The Best Restaurant in Kabul
Monday, November 6th 2006 - 6:51 PM
It's only about a five minute walk from work to the Arirang House Korean restaurant - probably about the same as the distance from home to work - or, in fact, the distance from home to the Arirang House. To get there from work, i go up the side road next to the office, and across the road i live on, passing the mosque on the right hand side, then continue on up this road for a hundred metres or so.
Like a lot of the roads around Kabul, this one is dirt, and has quite an uneven surface - for anyone who knows the place, the surface a bit like Terania Creek Road after the wet season. There's not a lot of traffic along it, but any vehicle driving at much more than walking pace tends to throw up a cloud of dust. Fortunately, though, the bad surface of the road makes it difficult to drive at any speed.
After the mosque you take the second turning to the right, which is another dirt road. This one seems wider than the first one, but it isn't really. I think it's because in the other road the vehicle part is well defined - it's shaped, with a curved surface for water to run off - and there are gutters down between the road and the footpaths, and there are trees along one side. This road is just flattish dirt from one side to the other, with nothing to break it up, except potholes.
A short way down here on the left, there's a baker's. This one's got a raised floor like the one nearest home, but there's glass in the windows here - which must be nicer when it's snowing! The bakery itself is further out into the road than the houses it's between, like it was just tacked on to the outside of one of them, taking part of the road space. The houses are all behind walls and stand a little back from the road itself.
A few houses past the baker's there's a corner shop, where you turn left. The Arirang House is a couple of doors up this road. There's generally an oldish Korean guy sitting or standing outside the gate. Now i've been there a few times - two or three times a week recently - he greets me in a friendly, enthusiastic way.
Inside the gate, there are a few steps going down to a path of white marble chips with small round sections from a log placed like stepping stones along it. It gives the entrance a definite Korean feel.
Inside, you go through a lobby area, with a counter on one wall, past a serving hatch and into the main dining room. This room is furnished with solid, varnished wooden tables and chairs, and all the windows - which make up the whole of one wall and part of another - are covered in a paper like material, with a simple grid pattern on it. It gives the impression of the traditional Japanese (and maybe Korean, i don't know) style of paper screen walls. I've only ever seen it in photos, but this certainly has a similar feel. Personally, though, i'd prefer to be able to see out!
There are quite a few different dishes on the menu, including several "hot pots", meat dishes, and seaweed rolls. The favourites among the group of people i usually go there with are the hotpots though - kimchi hotpot, tofu hotpot and soya bean hotpot. The soya bean hotpot is really miso soup with lots of vegetables and tofu - and plenty of chilli.
Even though i sort of prefer the kimchi hotpot, i've taken to ordering the soyabean hotpot because it's not as filling. The tofu hotpot is the most filling of the three, and i was struggling to finish it when i had it one time!
Kimchi is the Korean national dish. It's fermented white cabbage with chilli, garlic and onion, and often other vegetables, and i believe it accompanies all meals in Korea. I used to make it a few years back, when i lived at Terania Creek and had plenty of time to do things like that, and was living with people who liked it. I was in a Korean supermarket in Melbourne in May this year and was astonished by the number of different types of Kimchi they sold. There must have been at least a dozen types. Apparently there are a lot more different types than that though.
On their own, the hotpots wouldn't put that much of a strain on your stomach capacity, but it's what comes with it that's the problem. Every meal is accompanied by a selection of little dishes of things like pickled vegetables, kimchi, tiny fish, bits of crispy seawead, bean sprouts, and a range of different vegetable things. There's also a kind of vegetable pancake, a bit like an omelette, but i don't think there's any egg in it - i think it's mainly just rice flour holding it together.
All in all, i counted nine different little dishes, plus the pancake. And each one of them is so delicious, you want to eat it all - which doesn't leave much space for the main dish! After you've struggled through all that, they always bring you some melon at the end, too. Melon's in season at the moment, so i'm waiting to see what you get when melon season's over...
Anyway, the whole feast is pretty amazing. The food's extremely good and it's impossible to go away not feeling like you've eaten a bit more than you really needed. It's one of the best restaurants i've ever come across - and it's a bit of a surprise to find such good food in Kabul.
A meal here generally costs me about nine or ten US dollars, all up - which is probably more than i'd routinely pay for lunch in Australia, and i guess it's quite expensive by Afghan standards. But by the standards of the restaurants i've eaten in here, it's quite reasonable. And the food's a lot better!
You can see some of my photos of Afganistan at
WillKemp-Photos.com/afghanistan