Samgyeopsal (Grilled Pork Belly)

In Korea, samgyeopsal is the default answer when nobody can decide what to eat. Work dinner, catching up with an old friend, family night out — if the discussion stalls, everyone ends up at a pork belly place. You sit down, the grill fires up, side dishes appear, and then something unusual happens: no finished dish arrives. Raw meat arrives, and cooking it is your job. Some restaurants have staff handle the first round, but mostly the people at the table take turns grilling, cutting and passing pieces around. That's why samgyeopsal is remembered less for its flavour than for the hour spent cooking together — and why Koreans take people they want to get closer to out for exactly this.

For a national dish, its rise is startlingly recent. The word 'three-layer meat' shows up in a 1934 newspaper article, but before the 1970s pork belly was dismissed as a slab of fat, usually boiled and sliced rather than grilled. The turning point came when Korea started exporting pork to Japan in the 1970s: pig farming industrialised, the gamey smell disappeared, and importers wanted the lean cuts — loin and tenderloin. Pork belly piled up domestically instead, and grilling it with nothing but salt became the norm. By 1979 a newspaper was reporting that samgyeopsal joints were 'popping up like bamboo shoots.' The portable butane burner, on sale from 1980, sealed it: now a grill could go anywhere. By the 1997 financial crisis, 'samgyeopsal and soju' had become shorthand for the era itself.

The menu usually lists other cuts beside samgyeopsal, and knowing the difference makes ordering far more fun. Samgyeopsal is belly, so the fat layers are thick, it renders heavily on the grill, and it's the richest of the lot. Moksal (collar/shoulder) has fat marbled more lightly, so it's cleaner and softer to chew — the pick for anyone who finds belly too heavy. Hangjeongsal, from just below the neck, is a specialty cut with only a small amount per pig and a distinctly springy bite. Within belly itself there's a split too: paper-thin frozen daepae-samgyeopsal cooks in seconds, while thick fresh-cut belly crisps outside and stays juicy inside. Either way nothing is marinated, so the differences between cuts come through completely undisguised.

The spread around the grill is half the meal. Standard issue: lettuce and perilla leaves for wrapping, ssamjang, a small dish of salt and sesame oil, raw garlic, green chilies, a tangy scallion salad, thin brined radish sheets for wrapping, and a doenjang stew that comes with rice. On Jeju Island you'll get meljeot — simmered anchovy sauce — and dipping hot pork into it delivers a salty, deeply savoury hit that wins over most first-timers. Then there's the step you must not skip: the fried rice. When the meat is gone, say 'bap bokka juseyo' and rice goes straight onto the grill with the rendered pork fat, chopped kimchi, seaweed flakes and sesame oil. Scraping up the browned, slightly scorched crust with a spoon is the actual finale of the meal, which is why people order it even when they're already full.