Global cafe: Menu


Egg sandwich with homemade mayonnaise and lettuce. Fluctuates in popularity.

In the spirit of managing expectations, I’d like to be clear that the food I’m serving here is not groundbreaking or exciting or even interesting, mostly. The Global Cafe menu is sandwiches, sweets and drinks, but is expanding and changing daily. Each dish on the menu walks the fine line of affordability, popularity, availability and produceability.

Affordability: Food in South Korea is actually quite expensive compared to other Asian countries. I have to balance food costs with menu pricing, which has to be accessible to someone on a student budget as they’re are my biggest customers. Some of the portion sizes are, therefore, miserly.

Popularity: Sandwiches in South Korea are not to my taste. Mostly they’re pre-made, slathered in sweet mayonnaise and microwaved hot. I have not, and will not, try to recreate a Korean sandwich, so I have no idea how each sandwich on my menu is going to suit local tastes until I suddenly run out of them (or alternatively, have to eat egg sandwiches for dinner). The most popular sandwich is chicken with balsamic caramelised onions and lettuce on wholemeal bread.


Space is as a premium. Next time I’ll talk about coffee.

Availability: I’d love to be able to use more vegetables, cheese and cured meats in my sandwiches, and cheese, cream, butter and fruit in my sweets. This would make my life a lot easier, and I would probably enjoy the product a lot more. These things just aren’t available here at the price, quantity or quality I’d like, or they just flat out aren’t available. The joys of trying to make western food on a budget in Korea.

Produceability: It isn’t a word, I know alright! I’m just referring to my ability to produce the food, in regards to my time and the equipment available to me. For instance I have one domestic oven with one rack in it (which is also in full view of the public, pictured above). I have only one under bench fridge. Most of the time there is only one staff member around, me. As much as I’d love to be making the food to order, this is just not always possible. So I have to develop recipes that will keep.
Right now I’m making everything, except bread, from scratch. This includes the toasted muesli and yogurt, which is gaining popularity daily.

So, I sell a lot of sandwiches. I sell a lot of cakes. Now, just to be clear, I am sick to death of sandwiches. I can get no sandwich inspiration, and I don’t ever want to make another sandwich again and I most certainly don’t want to eat any sandwiches. Sweet things on the other hand are a different story.


Banana bread.

I get much more pleasure from making sweets than sandwiches, which is good, because I’m doing a lot of baking. A. Lot. Mini carrot cakes are baked fresh daily, often twice. I make banana bread every day, and I can barely keep up with demand for chocolate brownies. I’m considering adding muffins, sultana oat biscuits and caramel slice to the menu in the next week. These things have been chosen because of they’re easy to produce, keep well and sell wonderfully. I do have a bit of difficulty with ingredients, though.

Ingredients:

Bread. The bread that I’m ordering isn’t up to scratch. Actually I think it’s crap, super processed soft white bread. It is baked locally, but sometimes arrives frozen, baguettes rock hard. The kind of bread I’m using is normal in Korea and is accepted and enjoyed by the majority of my customers. Guess I just have to lower my standards then.

Butter. Pure butter doesn’t seem to exist in Korea. Although Koreans drink a lot of milk and eat a lot of yogurt, they seem to prefer margarine over butter, and the one locally produced butter I’ve found still tastes very fake. I’ve been buying butter imported from New Zealand from a Korean online shop, but they’ve recently decreased the allowable butter allowance to two blocks (~900g) per order. So now I’m making most things, banana bread for instance, with oil and stockpiling the butter to eat with hot cross buns come easter time.


View from my side of the counter.

Cheese. Now, this is embarrassing. There is a toasted ham, cheese and tomato sandwich on the menu (which I’m making with an incredibly poorly produced home sandwich press that broke on it’s first use) in response to customers pleas for grilled sandwiches, cheese and ham. Korean cheese is unfortunately unfortunate. The only affordable cheese I can get delivered is plastic processed individually wrapped cheese slices. A little part of me dies with every slice I unwrap, but this is normal for Korea and the toasted sandwich has quickly risen in popularity.


The counter, the menu, the horrible bright yellow lights behind the counter (the lights that almost induce seizures in my staff).

The actual menu is a flash animation displayed on a big monitor. This may seem strange but it was the perfect solution for two Bachelors of Design Computing. Why? I needed to be able to easily change the menu, I wanted to remove some reliance on knowing English in the ordering process by using pictures and Koreans are nuts for enormous TVs. It seems to be working, though people need to be directed to it, I guess some people it’s just ignorable advertising on first visit. I take pains to make the food look like the pictures everyday, and am heartened when customers can’t look away.

There isn’t much else I can say about the menu but questions are welcomed and I’m always open to ideas!

Next time: I’m not sure this is even coffee I’m drinking. An Australians pain at serving coffee in South Korea.

Global cafe website

Posted in Global Cafe | 7 Comments

Global Cafe – where, why and why me?

Global Cafe is located inside the Global Lounge (and Education Centre) of the Korea University of Technology and Education (KUT). I didn’t pick the name, fitout or location, I just gladly (or stupidly!) accepted the challenge laid out for me. KUT despite meaning a part of the female anatomy in Dutch (I REALLY want the university to give me one of their ‘KUT Pride!’ t-shirts) has a wildly unbalanced gender distribution (something like 75% male students) and is famous for robotics and hybrid cars. Sounds awesome? Well, the disadvantage comes in the fact that it is out in the sticks. It’s about 1.5 hours south of Seoul and the nearest city, Cheonan, is 15kms away. So, unfortunately, visits are probably outta the question.


When I came back from Australia with my visa, this banner was blowing in the wind. Global Cafe is inside.

Now, why? Well, the official decree is for the cafe to provide a reason for students to visit the Global Lounge. It is thought that getting more students hanging around will expose them to English and increase the likelihood that they’ll participate in Global Lounge activities which introduce them to international festivals and holidays. Last year the cafe was under the same management as another cafe on campus, serving out about 5 mediocre drinks a day, so they gave the space up, leaving it open for me.


Carrot cake with cream cheese icing. Unbelievably popular.

Why me? And how? When I was leaving Hanoi I couldn’t decide where to go next. Not ready to head back to Australia I jumped at the first opportunity handed to me. A friend from university, Alex, was living in Korea, managing the Global Lounge at KUT and he offered my his floor to sleep on and the possibility of a job cooking. He had told his boss that I might be hanging around in Korea for a few months, and he offered me the opportunity to run the Global Cafe. I took a chance and have been sleeping on Alex’s living room floor ever since.

My incredibly talented friend Karan Singh designed the Global Cafe logo.

Next post: Global cafe menu, difficulties and surprises.

Some photos of the Byeongcheon area

Posted in Global Cafe | 5 Comments

Global Cafe.

Hello! Today I really wanted to tell you about what I’ve been doing in Korea. I wanted to let you all know about my little cafe, the problems and surprises, the food, the customers, the beauty and the horrors. But that first picture up there might give you an idea of why my brain just isn’t working well enough right now to articulate all those points. Yesterday at 11am I was approached to cater afternoon tea for a study group of 45 Thai students at 2pm. They ordered 60 coffees (revolting, embarrassing, old. I’m ashamed to admit I serve long blacks with one shot, only because that’s what they want to drink here), and all the chocolate chip biscuits and carrot cake I could whip up in the interim. Luckily I had some excellent staff helping me out. The customers were happy but my heart sank when the room cleared and I had to throw away altogether too many half eaten, partially mauled biscuits. This kind of thing happens constantly and I can’t keep up. Every day cook greater amounts of food and I’m forever running out.


Spicy pork sandwich with pickled carrots

The rest of my time is spent making cakes and sandwiches, coffees and hot chocolate and thinking up new and interesting dishes that will hopefully be adored by a customer base whose tastes are vastly different to mine. It’s incredibly challenging and really rewarding. I’m putting myself on the line and when a plate comes back half eaten or a coffee half drunk a little part inside of me wonders what the problem was and my heart sinks. But a little of the weight is lifted when two friends almost fall out because the first in line buys my last three chocolate brownies leaving none for the other. Or when I’m told that my carrot cakes are the best they’ve ever tasted. Or when customers come back every day for a particular sandwich. This job is incredibly difficult and I’m exhausted and elated.

I’ll be back to tell you more as soon as brain function returns, but you could help me out by letting me know what questions you have about my little global cafe. Post a comment and I’ll reply in post form as soon as I can!

Posted in Global Cafe | 15 Comments

Byeongcheon sundaeguk

I find it strange that so many different cultures adore blood sausage. How did they first come up with the idea of mixing animal blood with grains and eating it in sausage form, and how did it happen in so many different places? I’m sure it has to do with not wasting anything which draws out no complaints here. I think it’s excellent that blood sausage in it’s many and varied forms is enjoyed worldwide, though I’m not sure anywhere revels in it as much as my Korean village, Byeongcheon. This tiny town is packed full of restaurants making their own sundae (blood sausage), advertised by cartoon pictures of ecstatic pigs enthusiastically offering up plates of sausage made from their own blood. Whole freezers in the one supermarket in town are dedicated to the stuff and recently, when telling someone where I live they didn’t understand until I added the word sundae to Byeongcheon.

Byeongcheon sundae is a different kind of blood sausage to the European version. It is packed with potato starch noodles, or glass noodles, vegetables and pigs blood, and is stuffed into intestines. I have visited a few sundae joints who all make their snags by hand, so each place has it’s own sausage style. But the most popular way of enjoying Byeongcheon sundae seems to be in soup (guk). Again, each shop makes a slightly different soup from milky white through to blow-your-head-off kimchi red, though in my experience, they’re all served with the same sides. Green chilli and thick slices of raw garlic, crunchy spicy radish kimchi, spicy bean paste (gochujang) and tiny little salty pickled prawns.

This particular place is a sit on the heated ground type, the fluoroescent lights are up and bottles of soju abound. I visited with my boss as a break on a cafe-equipment buying mission, and the Ajummas were so excited to see a new customer (me!) that they sent out a plate of hot sundae, unadorned. This sundae is surprisingly easy to eat, comforting and with a meatiness the creeps up on you after a few mouthfuls. Alternate with nibbles of cold and spicy sour radish kimchi, or drench with tiny-prawn sauce for a salty sour explosion for which the meaty-gamey sausage is just a base carrier.

Then the sundaeguk arrives, bubbling and hissing-hot. I’m instructed to remove every bit of sundae from my soup, decanting to a side plate to cool down enough to eat. This soup is lightly spicy with thick rings of fresh spring onions slowly cooking inside. Korean-sticky rice provides much needed starch and blandness from the punchy soup and hearty sausage. Plus, a Korean meal isn’t complete without at least a spoonful of rice, or so I’ve been told.

Living out in the Korean countryside can be difficult, people have limited English, it is incredibly cold and lonely. But at least there is amazing Byeongcheon sundaeguk here, bringing a bright light to small town life.

Byeongcheon sundae (병천 순대국)

Posted in Byeongcheon, Korean, Seoult and Pepper, South Korea | 2 Comments

My Hanoi favourites map


Banh mi stall in Hanoi

The world seems a lot smaller to me now. It could just be that I’m getting older, or because my closest friends are spread across more timezones than child-me knew existed, but it was my recent trip to Sydney that sparked this realisation. A quick visit ‘home’ for a visa and a haircut. Forty-eight hours of travelling for six sweaty days of eating, visiting and paperwork. It was almost the shortest amount of time I’ve ever spent in a country, bar transit stops of which I’ve had too many recently. Still, it is incredible to me that just a few days ago I was swimming in the Sydney sun and now I’m celebrating Korean Independence Day the only way I know how: by re-hydrating, staying in bed all day and dreaming of pasta (Independence Day eve is a rocking soju-soaked holiday here, it seems).


Banh mi in Hanoi

Unfortunately, money and responsibilities dictate that I can’t just disappear on a whim. As much as I’d love to jump on a plane and have a breakfast banh mi in Hanoi, I can’t. But for those who can, I’ve put together a map of some of my favourite places in Hanoi. Check it out!


View Hanoi food in a larger map

Posted in Vietnam | 7 Comments
Page 7 of 57« First...«56789»...Last »