When the Koreatown’s BBQ Dining is Resembling the Seoul’s Iconic Tented Street Food Stalls

Eating inside the restaurant is very cosy, but the street food stalls are way better. The pandemic shifting our daily life where we have to follow the health protocol like social distancing, always wearing your mask, and washing hand regularly. Those health protocols were made to minimize the spread of covid-19 in public and business areas. 

Nowadays we can find the acrylic glass in the cashier frontier or customer service, right? That designated acrylic was made to avoid the viral spread from both visitors and employee. This is the one of many examples of how business areas are developing and implementing the health protocol. 

The most real example we can see every day is restaurants. Yes, restaurants must follow the health protocol where the staff must wear mask, cleaning the cutlery and table with disinfectant, and restrictions on the number of visitors. The deduction of visitors is a must protocol that not only restaurant business does, but office also. 

Limiting the number of visitors my seem not good if you are thinking about the profit, but in LA, Koreatown, many restaurants are providing the dine-in service in their asphalt parking area. They install the tents for visitors to eat, and other tents to their staff cooking or preparing the dishes. 

The tent makes it look like the Seoul’s Iconic Tented Street Food Stalls or usually called ad “Pojangmacha”, the Korean street side eateries. You can easily find it in many Koreas Drama and Movies, and usually it is the BBQ street food. 

Pojangmacha, or pocha for short, were ideal places to have a late-night meal for Koreans coming out of offices in the evenings. Everything seemed tailored to soak up the accompanying rounds of alcohol, like tteokbokki (spicy rice cakes), sundae (blood sausage), and odeng (boiled fish cakes). 

Even though the Pojangmacha is one of the Seoul’s iconic, but their government have waged a war and consider the Pojangmacha as the “unsanitary eyesores.” But yet, this type of street food is the best way for restaurant business owners to keep the same number of visitors without violating the local health protocol.