- Mike Sula
- Bo ssam, Hal Mae Bo Ssam
For anyone who’s ever eaten Korean barbecue bo ssam is not an unfamiliar delivery system. Literally meaning “wrapped,” it also refers to a particular dish—a feast, actually—particularly if soju is involved. Typically, bo ssam is sliced and boiled pork belly served with raw oysters, kimchi, and raw cabbage or lettuce. You pick up a piece of greenery, tuck in some pork, an oyster, a scrap of kimchi, and perhaps add a smear of doenjang, or bean base—or a dab of fermented shrimp sauce—before bundling it up and shoveling it in your pie hole.
You can’t eat bo ssam without gamjatang and at Hal Mae it’s not so much a soup as a heaping pile of fall off-the-bone pork neck bones, sprinkled in nutty perilla seeds, taking a dip in a minimal amount of brick-red broth, a bit like the pozole at Dove’s Luncheonette ($24.95 for two). Of course you can’t consume either of these things without proper lubrication, so Hal Mae offers four kinds of soju, two varieties of Korean lager, the herbal rice wine known as baekseju, and another, the sweet, syrupy sansachun.
- Mike Sula
- Hal Mae Bo Ssam, Morton Grove
