After yesterday’s image-heavy (and then some) report from Bombay’s Sassoon Dock fish market, I have for you today a relatively restrained report from Seoul. This was one of our earliest meals in the city, eaten on the go just a couple of days after arrival. As with our first two meals (only one of which I’ve yet reported on), this was eaten in a restaurant on Insadong-gil, the main tourist drag of Insadong (the neighbourhood we’ve been living in). The main street is lined with souvenir shops and the like and is a magnet for tourist shopping. The alleys that branch off to the sides are filled with cafes and restaurants. I don’t know if anyone has tried to eat at them all, or if anyone has tried to provide a comprehensive guide to the restaurants on the street. But our experiences suggest that you can’t go very wrong just choosing a place at random. Though not all restaurants in Seoul are great, or even very good, I’m yet to eat at one that comes anywhere close to being mediocre, leave alone bad. Bukchon Kalguksu falls, I would say, in the “quite good” end of the spectrum.

Actually, I ate there twice. The first time was with the family—this meal takes up the bulk of the slideshow below—and once with a colleague a few weeks later. On the first occasion we were in search of kalguksu. Kalguksu—as you may remember from my report from Namdaemun Market’s Kalguksu Alley last year—is hand cut noodles in a light beef broth with just a few garnishes. It’s a very simple dish that offers simple pleasures, but when it’s good it’s very good—especially in the winter. And it was quite good here.

The menu is not vast. Indeed, there are only eight dishes on the winter menu (there are a few more in the summer—pictures of these are displayed over the open kitchen). Over the course of the two meals, I sampled half of them. All three soups that I tried were quite good: the kalguksu, the tteok-mandu guk (rice cake and dumpling soup), and the sagol oogeoji gomtang (cabbage and beef bone soup). The mandu were also tasty but are of the plus-sized variety, which made it a bit hard to pick them up with the thin metal chopsticks that are the norm at the vast majority of restaurants in Seoul. I fear a bunch of them fell apart in the process of trying to eat them. It was actually easier to eat the mandu in the tteok-mandu guk as a spoon could be deployed instead. These, I grant, are inept foreigner problems.

For a look at the restaurant and what we ate, click on an image below to launch a larger slideshow. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next.

Service was the usual Korean “present when needed but not otherwise interested”. The prices are very reasonable. The first meal: a combo order of two bowls of kalguksu and 4 pieces of mandu + one bowl of the tteok-mandu guk came to 37,000 won or just about $28. The second one which featured a bowl of kalguksu, a bowl of the beef soup and a regular 6 pc order of mandu came to 31,000 won or just about $23. I’d call both pretty good dealsm considering the first fed a family of four and the second two adults.

Okay, only a few days left in Seoul but a lot of restaurant reports. My next one, however, will probably be my last formal restaurant report from Bombay. That will be on Tuesday.