I want to eat that

Making food look tasty in art is no small feat. Making the hodgepodge of ingredients and the overwhelming redness of Korean food appear distinct and intriguing to the uninitiated is an even higher bar.

Robin Ha’s Banchan in Two Pages deftly navigates the artistic challenge of creating a distinct look and feel to the drawings themselves, while infusing the unfamiliar food with deliciousness. Her comic guides you in one or two pages per recipe through the process of making a variety of Korean dishes. She even provides descriptions of unfamiliar ingredients and prep techniques, using her straightforward drawings to take the reader step-by-step through key parts of the recipe.

Ha’s illustrations have crisp and expressive lines that don’t lose any of the distinctness of the ingredients and the final dishes. The drawings for stew recipes could easily devolve into a mess of colors and lines. But Ha’s drawings pick out just the right number of details to emphasize the variety of components and demonstrate how the dish will look after all your labors.

I love Korean food, but it hasn’t been easy to recreate the dishes I enjoyed when I lived in Dangjin, a small town south of Seoul surrounded by rice paddies. I took a job as a teacher in an English language school there, and my boss’s mom brought in lunch and dinner for the staff. I was very fortunate to have home cooking as my initial exposure to the cuisine.

At first, I didn’t think I was so fortunate. I came to Korea not liking white rice or tofu because I thought they were both bland, mushy, and pointless. Strange textures lurked everywhere. It was weird eating gelatinous fat and hard crunchy roots. The flavors were overpowering and pungent. The smell of extra-aged kimchi filled the hall between classrooms whenever it was lunchtime. I struggled for weeks to master metal chopsticks and only managed to feed myself because spoons were available. But week after week of eating food of such intensity and variety changed how I experienced food.

Banchan in Two Pages gives readers who aren’t planning on moving to a small Korean town an approachable introduction to Korean dishes besides bibimbap. I am all for Ha’s evangelizing of the range of Korean foods that are in reach of the average cook. I was delighted with how straightforward the preparation was for some of the everyday dishes I had eaten in Dangjin. Ha’s recipes helped to demystify several of those processes.

For me, eating Korean dishes was my initiation into the food enthusiast club. This cuisine grabbed me with its vibrance and sophistication, as well as its democratic nature. Excellent versions of dishes could be found in cheap neighborhood joints just as easily as expensive special occasion restaurants. Ha’s recipe comic brings some of those tastes I experienced back in my grasp, and makes them available to a wider audience. If you give them a try, you could find a whole new range of savory experiences opening up to you.

Come join the club.