Here, courtesy jet lag, is another quick report on a casual restaurant meal in Seoul. This was eaten in February and features Korean Chinese food. As you may know, like Indian Chinese food, Korean Chinese is its own hybrid cuisine. We don’t see very much of it in the Twin Cities but it’s very popular wherever Koreans live in large numbers—which is to say that it is very popular in Seoul as well. And dishes like jjangmyeon are iconic in the larger Korean culinary repertoire. Even though the missus loves Korean Chinese, we didn’t somehow particularly seek it out in Seoul—I guess there were lots of things we wanted to try there and some more often than others. Accordingly, this report of lunch at Namgyung is not of a meal at a lauded Korean Chinese restaurant, merely one that was convenient right after a lecture the missus had organize (on North Korean cinema) at the hostel at which my students were living in Yeongdeungpo. We took a bunch of the students with us to a late lunch after the talk. Here’s what we ate.

If you don’t read Korean or have someone who can read Korean in your party, you might not realize from the stree that this is a Korean Chinese restaurant. Indeed, you won’t even know the name of the restaurant as all the signage is in Korean. And then when you go in, the menu is entirely in Korean as well. A few students who weren’t with us on this occasion told me later that they’d stopped in and had fortunately been rescued by English-speaking diners who helped them order. In our case, we had the missus with us. It was a late lunch and we were a party of eight, and so instead of asking her to translate everything on the menu for people to choose from—you can imagine the confusion that would ensue—we decided to keep things simple: everybody chose between either jjangmyeon (noodles in black bean sauce) or jjambbong (spicy seafood noodle soup). In addition we got an order of tangsooyook (Korean Chinese sweet and sour pork) for the table to share.

The group split evenly into those who wanted the milder jjangmyeon and the spicier jjambbong and people got tastes of the other from their friends (the missus and I just swapped bowls halfway through the meal). We were given a special size of the tangsooyook split into two for the two sides of the table. All of it was quite tasty—and I think everyone enjoyed their food just fine. It would have been nice to try a few more dishes in a family-style order but this was not the occasion for that: we just needed to have a quick meal.

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

The restaurant seems quite popular with local young people, some of whom were finishing late lunches as well when we arrived. I assume it’s popular with the local office goers as well. Service was more cheerful than is the norm at Korean restaurants of this casual nature. Price? All of the above came to 89,000 won or $65. So just above $8/head, which is very good for Seoul. Portions were very generous. Nothing I’d recommend anyone go out of the way for, but if you’re in the vicinity and interested in Korean Chinese it’s certainly not going to do you wrong.

Alright, one more whisky review tomorrow and then two more restaurant reports on the weekend and that’ll be March in the books. I hope to have one more report from Seoul along with my first Delhi report. Let’s see how it goes.