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Friday Fun Thread for January 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Ramen broth. Does anyone ever actually finish the entire bowl of broth? Do we need the noodles to swim in the broth as opposed to just idk have enough broth to still sip, but not throw out 3/4ths of it? After all all the work of making ramen is just making the broth.

The banchan in Korean restaurants. Once again, no one finishes all of these.

These both strike me as just plain wrong. Basically everyone I know always finishes all of the broth when they eat ramen. Drinking up the broth, possibly adding more rice or noodles to it to soak it up, is considered just a standard part of eating ramen. There's a reason why slurping directly from your bowl is considered normal in Korea while being considered at least mildly poorly mannered in much of the West.

For banchan, this is an offshoot of the fact that in Korean homes, you just re-wrap your banchan after every meal and put it back in the fridge. Obviously that doesn't work in restaurants, but by and large, Korean restaurants give so little volume per banchan that it's pretty typical to just finish the whole thing and often have to ask for seconds for the popular ones. They'll even usually scale it so that they give you more if you have more people in your party.