The Drinking Table and Its Rules

The Korean drinking table grew out of the Confucian ordering of the household and the village that governed Joseon society, in which age and rank decided who sat, who was served first and who poured for whom. Its rules are older than any single venue: they were carried from the sarangbang, the men's reception room of the yangban house, into the tavern, the market stall and the modern restaurant, and they travelled with Korean emigrants to the cities of the United States, where the same courtesies are kept at tables far from the peninsula. Roy Choi's L.A. Son, a memoir of a Korean-American upbringing in Los Angeles, is the source this entry leans on for the diaspora side of that continuity.

The drinking table is set in a different order from the bapsang. Where the daily meal is built around rice, soup and banchan, the table for drinking is built around anju, the food that accompanies the liquor: a jjigae or jeongol left to simmer at the centre, grilled meat, a pajeon, braised or raw fish, or a plate of kimchi and dried squid. The drink is most often soju, makgeolli or beer, and the food exists to be shared from common dishes, each person taking from the middle with the chopsticks or a spoon. The meal and the drink are one occasion, and a table that begins with grilled pork and soju will usually end, late in the evening, with a bowl of naengmyeon or a rice and soup course to close it. The rules concern the pouring. A bottle is not poured for oneself; one fills the glass of another, and waits to have one's own filled in return. The younger or junior person pours for the elder with the right hand, the left hand touching the right forearm or the chest in a gesture of respect, and the elder receives the glass in both hands or with the same supporting touch. An empty glass is a sign that the pourer has been inattentive, so the glasses of the table are watched and refilled before they are drained. The reciprocal act is the offering of one's own glass to an elder, who empties it and returns it filled, and this passing of the cup is among the oldest forms of fellowship at the Korean table. The turned head is the second principal rule. When drinking in the presence of an elder or a superior, the younger person turns the face and the body to the side, away from the elder, and covers the glass with a hand while drinking. The gesture withholds the sight of the act of drinking from the person owed deference, and it is held to by those who keep the custom strictly, with the elder commonly allowing it to be relaxed in time. The same courtesy governs the receiving of a glass from an elder: it is taken with both hands, and not set down untouched. Roy Choi's L.A. Son shows these habits surviving in a Korean-American household and its restaurants, where the family table, the church supper and the late meal after work were occasions on which the old courtesies of rank and pouring were learned by children before they were explained to them. In that account the table is a place where language, obligation and appetite meet, and where a second-generation cook absorbs the manners of the first without the vocabulary for them. That is the sense in which the drinking table is a custom of transmission as much as of etiquette.

Anju is seasoned to stand up to the liquor: salt, chilli, fat and smoke dominate, in grilled pork belly, spicy braised fish, kimchi jjigae and fried or griddled savoury pancakes. Soju, clean and nearly neutral, and makgeolli, lightly sour and faintly sweet, are cut or cleansed by these dishes, and a cooling course such as a cold noodle or a plain soup often follows to settle the palate at the close.