Bo Ssäm

Our bo ssäm was a long time in the making before it showed up on the menu. I'd had an inkling for years it would be a good idea—bo ssäm is a supercommon dish in Korean restaurants, though the ingredients and cooking that go into it are frequently an afterthought. The oysters are usually Gulf oysters from a bucket, the kind that are really only suited to frying; the pork is belly that's been boiled into submission. Almost every time I ate it at a restaurant, I'd think about how much better it would be if all the ingredients were awesome.

The first time we made one was for family meal back when we'd just started serving kimchi puree on our oysters at Noodle Bar. One of the new cooks was fucking up oysters left and right, so I made him shuck a few dozen perfectly, and then we ate them ssäm-style: wrapped up in lettuce with rice, kimchi, and some shredded pork shoulder that was otherwise destined for the ramen bowl. (The shoulder in our bo ssäm is, essentially, the same shoulder we put in the soup at Noodle Bar, except that we add more sugar in the last step to make the crust even more delicious—it's like a shoulder encrusted in pig candy.) So there, in the cramped, dark subterranean kitchen of Noodle Bar, I ate the best bo ssäm of my life.

I think that experience and our take on the bo ssäm are typical of the way we approach "traditional" dishes: with one foot rooted in tradition and the other foot kicking it forward. There is a great line from Emerson that sums up my perspective perfectly: "Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books."