The 1988 Seoul Olympics and the Export of Korean Food

The Games of the XXIV Olympiad were held in Seoul in September and October 1988, and they came thirty-five years after the armistice of 1953 and within a generation of the country's rebuilding from the war. They were the first Olympic Games held in Korea, and they placed the capital, its hotels and its markets before a large foreign audience at a time when the cuisine was little known outside the peninsula and the communities of the diaspora.

The Games gave the country an occasion to present itself, and the table was part of that presentation. Visitors, officials and the press who came to Seoul met the cooking in hotels, in restaurants and in the street markets, and the dishes that travel most readily were those built on a clear and forceful grammar: grilled beef marinated in soy, sugar and sesame, as in bulgogi (불고기); rice dressed with vegetables and gochujang, as in bibimbap (비빔밥); and the fermented cabbage of kimchi, served beside almost every meal. The jang, the fermented soy and chilli pastes, and kimchi gave the cuisine a character that was recognisable at once and difficult to mistake for any neighbour's. The Games did not create the cuisine's reach abroad. Korean cooking had already travelled with the emigrants who settled in Hawaii, in Japan, in China and in the cities of the United States, and the larger Korean communities of America kept the table alive in their own restaurants and households. What the Olympics changed was the visibility of the cooking at home and the confidence with which it was shown. A country that had known occupation from 1910 to 1945, then war from 1950 to 1953 and the division that followed, now offered its food as a matter of national standing. The later export of the cuisine rests on this double movement, the diaspora kitchen and the attention of the wider world. In his book Momofuku, David Chang describes cooking that grew out of the Korean and Asian pantry of his upbringing, and the kimchi, the fermented chilli and the pork of that book show how the grammar of the jang and of the pickle passed into the professional kitchens of North America. The pork belly with fermented pastes and pickles, set against rice and sharp vegetables, follows the banchan principle: a centre of richness answered by acid, salt and heat at the edges. The result is a cuisine now understood on its own terms, with its regions, its court and temple traditions and its fermented foundations, and no longer reduced to a few grilled meats. The seasoning logic of Seoul in 1988 is the same logic a cook applies today, whether in Seoul, in Los Angeles or in Honolulu: ferment for depth, pickle for acidity, grill for char, and set many small dishes about the rice.

The Korean table that met visitors in 1988 was one of salt, heat, fermentation and sweetness held in balance: the savoury depth of doenjang and ganjang, the red heat of gochugaru made from the Korean chilli (Capsicum annuum), the sour of aged kimchi and the nutty finish of sesame oil. Rice stood at the centre, and the dishes about it were meant to be eaten together, each correcting the others.