Special tourism zone in Seoul
By Rama Gaind
INDIAN food is popular the world over. What’s more, it’s heartening to see the burgeoning number of Indian restaurants not only in Australia, but overseas as well.
Five years ago a visit to Seoul, the capital of South Korea, unearthed six Indian restaurants. The landscape is very different now.
With a population of over 10 million, Seoul boasts a 600-year history and in 1988 it became famous throughout the world as the host of the 24th Summer Olympics. Korea was again the focus of worldwide attention when it co-hosted with Japan, the 2002 FIFA World Cup soccer tournament.
Itaewon is a special tourism zone in Seoul, where you can idle away many pleasurable hours with shopping and dining. It is honeycombed with more than 2000 shops as well as jazz bars, night clubs and ethnic restaurants. This is one district that’s both popular with locals and foreigners. In the core, around the Hamilton Hotel, are a cluster of shops selling leather goods, bags, clothes, shoes and tourist souvenirs. The sidewalk is fringed with roadside stalls attracting shoppers with accessories, hats, T-shirts, small gadgets and much more.
Itaewon is the area most densely packed with diverse ethnic restaurants. This is the location of the Ashoka Indian Restaurant which opened in 1988 when the Olympic Games were held in Seoul. It was the first Indian restaurant in Seoul then.
Memories come flooding back of my meeting with the then chef Ganesh Chokkalingam had been working there for six years. Prior to working in Korea, he had also worked for the Taj Mahal hotel group. One of three chefs, Mr Chokkalingam, who was originally from Chennai (Madras), spoke about how popular Indian food was in Korea. The award-winning restaurant had attracted an increasing number of customers.
The interior was elaborately decorated with warm hues of maroon with many elaborate Indian artifacts on show. Along with a number of certificates of appreciation hanging on the walls, it was an impressive array of sample dishes in the display cabinet that had caught my eye.
Now you will find many Indian restaurants in Seoul which offer good Indian food in comfortable surroundings.
To mention a few, there’s Wazwan, where you get north Indian cuisine (basically from Kashmir); Usmania Restaurant; Chakra Restaurant; Taj Restaurant is one of the few upscale dining restaurants in the Myong Dong; and the Ganga Indian Restaurant is in the Seoul Finance Center (City Hall area).
Over six million foreign tourists visited South Korea in 2006. No doubt the numbers will continue to increase including the figure of 50,000 Indians.
