The Pojangmacha

The pojangmacha (포장마차), literally a covered wagon, is the tented street stall of South Korea, set up at dusk on pavements and street corners and taken down before morning. Its history belongs to the decades after the war of 1950 to 1953 and the division of the peninsula, when displaced families and the urban poor of Seoul and other cities took to selling cooked food from carts and improvised stands. Its place in the city has always been negotiated with the municipal authorities, and the stalls have been moved, regulated and in many places removed as the streets were rebuilt.

The pojangmacha is a table of service before it is a table of cooking: a counter or a few stools beneath a tent of canvas or plastic sheeting, a gas ring, a griddle and a pot of broth kept hot, with the cook working a few centimetres from the guest. Because the guest sits so close to the fire, the food is made and eaten in quick sequence, and the menu is limited to what a small stall can hold at heat. The dishes that belong to it are the braised and stirred and grilled foods of the Korean drinking table: tteokbokki, rice cakes in a red gochujang sauce; eomuk, fish cake simmered on skewers in a clear radish and dried anchovy broth, whose cooking liquid is ladled into a cup for the customer; sundae, the blood sausage; fried and grilled seafood; and stir-fried pork or chicken in a chilli sauce. Noodles in broth, such as janchi guksu and udon, serve as the closing course. The stall keeps the rules of the Korean drinking table in a reduced form. Soju is poured for others and not for oneself, the glass is received with both hands or with the free hand supporting the pouring arm, and a younger drinker turns the head aside to drink in the presence of an elder. The food on the counter is anju, the dish taken with the drink, and it is shared from a single plate in the manner of the communal table, not divided into portions. The cheop count and the ordered bapsang of the home do not apply; the pojangmacha is the opposite pole of Korean service, in which rank is relaxed by proximity and the same counter seats the office worker, the student and the late shift. Roy Choi, in L.A. Son, writes of Korean food as it was carried into the American city and cooked in the street, and the pojangmacha stands behind that line of Korean-American cooking: food of the pavement, assembled quickly, sharp with chilli and fat, eaten standing or on low stools, and made to be shared. The same logic of the tented counter, a cook at a fire and a customer within reach, reappears in the night markets and food trucks of the diaspora, where a Korean dish is adapted to a new street without losing its character of speed and heat. In Korea the stall has also become a setting for memory in the country's film and television, where a tent, a bottle of soju and a bowl of eomuk broth signify the end of a working day. That association rests on the plain facts of the form: the stall is cheap, open late, and built around hot food and drink at close quarters. Where the tents survive, they are now often licensed and standardised in appearance, and in some districts the same dishes are served from fixed premises that keep the name and the manner.

The flavour of the pojangmacha is that of the drinking table: salt, chilli heat and fat set against the clean edge of soju. The red gochujang of tteokbokki, the smoke of the griddle and the savoury clarity of the anchovy and radish broth are all made to be taken with a drink, and the hot broth ends the evening where the spirit began it.