Imperial Palace chef serves pasta soup

By Kim Rahn

You had a heavy drinking session last night. You need something to chase away a hangover, something like a “jjigae” (soup) would be good. But, alas, your lunch appointment is at an Italian restaurant, and the selection of creamy pastas won’t help relieve your stomach.

With these thoughts in mind, chef Hugh Lee at the Imperial Palace Hotel’s Italian restaurant Verona developed zuppa pasta. Zuppa means soup in Italian.

“Some regular customers, usually the more elderly, wanted pasta with soup, especially when they drank a lot of alcohol the previous night. So I served them pasta with a seafood-based soup and they liked it,” the executive chef for banquets and the Italian restaurant said.

Seafood zuppa pasta has a mild-spicy Vongole broth with seafood such as abalone, calamari, king prawn, scallops and clams, along with watercress and dropwort. It is served in a pot on a warmer which keeps the soup hot until the dish is finished.

Lee also created beef zuppa pasta which is boiled with beef tenderloin, oyster mushrooms, button mushrooms and arugula. A sesame sauce accompanies the dish so that guests can dip the beef in it like eating shabu-shabu.

“I devised it after being inspired by banga cauda, an Italian dish made by chopping anchovies up, boiling them with olive oil, and dipping vegetables into the sauce. I thought it would be fun to try eating pasta like shabu-shabu,” the 47-year-old chef said.

The pasta dishes will be offered in a promotion at Verona until the end of August. They are served together with affogato as dessert, which is good to cool down the spiciness of the seafood zuppa pasta and also goes well with the beef dish.

The grill and Italian cuisine expert with 21 years of experience has tried to develop new menus while keeping the tradition of Italian cuisine. Before opening Verona, chef Lee stayed in Italy for three months in 2004, working at local restaurants and studying cooking there.

In Korea, he tries to recreate the authentic Italian taste he had while overseas, but it is not easy as the ingredients here are different from those in Italy, he said.

“In Italy, they can get fresh herbs directly from the fields but we have dried herbs here. We can also only get processed truffles which has a much weaker scent than fresh ones.

“So I try to develop a similar taste with Korean ingredients, searching for similar flavors. For example, Korean eggplant is waterier than that in Italy and so it is difficult to get the texture of the original Italian dish with the Korean one. So I cover eggplant with flour to reduce the water.”

Lee said one of the strong points of Italian cuisine is that variation is relatively easy, as using any vegetable, meat or seafood and applying different sauces such as cream, tomato and olive oil can conjure up a good new dish. He encourages his staff to experiment with new creations and selects the best one as “Today’s dish” to customers.

“Innovation in cooking is encouraged. But at the same time, the dish should retain the old Italian tradition. Globalizing Korean food is the same: in making ‘Westernized’ hansik with ‘doenjang’ (fermented soybean paste), the most important thing is using good quality doenjang,” Lee said.

For more information about the zuppa pasta promotion, call 3440-8000.