One of the questions visitors ask me most often is why Koreans share their side dishes. First-timers walking into a Korean restaurant are often caught off guard. They ordered one dish, and within minutes the table fills with kimchi, seasoned vegetables and pickles. None of it lands on their own plate. It all goes to the middle of the table and belongs to everyone. Most visitors view this as part of Korea's sharing culture. They are not wrong, but every time the question comes up, I tell a slightly different story. What sets Korean cuisine, or "hansik," apart is not that people share dishes. It is that people sharing one table can eat entirely different meals. A few years ago I shared a meal with a journalist from Austria. She is a vegetarian, yet I had managed to arrange the meeting at a Korean barbecue restaurant of all places — still, the meal went smoothly. The table filled up with rice, soup, leafy greens, and side dishes. She asked me how to eat ssam, a traditional kind of lettuce wrap, and then asked whether any side dish should not be put inside. I told her none was. A little