Comment by BrandoElFollito
13 hours ago
Reading the comments here and elsewhere, and these from my Korean friends -- this is not reflected in Korean restaurants, at least in France.
I have tried a few in and around Paris (the latest was yesterday, a small family-run one lost in some random street), and the food is at best normal size, and less positively massively overpriced.
You usually get 3 tiny plates (with two leaves of kimchi, to give some context) and a normal plate of food + a small bowl of rice.
This is enough for my French stomach, but reading about the lavish servings and whatnot, this may just be a local thing.
Native Korean living in Korea here. Many restaraunts in South Korea have self-bars where you can refill the kimchi (and other various banchan (side dish) assortments) as much as you want - and in the rest of the places that don't have this you can just ask the waiter to give some more for free instead! Refusing to give free kimchi isn't just considered bad service here; it's just outright weird.
Only the "touristy" Korean restaraunts outside of the country don't do this - they charge hefty prices to innocuous side dishes like kimchi, and I've even heard places in Europe sell soju in shots (which is outright ridiculous, soju is one of the most cheap-ass low-brow artificially made commodity liquor here!)
I suppose people adapt serving sizes to local norms.
That said, the first Korean place I ever went to (in Dublin) served comically large amounts of food. I could never figure out how they made the economics work; they were the same price as the neighbouring Chinese places but must have been using at least twice as much food.
I’m not surprised.
When I went London over ten years ago, the recommended Korean restaurant paled to what’s in NYC.
I imagine competition and easy access to Korean ingredients are the main factors.
Yeah that sounds very westernized. This is what you'd see for one person at an average, traditional Korean restaurant in the US: https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/GZx0kD7qjv5983YOuGd_.... Depending on the place you might see a few more/less sides.
There are also places like what you describe that don't give you all the sides, where it's just focused on having an entree, so more like this: https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/mamas-kitchen-bellevue-2?sel.... I can understand this because I've seen groups of non-Koreans at the traditional places leaving all the banchan untouched.