dining

Are you reading this from someplace far away from Panama, and are you one of these people who can’t distinguish the rest of Latin America from Mexico?

If so, let me clue you in. Jalapeño and tabasco peppers really aren’t a significant part of Panamanian cuisine. In general, the food in this country is not all that spicy. The ubiquitous spices here are culantro and garlic, not hot peppers.

This is not a universal truth, however. The West Indians and the Kunas prefer spicier fare, so the food on the Atlantic side tends to be a bit more picante. There are all sorts of subcultures here and if you want Mexican food you have a number of options in Panama City.

Still, if you like your sopa de mariscos spicy hot, the most frequent option is to order the standard culantro-flavored concoction of root veggies and seafood and add however many dollops of yellow aji chombo sauce your palate desires.

After a hard morning slaving over my email and talking on my cell phone, I found myself craving something different in the way of seafood soup, and I wanted it spicy. So I took my lunch break at the Korea House, on Calle 52 in the banking district.

It wasn’t very crowded. Besides me, this lunchtime crowd included a group of Korean businessmen, a Korean couple and a party of middle-aged African-American men who had apparently acquired the taste for Korean cuisine while serving in the US military.

This little restaurant is also a bar, and features a few Japanese entrees in addition to the wide selection of Korean dishes. It’s an outpost of another culture. You don’t get a fork unless you ask for one, and there is no non-smoking section. I prefer chopsticks, and the ventilation was good enough to keep the smoke from bothering me.

I don’t do well at Korean pronunciation. I perused the trilingual menu, found cham pong --- a spicy seafood soup --- and placed my order. I didn’t get the accent and tones right, so the friendly waitress corrected that and asked if I really wanted something picante. I explained that I like things hotter than a lot of other Panamanians do.

First there came four little bowls of veggies. One kind of greens was flavored with a slightly spicy shrimp paste. Another kind of greens bore the subtle but unmistakable taste of toasted sesame oil. What were those little white shreds in that interesting orangey sauce?

And then, because this is after all a Korean restaurant, there was the dish of fiery kim chi. The Germans, you see, are not the only culture to have perfected a recipe for fermented cabbage.

I picked at the vegetables, clearing my palate with the kim chi, until the main dish arrived. It was a big bowl of soup with clams, shrimp, octopus, squid, green peppers, cabbage, carrots --- and were those leeks? and was there some other sort of seafood in the mix? --- along with noodles, egg drops and a mildly spicy broth.

Oh, yeah, the good stuff. It was soup to be eaten with chopsticks until the end, for which a handy soup spoon was provided. It was a very satisfying meal.

But that wasn’t the end of it. The waitress brought out cold watermelon slices and a cup of hot ginseng tea when the soup and vegetables were gone. The meal was thus perfectly balanced, the body and soul contented, yin and yang in divine harmony. That’s a pretty good lunch deal for $10.50.

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