s and 60s, their heads bent over the large clay pots, and four young women running around to satisfy requests for more kimchi or another bowl of rice. Requests were yelled out as men wiped their noses which would drip from the heat of the soup and the spice of the kimchi. We sat down and after one bite, I was hooked. The broth was milky and the meat tender. The rice was already inside, so all I had to do was add a teaspoon or so of coarse sea salt, a few dashes of black pepper, and a heap of sliced scallions. Of equal importance in judging a seolleongtang joint – and usually, they focus on just this one dish – is the kimchi. Inamjang didn’t disappoint.

In my short life, I’ve eaten too well: the French Laundry five times, sushi from Sukiyabashi Jiro, a twenty four course meal at Alinea, and visits to two of Joel Robuchon’s three star restaurants. And somehow, in some ways, this bowl of seolleongtang beats them all. Perhaps it’s nostalgia, a la Ratatouille, that gives an unfair advantage to the soup: a rapid sequence of memories of waking up in the dark, of holding up my bowl of seolleongtang to finish the last bit of the still warm broth, of driving on empty freeways to the beach before sunrise, of seeing my dad smile with his eyes on me and not the fish I’m unhooking. Perhaps it’s because, just like my dad said, this soup makes you grow strong as a man. At Inamjang, it was difficult not to wish my dad could see me all grown up but still eating like his son.
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