Korean BBQ and Squash: The Best Meal Since I Came Back to Harvard

There is one dish at Harvard that everyone (except vegetarians) raves about: Korean BBQ. People love it so much that when the dining hall stopped serving Korean BBQ (because it's a seasonal menu), a lot of students got angry and protested to bring it back!

There was a sign listing all the ingredients in the special Make Your Own Korean BBQ section.

The bar included seared marinated beef (which ran out, as seen in the picture, attesting to its popularity!), crispy tofu, sticky rice, green leaf lettuce, kimchee, pickled cucumber, scallions, and ssamjang, or the paste/sauce that you add to the green leaf lettuce and the beef.

A close-up of the kimchee, pickled cucumber, and ssamjang. According to a friend, she saw the dining hall workers opening up a jar of kimchee, suspecting that they bought it from somewhere rather than make it in its kitchen. It must be quite expensive to afford all that kimchee! I don't really understand why the pickled cucumber is there...we, Koreans, don't eat that kind of stuff.

The dining hall lady brought the grilled beef from the kitchen! The sticky rice was literally a sticky glue that you had to scoop it so hard with the spoon to get it. I didn't eat any of the rice.

Someone once told me that Harvard has partnered up with a nearby squash farm, thus the prevalence of squash in the dining hall. I could eat squash all day, so I go absolutely crazy whenever they serve squash in the dining hall.

My two plates full of food! Wow, no wonder I was so full after devouring all this food. I couldn't choose between the regular meal and the special Make Your Own meal. I meant to bring a little bit of both, but ended up getting a lot of both haha :)

The best way to eat Korean BBQ is to wrap the beef and the kimchee into the green leaf lettuce and put it in your mouth all at once.

I was so pleased by the taste of the kimchee! I am sorry Mom, but it tastes almost as good as yours! I especially like the thick, whiter part of the cabbage then the leafy outer layer. Sadly, the green leaf lettuce wasn't that fresh, especially towards the edges.

The Korean BBQ itself didn't meet my expectation. The last time I had it at a different dining hall, the meat was clearly grilled over fire because it had nice grill marks and smell of the fire within the meat. This one, however, tasted almost boiled in water. The meat was really coarse, dry, and tough, though I did like the fact that it wasn't fatty. The meat was cut really big as well so I had to rip it apart.

My second plate was probably tastier because of the squash! I liked the slightly burnt edges. The squash was seasoned in some kind of sticky sweet sauce, which I think is unnecessary because it shields the naturally sweet taste of the squash. I like the more orange, mushier squash because it's easier to chew. The other dish I got was the portabella mushroom stuffed with quinoa, edamame, and cranberries (you can't see the mushroom), which tasted so bland and tasteless. The East Indian Rice & Lentil had pretty nice spices from the curry, but it was sort of greasy.