Yes, I'm upgrading my relationships. Today, Mystery Lady #1 was joined by three others from Seoul, with pickup in this spiffy Mercedes.
I've been to Seoul at least 50 times, so to indicate that this was my best day here....ever, is significant. The cuisine was incredible, plus we had a long drive to view the remains of cherry blossoms in the mountains, with culture tossed into the mix.
We were whisked to lunch at Dooreyoo, a contemporary Korean restaurant with deep roots to traditional cooking. The chef is the celebrated Tony Yoo, who earned the first Michelin star in Korea.
He has two of these places. We first went to his older one, but the ladies did not like the seating arrangement, so we went to his second, which is in an art museum.
Their soy sauce, for example, is served in very tiny amounts, for this brew is said to be seven years old, but, more so, like the U.S. Senate Bean Soup, the batch just keeps fermenting and re-filled as used. You don't dip the food into this sauce. You touch the tip of your chopstick to add the taste to what you pick up.
I might have broken my all-time record for lunch, but we had five different kinds of drinks, starting with Makgeolli, an unfiltered rice wine. We also had the clear version, which was new to me, a bottle of Rhone Crozes-Hermitage, and two kinds of end-of-meal drinks (sake- and soju-based, infused with additives) that are consumed for reasons of health. Seriously. I told them that my knees hurt, so much of the meal was focused on curing that pain, with both food and alcohol. 
The first course was a kind of tomato soup with nuts. Then came tomato-covered kim chee (you can't see the KC, but it was said to be historically accurate as to what it once tasted like) and a mountain potato salad and scallops:
The scallops were so good that I need to enlarge them for you, especially as there were special seaweeds in the concoction to eliminate knee ailments:
Then, Korean wagyu beef followed by rockfish:
Korean wagyu tastes like Japanese wagyu, and that rockfish was sensational.
It was explained to me that in the processing of Makgeolli, a thin layer of alcohol rises the top. This is carefully remove to be clear Makgeolli, one of our drinks. Here are the close-to-end-of-meal therapeutic liquors:
The dessert was vanilla ice-cream covered with coco powder and kinako:
Was this the end? Nope. A final tea, except the ingredients, like mulberry, were fashioned to further soothe my knees:
After a two-hour lunch, we drove for another couple of hours around the hills to get close to the cherry blossoms. I took fifty photos, but here are just two:
These hardly do any justice to the awesomeness, but we then went on to the National Folk Museum, focusing on the typical Korean's lifestyle over time. Two Blue-Bar Pigeons led us to the site:
If you're wondering why me and not the mystery ladies, I'm protecting their privacy.
Next door is the Gyeongbokgung Palace, the main royal place of the Josean Dynasty, which lasted from 1392 to 1910. The original palace was destroyed by fire in 1592 when Hideyoshi Toyotomi of Japan came to conquer. The site remained in ruins for 270 years, but restoration began in 1867, just before the beginning of Japan's Meiji Era. There were further damages inflicted by the Japanese from 1910 to the end of World War II. This current restoration only began in 1990, demolishing the primary Japanese headquarters, which had been placed inside the Palace grounds.
Note above that foreigners are wearing traditional Korean wear. This is because anyone doing so can enter for free. A few other photos:
Again, I took a hundred photos, but let us next go on to dinner. Obviously, after that fabulous lunch, I was not hungry at all. However, the Korean Mystery Ladies, hearing that I liked kalbi, insisted on a special restaurant that specialized in this delicacy, plus Korean wagyu steaks. The drink of the evening was one shot soju poured into a half-full glass of beer.
There were two grills, one for the steaks and the other for the kalbi, but look at all those complementary dishes:
Here are the stages of BBQing for each:
Let me stop here, but only to say that both were extraordinary. Don't know what the English translation is, but here is the entrance of this Korean beef restaurant:
All the above compressed into a few hours. Yes, the best day I've ever had in Seoul. Mystery Lady #1 and I were then dropped off at the Sheraton D-Cube City Hotel later that night. We need to awaken at 4:45AM, for we depart Incheon for Narita early tomorrow morning for our final adventure: bullet training around northern Honshu and Hokkaido, again to follow the cherry blossoms.
How are my knees? Feeling better.
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