These clams come from the Korean port city of Sorae, where a fishmonger turned restaurateur named Lee Myong Chol serves shellfish at his eponymous seafood restaurant/fish market. Sorae is the sort of town any true foodie dreams of discovering, built around a teeming seafood market provisioned by fishing boats that arrive daily and that is chaotic enough to make you feel like you’re in preindustrialized Asia, not the ultramodern Korea of the twenty-first century. The bivalves pack a double wallop of flavor, first in the form of a vegetable relish made with peppers, carrot, and scallions, then from a sort of cocktail sauce based on Korea’s ubiquitous chile sauce. The master recipe calls for clams, but whole bay scallops in the shell and giant green-shelled mussels would be cooked the same way. All would be served with one utensil not typically found at the tables of most American grill joints—scissors. This enables you to snip even the largest, toughest bivalves into tiny pieces in the shell, rendering them as tender as the most delicate
littlenecks.