Cycle 3 – Item 169
22 (Fri) June 2012
Pizza Insalata
4.0
at The Corner Kitchen
-Oksu, Seongdong, Seoul, Republic of Korea-
with W and DJ, Mom + Dad
With this pizza, I’ve run out of excuses not to give this restaurant a 4.0 rating. I held back, feeling that the unremarkable cheese and tomato sauce didn’t measure up to the exalted standards of excellence for which GMTD is internationally renowned. But the fresh vegetables here – sliced red onions, pre-roasted cherry tomatoes, and piles of arugula (my favorite pizza topping of all) – together providing a perfectly crispy and bitter-sweet-tangy counterbalance to the perfectly savory-chewy crust, more than made up for the other minor deficiencies. Overall, it was one of the best pizzas that I’ve ever had in my life. 16,000 won.
The past 3 episodes of Master Chef Korea, which started its first season a couple months ago, appear to have taken cues from GMTD. On tonight’s episode, Episode 9, the elimination challenge concerned street food, a topic that I covered last Sunday (see 3.164 The Trinity). In Episode 8’s elimination challenge, where contestants had to identify the ingredients in mandu, all the contestants got tripped up when they incorrectly named daepa instead of buchu, two similar types of onion that I discussed about a week earlier (see 3.154 Buchu & Eggs). Finally, the elimination challenge for Episode 7 involved manually beating egg whites into stiff peaks, about 2 weeks after I’d begun to experiment with French cuisine (see 3.137 Potage Parmentier). Coincidence?!
(See also FOOD GLOSSARY)
(See also RESTAURANTS IN KOREA)
