One of the unfortunate things about Korean food once you get over the first flush of how delicious everything is is that you notice that meal after meal is visually similar. It makes it very hard to be aggressively sharing through social media (as if the little dopamine bursts of a half dozen likes directly stimulated the taste buds). Meal after meal, or at least the meals I’ve been going for, are composed of a cauldron of soup, a metal bowl of rice, and a handful of kimchi/banchan. Beyond that, its not hard to notice how meat is pretty much always served with a basket of lettuce leaves and a few chili peppers. No one will ever convince that Korean food is unhealthy because each bite of meat is taken with a mouthful of lettuce. You certain get your fill of salad.
수육 (suyuk, 水肉，”boiled pork”) is eaten with the lettuce wraps much like your array of barbecued meats, but the key difference is that it is boiled rather than barbecued. As should be clear from the parenthetical above, suyuk is based on the hanja literally representing “water meat,” though there is no close equivalent in Chinese cuisine. If I wasn’t dining alone and ordered a medium or large portion of suyuk, the restaurant would have brought it out in a chafing dish and the broth to heat it up at the table.
Suyuk appears to usually be served in restaurants that also offer an array of 국밥 (gukbap, “soup rice”). As pictured above, this set meal came with a bowl of pork soup to which I added a small portion of noodles and the bowl of rice. There were three dishes of seasonings (salty, spicy, and fishy) and the bowl of chives to doctor up the soup to one’s taste.
The whole set was listed as a 수백한상 (su baek han sang), which I think literally means “water, white/hundred, one, table” or rendered more naturally a table of suyuk set meal. baek (백) is an interesting word which either means white or hundred via the Chinese loan words 白 (bai2) or 百 (bai3) respectively. Baek appears in baekban which refers to a set meal consisting mostly of banchan side dishes (notice how ban shows up in both words). The dictionary says baekban is 白饭 (bai2fan4, “white rice”) in the Chinese hanja, which strikes me as less poetic than an etymology suggesting a hundred dishes.