I Ordered "Small" Gamjatang. It Was Enough for 3 Meals.

I worked late last night — later than usual — and didn't get home until 11 PM. I was hungry, but it was too late in the day to think straight about what to eat.

Then, out of nowhere, I wanted gamjatang.

If you haven't heard the name, gamjatang is usually described in English as Korean pork bone soup — a big, deep-red, spicy broth built around pork spine bones. It's a dish I've taken foreign friends to more than once when they've visited Korea. The first reaction is almost always "wait, are those... bones?" — but once people actually try it, most of them end up liking it a lot more than they expected.

I like it too. But there's one problem: gamjatang isn't really built to be eaten alone.

Not exactly a "dinner for one" kind of food

At a restaurant, gamjatang usually comes in a large pot that sits on a burner at your table, simmering while a group of people share it. It's built around a shared pot in the middle of the table, not a plate portioned out for one person.

It was too late, and sitting alone at a restaurant felt like more effort than I had energy for. So I ordered delivery instead.

I ordered the smallest size. It did not feel small.

Since I was eating by myself, I went with the smallest size on the menu — about 30,000 won (roughly $22).

"Small size, eating alone — this should be about right," I thought.

When it arrived and I lifted the lid, I just sat there for a second, looking back and forth between the pot and myself.

This was the small size?

I counted the bones. There were ten.

Out of curiosity, I actually counted the pork bones.

Ten.

Plus potatoes, vegetables, and a very generous amount of broth. This was not a single serving by any reasonable measure. If I had to guess, this pot alone was good for four or five meals.

I'd ordered a late-night dinner because I was hungry. What I actually ordered was several days' worth of dinners.

That's kind of the whole point of the dish

Thinking about it, gamjatang was never really designed to be a solo meal. It's pork bones, potatoes, and vegetables simmered together in a rich broth, meant to sit in the middle of a table while a few people eat from it at once.

There's actually a version of this made for one person — take out the potatoes, serve it in a single-portion bowl, and it becomes a different dish called ppyeo-haejangguk ("bone hangover soup"). Looking back, that's probably what I should have ordered instead.

My foreign friends have liked this one more than I expected

Whenever people think of Korean food, bulgogi, bibimbap, and kimchi usually come up first. Gamjatang doesn't get mentioned nearly as often. But I've noticed it tends to get a better reaction from my foreign friends than I expect going in.

The first look can be a lot: a huge pot, a pile of bones, thick red broth. A few friends have hesitated before trying it. But almost every time, once they actually got the meat off the bone and had a bite with the potatoes, that hesitation disappeared fast.

Eating it alone taught me something I never noticed before

None of this really shows up when you're eating with other people. Gamjatang is just a lot of food — at least the "small" size I ordered last night was.

Looking at what was left after one meal, I had one clear thought:

"How am I supposed to finish all of this by myself?"

I ended up getting three meals out of it total — today, and two more after that. Not quite the four or five I'd guessed, but still nowhere close to a single dinner. What felt like a single 30,000-won dinner turned into three days of meals, bought without meaning to.

Eating it alone wasn't bad, though

To be clear, none of this makes the food taste any different. Eating a hot bowl of gamjatang at home, alone, late at night, was actually kind of nice. No burner to keep simmering, no need to pace myself for a table of people — just serve out what I want and put the rest in the fridge.

But I did learn one thing for next time: the small size is more than enough. Actually, it might be too much.