Up until yesterday, I thought that Korea had pretty normal ice cream. The country is a bit obsessed with Baskin Robbins 31 Flavors (there are about 3 within about a 5 minute walking distance from my work), and most of the ice cream I’d seen was pretty standard. Now, I may have thought this a wee bit unusual- when Korea tries to do non-Korean food, they tend to Koreanify it (which generally means making it excessively sweet and/or spicy), but I just figured that the appeal of ice cream was universal. It took a visit from Britt (now Snarky) and her boyfriend to show me just how wrong I was.
Snarky and Boyfriend have been visiting me for about a week now and I’ve learned that I am perhaps not meant to be a tour guide. I managed to completely fail at public transportation the night I picked them up from the airport… which meant that we got dumped off on a deserted, misty beach in the middle of the night by the bus that was supposedly taking us home. I’ve taken them on a beach themed island trip that was spent almost entirely in a chilly drizzle. I failed to adequately explain aspects of the subway system which lead to them getting sent off into the mountains when they were trying to come home from Seoul- again in the middle of the night. But! I think they’re having a good time.
As it turns out, Snarky’s boyfriend’s favorite pastime in a foreign country is to try every type of snack he can find. While this has led to an unimaginable number of wrappers suddenly appearing all over my apartment, it has also led to some very entertaining food discoveries. Such as yesterday’s Haebong ice cream experience.
Now what sounds better than a waffle cone with ice cream? How about a waffle (just skip the cone aspect) with two scoops of ice cream, fruit flavored sauce and whipped cream? Sounds pretty good, right? Perhaps a little decadent, but they’re on vacation and I’m on… er… special Kirin time (well, I don’t always get visitors, so I figure I’ve got some leeway, right?). So we decided to give it a try. Plus, the décor of the restaurant was quite a bold statement- bright, bright, BRIGHT pinks, blues and yellows screaming all over the chairs and tables, with a mascot of a funny little wannabe gangster punk looking drugged out on two scoops of ice cream.
Unfortunately, as we discovered at the counter, none of the ice cream flavors were in English. Instead, they all had absurd looking pictures of the flavors that they represented. Snarky, her Boyfriend, and I were fascinated by the black ice cream with the picture of what looked like powdered coal with a smiley face. With elaborate sign language we managed to obtain a sample of this mysterious flavor.
OMG. Our first idea was “Seaweed????? WTF??” and then we realized it was sesame. Yes. Sesame flavored ice cream. And I don’t just mean a hint of sesame. As Snarky put it, it was like they took a bowl of ground sesame seeds, added milk and sugar and froze it.
That was rather ghastly. As was the cheese flavored ice cream. The cactus flavor was… interesting, and the coffee flavor was stronger than a real cup of coffee. When Haebong makes ice cream, they don’t mess around. They take flavors to a whole new extreme. And in case you were wondering, green tea and waffle are not a good combination.
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