One evening after work I went to Nongoljib in nearby Sinsa-dong, just to grab some dinner. Since it specialises in beef I expected it to be pricey, but there were quite a few cheap items on the menu, so it is a place worth going to.

US hanger steak, two portions

Probably thanks to a generous dose of seasoning, it tastes decent for the low price. A good place to drop into casually when you suddenly crave meat.

Nurungji

I ordered nurungji instead of a bowl of rice. A classic at Korean barbecue places.

We had a company-wide dinner, so we went to a certain Italian restaurant in Garosu-gil. The food was not good, so I will not name the place.

Salad

I had never had a salad like this in my life: the ricotta was sweet, the dressing was sweet, everything was sweet. Usually if only one thing is sweet you can just pick it out and eat the rest, but here there was no way out.

Barbecue

The sauce was sweet too, and the proportion of carbs was way too high.

Pasta

Just an ordinary lump of carbs.

The shabbier the restaurant, the higher the share of carbs, the cheapest ingredient, but I never imagined even the salad would be like this. In terms of cost it might be 500 won at most. Selling this kind of thing for over 10,000 won is presumably how you keep a shop running in Garosu-gil.

Around the launch of Blue Ribbon I was working late more often, which cut into my exercise time, and with more eating out on top of that, my belly showed up in no time. Because of that, lately I have been leaving work on time and eating dinner at home, but the belly fat is still not coming off. I do enjoy hunting down good restaurants, but health comes first. When you are out of shape your palate gets dull too, and the bigger your belly, the more you have to wear clothes that hide your figure, so it hurts in all sorts of ways. So these days I am flat-out avoiding places whose flavour comes only from cheap carbs and trans fats. If I could also cut down on drinking a bit, I could live an almost perfectly healthy life, but that seems unlikely, so I will just have to make more time for exercise instead. If I can get through the year-end parties without damage, my runaway six-pack should be back by next spring. Probably.

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