Youn’s Kitchen, Season 2 Episode 7 (Part 1)

Youn’s Kitchen’s big day proves interesting. For one thing, having real chefs as customers adds pressure to the casts. And yet they lend fresh eyes to look at the food from different perspectives.

Aside from a full Hall — the ‘rival’ restaurant’s owners and employees, with more turnout than anticipated, are seizing it — Youn’s Kitchen also welcomes customers outside. A group of four, a local three-generation family, take an outdoor table.

… And the pressure begins as the party makes their order. They want to taste everything on the menu — “the owner is paying,” a caption reads. For a start, they shall have three of each dish, each for a group of four. Seo-Joon passes the order to the kitchen.

Youn’s Kitchen’s Sixth Day Continues

The kitchen starts cooking, Boss Youn fries six pieces of kimchijeon at once and Yu-Mi prepares 24 cuts chicken gangjeong on the deep-fryer. In the Hall, Seo-Jin and Seo-Joon set the tables.

The two chefs of the restaurant party, the bearded one and the bespectacled one, discuss Korean for ‘thank you’. “I only know Korean for ‘it’s delicious!’,” the bespectacled chef says. The others know ‘masitda’ (맛있다) as well. After getting no results with translator app and searches on the smartphone, the bearded chef asks Seo-Jin about ‘thank you’ in Korean. “It’s ‘gomawo’,” Seo-Jin says. So, “gomawo,” the chef says.

Kimchijeon and chicken gangjeong are ready and served. After taking pictures of the food, the party eat them. “It’s good,” the chefs say. The restaurant owner is interested in eating them using chopsticks. “It’s good,” he says of the food. And then it’s a round of masitda is heard.

“This tastes like empanadilla, don’t you think?” The cool girl says of kimchijeon. “Galician empanadilla?” The chefs see her point. “But with Asian flavour in it,” the bespectacled chef says. Between the two dishes, he would chose kimchijeon and so would the cool girl. But both are delicious anyways.

The chicken gangjeong is also well-received.

 

 

Seo-Joon brings the menu card to the customers outside who then order japchae and chicken gangjeong. At another table, two Koreans, who become Youn’s Kitchen’s third customers of the day, take seats. They order kimchijeon, chicken gangjeong, galbi, and bibimbab.

Seo-Joon goes straight to the kitchen with the orders. He looks intimidated by the busy cooks and approaches carefully. “Tell me,” Yu-Mi says but Seo-Joon decides to write the order consolidation first.

Boss Youn and Yu-Mi prepare four servings of japchae, each cooks two portions. They don’t do exact measurement that at one point, Boss Youn takes some meat off her pan and puts them on Yu-Mi’s. On second thought, Yu-Mi thinks Boss Youn’s pan has fewer meat so she takes meat off her pan and puts some on Boss Youn’s pan. Basically, they are back to their initial load.

 

Outside, the second customers, mother and daughter, talk about the daughter’s children’s growth.

In the Hall, the bearded chef asks Seo-Jin for spicy sauce. “We have a very spicy sauce,” Seo-Jin promises. He goes to the kitchen the get gochujang.

In the kitchen, Boss Youn and Yu-Mi are busy portioning the Japchae. Seo-Jin enters, asks for gochujang, and sighs a couple of times, which makes Yu-Mi laughs, while Boss Youn is cooking silently. He then apologise to Boss Youn for the day’s trouble. “I must have been too greedy,” he says. “Why is that?” Boss Youn asks if this is beyond their capacity. Have they, perhaps, bitten more than they could chew? (A caption reads “the regret of an ambitious man”) Seo-Jin sighs again while wiping the edges of the gochujang sauce dish.

The gochujang sauce is served to the restaurant chefs — “be careful,” Seo-Jin warns them. The bearded chef tastes it a bit. “It’s not that spicy,” he says before the gochujang is taken, passed around, and shared. “It gets spicier after a while,” the bespectacled chef says.

Four servings of Japchae are ready. Seo-Joon brings one to the second customers outside. The mother sits her granddaughter on her lap as they eat Japchae. The three-generation women like the Japchae.

The other Japchae are for the get-together group. They ask for more spicy sauce. They wonder about Japchae, what it’s possibly made of and how it gets transparent. “Let’s ask the kitchen,” the cool girl says. So they go to the kitchen window and ask.

They are shown the boiled glass noodles. “Is it made of soybean?” Boss Youn says it’s made of starch — “sweet potato starch,” Yu-Mi says. The chefs find the noodle interesting that it’s clear when it’s made of wheat. The bespectacled chef thinks they can make interesting food with it.

Seo-Jin shows them the dried glass noodles. They take one strand each and inspect it thoroughly. “This seems like it’s from rice,” one says. “But it’s not,” Seo-Jin says. How fascinating! One chef thinks they should go to Korea to learn making glass noodles.

 

The kitchen makes more kimchijeon and chicken gangjeong which are served to the customers outside. The third customers like it, of course. The mother even questions why it is sold only at €6 while giving smaller chicken cuts to her granddaughter.

 

 

It’s time for the main course for the get-together party. The Hall team should reset the tables. “The plates were heavy, my wrists hurt,” Seo-Joon says. He picks dirty plates and cutlery off the table and puts new ones. Seo-Jin does the dish-washing.

The party talk about the chefs going travelling. “If you are going to Korean, I’m coming too,” one of the ladies says. One of the two male chefs is going to Peru and the other to Japan. “It’s because I’m interested in playing ocarina,” the bearded chef who’s going to Peru says. His remark draws laughter. “So he can make a living from playing ocarina on Madrid Metro!” The bespectacled chef laughs.

The kitchen begins cooking four galbi. They make one for the Korean customers outside and then proceed with three galbi for the get-together party.

Seo-Jin sets the knives on their tables and Seo-Joon serves the galbi, which the party dig as another round of ‘masitda’ is heard. The bespectacled chef adds flourish and swing to the phrase to emphasise the deliciousness. “Mmmh, masitda!”

The owner draws attention to him getting better with chopsticks and shows them eating galbi with it. He tells the chef to stop refilling his wine glass but he gets shushed. “You are not bossing us around today,” the bearded chef says. But the bespectacled chef mentions a catch to their freedom today: four boxes of octopus await on Sunday. “And squid,” the Boss says — “No! Not squid!” the chef laments — “and a truck load of shrimp!” The main chef, the owner’s wife, agrees with the idea. “That’s too much!” the bespectacled chef complains.

 

Seo-Joon clears the second customers’ table and receives compliments for the food — the little girl likes them a lot. He returns with the bill. After leaving tips on the table and exchanging goodbys with the Korean customers, the second customers leave. Seo-Joon resets the outdoor table.

 

The kitchen prepares bibimbab. Boss Youn starts with cooking meat for four portions while Yu-Mi is cooking four eggs on the egg pan — she cracks a fifth egg after one is removed for its yolk is broken. “These look right, right?” Boss Youn says as she divides the meat into four using estimation by sight.

The get-together party are doing another round of toast: “Pa’riba, Pa’bajo, Pa’centro, y Pa’dentro!” (bring it up, bring it down, centre it, and bring it inside, ie drink it!) Boss Youn thinks they are lively people. Yu-Mi agrees for they sound jolly. “People living with sunlight tend to have sunny disposition,” Boss Youn says.

Seo-Jin comes into the kitchen, asking Boss Youn if she hears the ‘delicious’ remarks. “No,” Boss Youn says. She wonders if Seo-Jin’s Spanish has improved. “They’ve been saying it in Korean, ‘masitda’, repeatedly,” he says.

Boss Youn has a more pressing matter on her hand: the carefully placed meat stack collapses. “You got me so hyped up,” Boss Youn blames Seo-Jin. She asks Yu-Mi to take care of the plating. Soon the four bibimbab are ready.

Seo-Jin brings one bibimbab to the Korean customers outside, which makes their order completed, and brings back the dirty plates. Seo-Joon serves the three bibimbab to the get-together party table.

The bibimbab’s plating makes it an object for photo shoots and wins approval. “I really must go to Korea to learn,” the bearded chef says. The chef tells Seo-Joon that he goes to michelin starred restaurants on holidays but perhaps this time he should go to Korea. “You should,” Seo-Joon agrees. “It’s beautiful.”

The first group mix their bibimbab already with sauce. The second group of four, with the main chef, decides not to mix theirs. Seo-Jin advises them that the sauce is optional. For the third group of four, Seo-Jin shows them how to mix it with their prefered sauce, the chilli sauce. One of the men says the colour reminds him of a dish they had in Hiroshima, Okonomiyaki.

After watching the other groups mixing their bibimbab together, the second group decide to do the same, including breaking the egg and adding soy sauce. “Put the spicy sauce on your own plate,” the main chef says and the rest of the group agree. The main chef also strikes the bowl to make noise.

Another round of ‘masitda’ is heard from the party. The owner is intrigued by the heavy bibimbab bowl. Seo-Jin asks them about the food. “Amazing,” the bespectacled chef says. Seo-Jin tells them about the next dish, a new menu, kimchi fried rice.

 

 

Boss Youn and Yu-Mi cook the kimchi fried rice with the aromatic spring onion oil. Topped with fried egg, the dishes are served.

The new dish gets various comments. “It’s like Cuban-styled fried rice,” one of the men in the third group of the party says. The kimchi fried rice reminds the main chef, in the second group, of the yellow rice her mum used to cook. For the colour, “we used saffron,” she says.

The first group play a guess-Seo-Jin’s-age game. Is he over fifty? “He must have taken goof care of himself,” the cool girl says. The boss disagrees. “He is thirty-ish,” he says. The cool girl thinks Seo-Jin is handsome. “They all take good care of themselves well,” the boss says.

 

In the kitchen, Seo-Joon looks for more plates. Boss Youn asks him how many customers they’ve got so far. “17 people,” he says as he searches the kitchen for plates but finds none. That’s it! “Let’s close,” Boss Youn says. They’ve got enough customers and they’ve got no more plates. They should wash dishes now.

… which is what Seo-Jin is doing while supervising the Hall for he has earned the nickname ‘Seol-keo-Ji-ni’, the dish-washing-Jin, in previous life job.

It is time for dessert.

 

Seo-Joon tells the kitchen to start cooking Hotteok. Seo-Jin applauds today’s speed and pace in serving food. the Hall and the kitchen are in synch. Although the huge workload takes its toll on them. “I feel like I could die!” Yu-Mi says when she picks the ice cream box from the Hall, and seems difficult to give coherent answer when Seo-Jin asks.

Yu-Mi prepares the Hotteok dough. When Boss Youn is about to cook the dough, Yu-Mi brings up a friendly face by the window. The bespectacled chef is watching, followed by another friendly face from the get-together party. The boss too takes a peek from the window.

Boss Youn greets them. “Did you enjoy the food?” Boss Youn asks. “It’s very nice,” a woman says. Boss Youn humbly asks for their understanding as Youn’s Kitchen’s staffs are not professionals. Yu-Mi keeps on doing plating for Hotteoks under their watchful eyes calmly. The bespectacled chef thinks the apron looks nice.

Hotteoks are served. Seo-Jin gives them new plates. The chefs notice him working non-stop and looking stressed. “Relax and enjoy it,” one says. After taking picture of the dessert, they share the hotteok. “It’s delicious,” is the verdict for Hotteok.

“We’re done, right?” Boss Youn asks. With the desserts are out, their work is done.

Or so they think…

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To be continued to the second part of episode 7 recap.

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