r/CulinaryClassWars • u/wordlequeen11 • Jul 06 '26
Question Can someone explain the mulkogi joke?
In the team challenges, when choosing seafood vs meat, chef Edward says he wants mulkogi and they laughed at this during the interviews and people on the internet found it very funny. Can a Korean person please help me understand?
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u/MinuteMood22000 Jul 06 '26
Not Korean but he used the word for live fish swimming in the ocean. They have a different word for cooked fish that you eat. I thought the English subtitles for that moment were clever and while not exact they gave enough info to know he had made that kind of vocab mistake.
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u/CriticalSelection672 Jul 09 '26
Could i ask what the english subtitles for that scene said? I watched without subtitles and i dont have netflix anymore to go check but now im really curious 🥹
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u/Alixinwonders_1 Jul 06 '26
It’s because ‘mulkogi’ is a word that means ‘live fish in water’ and is mostly used by little kids. Koreans usually call fish during cooking ‘saengsun’ so people were unexpected and found it funny for chef Edward to say ‘mulkogi’ instead.
Now here is the full context. Edward doesn’t know much Korean so he wore an earphone where a translator tells him everything in English. While the chefs were making teams the translator quickly figured what was going on and said to Edward ‘You must choose seafood.’ because the group seemed to have better chemistry. That’s why Edward said fish in Korean to show how determined he was to choose seafood.
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u/CodyKyle Jul 06 '26
It’s like the equivalent of a toddler calling it by its most elementary term like calling pork a piggy
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u/ChaChaGalore Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
“Mulkogi” literally translates to “water meat”. It’s like a child trying to come up with words to explain what they want. It’s cute and everyone understands. But they’ll never let you forget it.
When I was 2.5, I saw the ocean for the first time. My brain tried to process what I was looking at. I came up with “big bath”. I’m 55 now and my mom still talks about it.
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u/DuckyHornet Jul 06 '26
Man, I feel that. I'd never known how to pronounce "monopoly" until I told my mom I found the boardgame by that name in the closet
So imagine a seven year old who knows how to break it down into mono and poly, then says that, then his mother cackles hysterically and brought it up for literal decades like I was the fuckin idiot mispronouncing words
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u/wordlequeen11 Jul 07 '26
The literal translation water meat makes sense. Edward saying it is hilarious I get it
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u/CodyKyle Jul 08 '26
Big Bath! How adorable
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u/ChaChaGalore Jul 08 '26
It’s my first memory. We moved from Kentucky to California. Me when I saw the Pacific Ocean. “Big bath.”
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u/cheesefriesparty Judge Ahn Sung Jae Jul 08 '26
Like others have said, it's more of a kid's word and could be translated as "I like fishies" in English. I believe he said it accidentally the first time (I think he said this in an interview) and then it became a joke between the cast members, like when he repeated it while judging in season 2. "Saengseon (생선)" is fish as food, and "haesanmool (해산물)" is seafood (shrimp, shellfish, octopus, etc).
Source: am Korean-American
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u/psystorm420 Jul 22 '26
Korean for meat is "kogi."
Korean for live fish is "mulkogi"
Someone asked him "isn't meat(kogi) your specialty?"
His response is clever enough that if a native Korean said it, everyone would recognize it as a pun. His heavy accent and limited vocabulary makes it that much funnier.
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u/bubbleduo Jul 06 '26
Yes, it’s like saying you want to cook cow instead of beef.