SYLVIA: Oh hey Seth!

SETH: Hey Sylvia.

Nice to meet you.

SYLVIA: So nice to meet you.

Welcome.

SETH: Well thank you so much, I'm excited about being here.

Glad to make the drive out to Centreville because I do like Korean Barbecue but I always feel like when I have it, I never quite know what to order.

SYLVIA: Well I'm so glad you're here.

Let me go ahead and introduce you to our signature dish, our galbi if you follow me into the kitchen I can show you how it's prepared.

SETH: Let's do it.

SYLVIA: Well Seth, great barbecue starts with great meat and we've caught chef at the perfect time.

This is our signature dish, our galbi.

It's short ribs that we're about to marinate in our soy garlic marinade.

Here uh Chef Choi is actually butchering our short ribs and this is actually a very technical skill it's not something that just anyone can do.

I actually, personally tried it myself and it was horrible it was a mess.

SETH: You need a sharp knife and a lot of years of practice?

SYLVIA: Lots and lots of years of experience for sure.

SETH: So it looks like here your kind of almost uh unfolding the meat.

SYLVIA: Yes.

It's being cut in a way where the full bone is exposed and so this is one of our best cuts of meat, you can see the marbling you know the bright red color the vibrant white that's flowing through it.

It has like a perfect fat to meat ratio where it just melts in your mouth.

SETH: Oh yeah I can see a lot of the nice marbling on the meat right there.

SYLVIA: So the next step after this is that we'll actually soak it in the marinade.

We make this three times a week and it's our secret recipe.

It has soy sauce uh sesame oil.

But it also has fruit items that actually helps tenderize the meat and provide a lot of umami and in depth flavor.

Different from what many people might know to be a traditional teriyaki sauce, this is I would say 10 times better than that.

SETH: I'm guessing you already have some of the galbi already marinated and ready to go.

SYLVIA: I do.

It's going to be a great treat for you.

I'm so excited for you to try it.

SETH: That sounds great, let's do it!

SYLVIA: Let's do it!

SETH: Sylvia.

What a spread.

And I see some beautiful marinated galbi right here but I have no idea, how does one even begin to get started here?

SYLVIA: So I'm actually going to go ahead and get this on the grill.

Everyone has their own way of cooking their short ribs so I'm going to go ahead and unravel both and cut them into pieces.

You can tell that we have an open-flame grill here, it's going to have a nice, beautiful charred flavor to it.

I hope you're hungry Seth.

SETH: I am starving.

SYLVIA: All right.

SETH: Oh ho ho listen to that sizzle!

SYLVIA: The sizzle.

So the key here is to cook it evenly.

We're going to actually start with the main part of the short rib.

This is actually going to cook the fastest but it's actually the best part.

We're going to save the bones and the veggies for a little bit later.

And Seth, while this is cooking, I want to introduce you to one of the greatest friends of Korean barbecue.

The booze and the alcohol.

SETH: Gotta have the booze.

SYLVIA: Yes this is absolutely traditional that we have this with Korean barbecue.

I'm going to start off with a nice Korean beer and I am going to give you the perfect proportions of how to make, what we call, somaek.

And somaek is the Korean word soju and the Korean word for beer, maegju put together.

I'm gonna go ahead and pour you my best version of it.

They say that if you get the ratio perfect it's supposed to taste a little bit like honey.

SETH: All right.

So we're just mixing the soju right with the beer.

SYLVIA: Exactly.

This is all about uh an experience.

And then with the beer this is just so boring to just drink this like this.

You know, you and I need to have a little bit of fun here.

So you just hit the bottom here and once it foams up that's when you and I are supposed to drink.

SETH: Hey.

There we go.

Cheers to that.

SYLVIA: Cheers.

SETH: All right I am ready for some meat now.

SYLVIA: Awesome.

Amazing.

The idea is that you're supposed to coat your stomach with the alcohol before the food goes in.

SETH: It's science right?

SYLVIA: It's science.

All right so once we get a nice brown color to it, I'm going to go ahead and cut it into pieces.

SETH: So it's still the outside's nice and charred but the inside still has a little bit longer to go.

SYLVIA: Yes.

SETH: And people shouldn't be afraid to try this themselves right?

SYLVIA: No.

SETH: You don't have to be, You don't have to have years of expertise to give this is a shot.

SYLVIA: Not at all.

Seth, do you want to take over?

SETH: Oh let's let me give this, let me give this a shot.

SYLVIA: I'm going to leave this piece to you.

SETH: All right I do have a whole shot of soju and beer in my system but we'll see.

Cut a few pieces there.

All right now.

SYLVIA: You're a pro!

Are you looking for a job?

Because we're hiring.

SETH: So now do we stir a bit more or?

SYLVIA: Yes.

So we just want to sauté it over the grill so that it has a little bit of like that finish, char, caramelization on the outside.

SETH: All right I feel like my work here is done.

I'm ready now to uh to try some of it.

SYLVIA: Do you want to try some of this?

SETH: Let's give it a shot.

SYLVIA: If you wanna grab your chopsticks and take the first bite.

SETH: Oh look at that caramelization.

SYLVIA: You get that like tenderness of the meat, like the marinade that's just soaked in.

SETH: Holy cow.

That is amazing.

The sweetness too of the marinade and getting those nice little caramelized bits on the outside... SYLVIA: Yes.

SETH: But still having all that fat and marbling on the inside.

That's really amazing.

And I see all these other beautiful sides here.

How do these all play into the barbecue?

SYLVIA: Okay Seth I'm going to introduce you to the best bite that you might have ever had.

You're going to have to use your hands so you might have to put your chopstick down for a second.

SETH: I'm ready.

SYLVIA: Grab a piece of lettuce and then we're actually going to take the pink radish right on the bottom and then a little bit of rice and then we're going to take uh galbi and then you can take a small dollop of the soy bean paste to add a little bit of the umami flavor.

SETH: That is quite the colorful sandwich right there.

SYLVIA: It is.

It's like a sandwich, it's like a taco, it's a lettuce wrap.

Whatever you wanna call it.

SETH: And you just wrap it up and give it a go?

SYLVIA: And you wrap it up and it goes in.

So there's a Korean saying like how big is your mouth or how big can you make lettuce wrap where you can do a one-biter.

SETH: This might be a two-biter we'll see.

SYLVIA: I challenge you.

Get the freshness of the lettuce, the pickled daikon, the sweetness of the meat a little bit of the rice.

It's a mouthful for sure.

There's a lot of Korean jokes about how wide your mouth spreads for you to stuff everything in your mouth.

SETH: I don't know that my mouth was made to handle a lettuce wrap of that size but that was amazing.

SYLVIA: Yeah?

It was, wasn't it?

Well now I'm going to put the rest of the meat on.

This is actually, depending on who you talk to, the most coveted or the least coveted art of the Korean barbecue galbi experience.

And so I'm going to actually put the bones on.

It's going to take a little longer to cook.

It's going to be a little tougher, a lot chewier but some people love it.

They love just gnawing on that tendon and like that fat that's around the bone.

SETH: There's so many preferences involved in this process.

SYLVIA: Absolutely.

The best about Korean barbecue is that uh, there's no rules.

You literally can do whatever you want and we've seen everything under the sun and there's no judgment so, um really it's just you have people that come in here and don't even know that they like galbi and we introduce them to it and they love it.

You have the people that come in here and just want the un-marinated meats, the purists.

SETH: Well so many traditions, so many different preferences.

SYLVIA: There are.

SETH: I haven't had enough Korean barbecue to have any strong preferences of my own so I guess the only solution is to keep coming back?

SYLVIA: Absolutely.

We'd better see you often Seth.

SETH: You will.

This was delicious and also a lot of fun.

Thank you Sylvia.

SYLVIA: Thank you for coming in.