Clockwise from
left: Bukchon
Hanok Village;
Lorenzo Antinori,
head bartender at
Charles H. in the
Four Seasons
Hotel Seoul; Line
Friends Café
& Store on the
“café street” of
Garosugil (see
Trip Notes).
reintroduce Edison bulbs to downtown Manhattan.
Still, the atmosphere in the bustling basement is pure
Seoul – the service somehow both rambunctious and
flawless, the clientele equally committed to having
a good time and closing a deal. At the bar beside me
is an amiable businessman from Busan. He starts off
drinking Kyoto dry gin alone but ends up chatting to
a Venezuelan couple with a mysterious past. The head
bartender, a dapper Italian named Lorenzo Antinori,
has been in Korea a year, which is apparently long
enough to internalise the country’s priorities.
Suggesting an Old Fashioned made with almond
liqueur, Antinori insists the drink’s ice cube, which
is made of coconut water, is “very good for the skin”.
In addition to seven restaurants and bars, a helpful
concierge and the most powerful shower of my life,
the Four Seasons has a Korean sauna, a jjimjilbang,
which makes a useful complement to Charles H. As is
customary, the sauna has a variety of pools of differing
temperatures and, in a five-star twist on tradition, an
oxygen room for napping.
The sauna overlooks Gwanghwamun Square,
the centre of the 600-year-old historic city of Seoul
founded on the north bank of the Han. It’s a
designated spot for civic gatherings, and protesters
gather on Saturdays at Sejong crossroads, the
intersection at the base of the square, and march
to Gyeongbokgung Palace, the headquarters of the
Joseon Dynasty, to make their voices heard. (The
president’s house is behind the palace.) Their causes
are many – I see contingents flying American, Chinese
and Israeli flags. The Candlelight Struggle of late
2016 took place here, a series of gatherings in which
hundreds of thousands, and on one occasion,
reportedly more than a million people, peacefully
denounced President Park Geun-hye for corruption.
The protests led to Park’s impeachment by the
Constitutional Court of Korea last year.
Watching the action is a bronze statue of Admiral
Yi Sun-shin, Korea’s most famous naval commander,
who in the 16th century successfully resisted the
Japanese. Next to him is a statue of King Sejong
the Great, who replaced Chinese with Hangul, the
unfailingly sensible national language. (The shapes
of each consonant mimic the shape of the speaker’s
mouth when pronouncing it.) Nationalistic fervour is
alive and well at the palace up the road, where anyone
dressed in traditional garb, or hanbok, enters for free.
The pedestrian plaza out front is often full of teenage
boys wearing the round horsehair hats of Sejong
noblemen, and young women floating around in
tiny bolero jackets and bell skirts. The palace, one
of the Five Grand Palaces built by Korea’s last and
longest-ruling Confucian dynasty, was destroyed by
the Japanese twice, and has been rebuilt twice. But
seeing the costumes among the lotus ponds imparts
a vivid sense of the site’s original grandeur.➤GOURMET TRAVELLER 141