There's nothing more Australian than a barbecue. They’re as Aussie as taking a replica Phar Lap made out of beer mats to play beach cricket. Chucking a slab of meat and a couple of tubes of miscellaneous gristle onto a hotplate is such a huge part of our culture that it’s the one cooking task that Aussie blokes can regularly be convinced to do, generally while wearing a novelty apron.
The tradition retains its place in Australian hearts – so much so that our compulsory voting system would collapse if we weren’t lured to polling booths by the promise of a snag dripping its fat into a slice of margarine-smeared white supermarket bread.
But while our passion may be unsurpassed, from a culinary perspective there's nothing especially sophisticated about Australian barbies. When I was a kid, the average sausage wasn’t so much char-grilled as just plain charred, and the steaks were often chewier than gum.
While the quality of the meat has improved, and our skill along with it, we like to keep things simple. Many Aussie backyard chefs tend to sneer at anything as fancy as mustard, let alone elaborate marinades.
Ask any purist grilling bulk-buy pork snags at a fundraiser outside a hardware store, and they’ll tell you that the only real option for adding individual flair is onions – the correct answer is yes – and the choice of tomato or barbecue sauce.
The truth is that other countries do barbecuing – well, as a matter of national pride, I’m going to say ‘more elaborately’ rather than ‘better’.
Nowadays, our cities are full of those Brazilian joints where they keep bringing you more perfectly-cooked serves on skewers until you faint or have a coronary. Argentinian steakhouses have taught us to pair a hunk of beef with chimichurri, a delightful blend of herbs and oil, while Texan-style wood-smoked barbecue is almost as ubiquitous amongst certain quadrants of our cities as beards. (Note that the vendors of the former often sport the latter.)
But there's one country where the love of cooking meat over an open flame is so great that rather than keeping the pleasure for themselves, the chefs generously allow the customer to do the grilling honours – Korea.
Now, I know a few Aussie pubs have cook-it-yourself steak setups where you hit the salad bar and then drop your T-bone onto a communal hotplate. But if you haven’t experienced Korean barbecue, it takes the DIY concept to a whole new level.
A patron cuts portions of galbi beef into smaller pieces, as it cooks on a burner at his table inside a Korean BBQ restaurant. Source: Getty Images
At a Korean barbecue restaurant, the flame’s right there on your table. They give you pre-chopped strips of meat, frequently daubed with a potent marinade, and you pick up the tongs and do your thing. The portable butane burners that were commonly used are being , but natural gas versions are available. And better yet, in some K-BBQ outlets, they’ll actually bring a bunch of glowing, red-hot coals to your table and dump it in the middle beneath a flimsy grill. It’s as excellent as it sounds.
But what of the smoke indoors, you may wonder? There are always extractor fans, often in tubes that you can pull down over the grill – and they keep your clothes surprisingly stench-free.
Gather round and have your marinated prime rib prepared for your table on your table. Source: Getty Images
There’s even a token concession to healthiness in the form of lettuce leaves, which are used to wrap the meat in what can only be described as a mini-kebab. Then you dunk it in one of the provided sauces. Try it once, and you’ll be hooked.
I was when I first tried it, at a place in somebody’s backyard in Campsie where they placed the grills inside disused oil drums, for that authentic Korean Mario Bros experience. The place was known only as the Black Spider, and I’m sure it’s now been shut down, whether by planning authorities, an irate landlord or the business’ move to more legitimate premises, as Sydney, like all Australian cities, has been experiencing a K-BBQ explosion lately. Whereas at the Black Spider, we were more concerned about literal explosions.
Grilled pork belly barbecue (samgyupsal).
Doing things at your table seems to be a popular option in Korean cuisine. Many soups comp with a block of dried noodles which you need to stir yourself within the sauce, and then there’s the legendary , where you get a bowl of steamed rice, meat, veggies and chili sauce, and stir-fry it via the heat of the stone bowl. It’s absolutely delicious, especially when the rice on the bottom gets crispy.
Those geniuses in the Korean Institute of Barbecue Science have even come up with a way to serve beer at your table. On request, they’ll give you a tall plastic tower full of beer, with a little tap so you can serve yourself.
But how, you may wonder, does it stay cool? In the centre of the tube, there’s another tube full of ice. I told you they were geniuses.
Korean barbecue is incredible, so much so that I genuinely can’t understand why North and South haven’t gotten together and held a big cook-up in the DMZ to sort out their differences. The same generosity that leads Korean restaurants to offer free sides could surely be harnessed to bring the two halves together?
The growing popularity of K-BBQ has led me to an obvious question – why hasn’t every pub in Australia started offering it? The style is hugely popular in Japan, where it’s called yakiniku, and comes with a different range of sauces, but the same lettuce leaves.
Sure, we don’t need to have the full range of excellent marinades that typifies the Korean approach to cooking meat. But if Aussie blokes were given the chance to grill steak and refill their own beers right at their table, surely they’d never get up again?
