William Gibson Describes the Attractions at Colonial Williamsburg

This article is part of the The Great Authors Series series.

An animated billboard in Busan announces the opening of a steak restaurant called Cody Beef, complete with a picture of an Anglo man and woman enjoying a plump steak and a steaming potato, promising the salarymen and factory workers of Busan an "authentic American steakhouse experience." Cody Beef exists in the lobby level of the Hanwa Group's Motor Company Tower, a 36-level building of carbonized steel and tinted glass designed by structural algorithms and resembling a collection of green glass bubbles rising vertically and adhering to a net of black mesh. There is a steelworks in Busan that developed special techniques for curving steel beams just to allow the construction of the Hanwa Group's building.

Cody Beef's curator of experiences, tasked with assuring customer satisfaction and providing an authentic experience, is David Lee, a half-American man with refined tastes and an impeccable attention to detail. He has spent three months traveling the United States and visiting steakhouses, from Chicago to New York to the bleeding edge of California steakhouse chic, finding instead the look and experience he desired in Colonial Williamsburg.

Convenient, then, that the wide selection of shops in Williamsburg offer authentic reproductions of colonial furniture, and ceramics. David Lee was able to import what it meant to be a colonial eating purple potatoes and venison steaks directly from Virginia to the green bubbles of the Hanwa Group's Motor Company Tower. David Lee even found a blacksmith named Clark Debussey who has provided Cody Beef with a provenance for various metal tools and implements used by the colonials. For the overworked salarymen of Busan, for just those moments they spent at Cody Beef, they would escape the blue LED clocks they produced on the mile-long lines of precision manufacturing at Hanwa Group's digital alarm clock factory.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)