My first encounter with jajangmyeon was a revelatory experience. Two years ago, I was in Seoul with my grandmother, eating our way through her home city when we ended up on a dedicated noodle journey. Yesterday’s lunch had been a chilled metal bowl of naengmyeon, extremely chewy buckwheat noodles served in a cold beef broth punched up with acidic kimchi juice and chalky slices of hard boiled egg. The day before, sweating in the June humidity at a stall in Gwangjang market, we’d slurped down kal guksu, knife cut noodles served with beef broth, carrots, cabbage, and shredded toasted seaweed on top. Just when I was certain there was no room left in my heart, or stomach, for another breathtaking bowl of noodles, we went to a fancy Chinese restaurant in Gangnam. The host led us to our table in a darkly lit room filled with stylish people in designer clothes and my grandmother ordered us heaping bowls of jajangmyeon. We tucked our napkins into our shirt collars and dug our chopsticks in to mix the noodles until they were slick with black sauce. The hand-pulled noodles were balanced: not too thick, gummy, or ethereal, with a bouncy chew. My grandmother and I slurped our bowls clean, waddled back to our Airbnb, and spent the rest of the trip talking about how incredible those noodles were.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that I could write sonnets about jajangmyeon. The elements are all there: toothsome, chewy noodles topped with chunjang, a thick fermented black bean sauce cooked with small pieces of fatty pork, zucchini, and onion. The glossy sauce is adorned with crunchy, electric-yellow pickled danmuji (daikon), raw white onion, and matchstick cut cucumber. The richness of the chunjang, rivaling that of a slow-cooked bolognese, is balanced by the sweet acidity of danmuji cutting through the savoriness like a breath of fresh air. To me jajangmyeon is a comfort food to end all comfort foods, a healing salve for all occasions. It’s for filling a cavernously empty stomach, for soothing period cramps, and for nights when the world sits too heavily on your shoulders.
In my experience noodles are remarkable starting points for larger conversations about cultural history, politics, and diaspora. That naengmyeon lunch led to a discussion about the dish’s North Korean origin and my grandmother’s thoughts on reunification. Photos of kal guksu yielded a 30-minute lecture from my father about how wheat-based noodles became popularized during the Korean war, when American wheat flour was distributed with rations.
Jajangmyeon proves to be no different, as its nation-spanning origins can spark feisty debates about the dish’s cultural heritage. The dish arrived in Korea when Chinese immigrants brought Shandong-style zhajiangmian to Incheon. From its diasporic beginnings, the Koreanized Chinese dish evolved in context to become a unique phenomenon in Korean culture. Popularly eaten on Black Day —the anti-Valentine’s holiday for sad singles— the dish is the most common takeout food in the nation. It has also spawned an extremely gushy subgenre of ASMR mukbangs. Regardless of how you choose to classify jajangmyeon, the dish in mainstream Bay Area food culture still lives in shocking anonymity. You can order jajangmyeon at Chinese, Korean and Korean-Chinese restaurants under its many names (meat sauce noodles, zha jiang mian, jajangmyeon) and determine which interpretation best satisfies your particular palate (one writer, driven by a craving much like mine, did so for restaurants in San Francisco).