As part of our newly founded ‘Korean Food Club’ (KFC) for short, we decided it was time to try Gopchang aka intestines. Offal isn’t something that I am a huge fan of but for some reason the attraction of trying something weird and new, overshadowed my certainty that I probably wouldn’t like it.
We found a kooky little restaurant down a back alley in distant part of Gwangju, I say distant, it was probably Sangmu but distant for us based in Chonnam University Backgate. We walked into the restaurant and sat down. Expecting grills to cook our intestines on, we hurriedly asked the waiter before all the sides came, if this was the correct place. He gestured to a connecting door between the two buildings and ushered us into the next restaurant. Weird, I know, but this isn’t the first time in Korea that we’ve sat down in one restaurant thinking it was another.
We sat down and ordered the first thing on the menu; I left this to our friends who spoke more Korean than I did. We ordered a mix of meats including the intestines, for 4 people. There were 6 of us and we agreed we’d order more if we loved it. I am so glad we only got 4 portions!
It came and looked really quite appetizing. It was essentially a steaming hot plate of different bits of meat with veg surrounded by bread that I guessed would soak up the meat fats whilst it cooked. We waited for the meat to cook and our, very friendly, waiter kept checking on us and eventually told us we were good to go, get stuck in! We were armed with A LOT of soju and beer to get us through this meal and boy, did we need it.
There were 4 different bits. The first was a small cylinder, it was literally a tube. This, I guessed, was the intestine. This was ok when it was hot, chewy and had a tang to it. I guess how you would imagine eating a tube of skin would be. Then there was a fatter, shorter tube that had fat all the way through the middle so you couldn’t see through it. This one had the fatty surprise that burst into your mouth as you bit into it. Again, not too bad really when hot, tasted a little like a fatty bit of crackling or something. The burst of fat into my mouth was a little too much for me and I declined more of these bits going forward. Then, there was the only bit that looked like a slice of meat, and this wasn’t bad at all, it tasted strong, perhaps a little like liver – which at this point, we assumed it was! Finally, there was the square thin bit of skin; this I assumed would be like crackling. Wrong, wrong, wrong. This was the toughest thing I’ve ever eaten (different to the hard texture of Hongeo, fermented stingray) and whilst chewing on it I realised it would never end. I hate to say it but I spat it out. I chewed this tasteless, fatty bit of skin for nearly 5 full minutes and when I spat it out, I could see I hadn’t even made a dent.
As we ploughed our way through this extravaganza including of course, the usual array of sides, we noticed that it started to go cold and congeal. This is when the reality set in and we realised just what we were eating and started to question why. The fatty parcels didn’t taste as bearable, the skin started to stick to the pan and the tubes start to wither. The meal had come to an end.
It was only the next day when our friend looked up the meal again to check what we’d had that we found out the truth. I was of course, delighted to hear that the only bit of it I’d actually liked was heart, not liver. Joy of joys!
An awesome meal experience though, it was so much fun and didn’t taste too bad at the start. So I would say give it a go, have a try but eat quickly!