Today I have for you a report on lunch at a North Korean restaurant in Seoul. Well, a restaurant serving North Korean style bbq at any rate. We’d recently taken a trip to Ganghwa Observatory—from where you can peer into North Korea—and so it seemed fitting to go eat a North Korean-style meal after that. Accordingly, I took a bunch of my students to Pyongyang Gogijip in Insadong. This is a place I’d passed on many occasions without quite realizing it was there. This because it’s located on the second floor (or first floor as we’d say in India; I suddenly can’t remember how the numbering goes in Korea). But when I looked for North Korean places in the vicinity of the cafe at which I was holding office hours, there it was, just a few minutes walk away. Here’s a quick look at our meal.

The restaurant turned out to be a lot larger than had seemed to be the case from downstairs. And so even though we were a party of six and quite a few tables were occupied, we didn’t have any trouble getting seated right away. There was trouble shortly thereafter as the missus was not with us, and neither was there any English on the menu and nor did the staff speak more than a word of two of it (there is, of course, no reason why they should). With google’s translation help, the menu was an easy problem to solve; however, it took a bit of doing to convey what we wanted to our server, who had opinions on quantities and specifics but couldn’t quite convey them to us as clearly as he would have liked. But we managed to get everything we wanted.

What was all of that? The main event was a mix of meats to be grilled on the cast iron pans on the burners on the table. The grilled meats had to be mostly beef as one member of the party did not eat pork. So we got a couple of orders of brisket and a couple of orders of sirloin that he could join in as well. We also got a bulgogi casserole with glass noodles, mushrooms and greens that he could eat and an order of ttukbaegi gyeranjjim (steamed egg in an earthenware bowl). For the pork enabled we got some pork belly for the grill and a moksal (pork neck) jeongol. To end a couple of bowls of mul naengmyeon.

In short, it was all pretty good though nothing extraordinary (I preferred the meat at our dinner last summer at Ikseondong Mokjang, about a 12-minute walk from this place). My favourite part of the meal was the Pyongyang-style mul naengmyeon—the broth is much milder/blander than in the South Korean style. It has taken me a while to develop a taste for this style but now I prefer it to the other as a chaser to bbq.

For a look at the restaurant, the menu (if you can read Korean) and everything we ate, launch the slideshow below. Scroll down to see how much it all cost and to see what’s coming next.

Service was a bit harried on account of our inability to speak Korean but was fine as service goes in non-high end places in Korea. Cost? 224,000 won all-in, which works out to $161 at the current exchange rate. That would be just about $27/head. A very good value by American standards for what we ate.

Alright, tomorrow I will have a report from Delhi in March. On Sunday I hope to put up another Seoul report and be back on track from that city on this trip.