Eating out at Korean Restaurants

Songdo is an international community and therefore has many international restaurants.  We have found Vietnamese, Japanese, American, Mexican, Italian, French, Chinese, and many others.  So, we are not just eating Korean food all the time.  However, Korean food is the cheapest, and it is quite tasty.  Korean restaurants tend to specialize in one thing.  I'll review a few of those here.

Korean barbeque is very popular.  They will only cook a bit at a time, in front of you, at your table.  They have the nice feature of having your chairs actually be lidded containers that you can put your coat and purse into, so they don't get that smoky smell.
The gogi, or meat, can be marinated or not.  Galbi is very popular.  It is marinated, grilled short ribs.  We enjoyed them at this restaurant. 

Notice that the food is served in many different little bowls.  It's family style.  You get a small plate for yourself and you dish up however much or whatever you are interested in.  I like this community style of eating.  It promotes sharing and allows you to taste many different things in small portions. 

In some Korean restaurants, the kimchi, or pickled cabbage, is already sitting at the table when you sit down.  It's assumed everyone wants to eat it, so you don't even have to order it.  It's just there.  Or it comes as the side dish to whatever your order, if its not already on the table.  There is a spicy kimchi and a milder radish kimchi, that I prefer.  The radish kimchi kind of cleanses the palate, especially after eating a bite of something else spicy. 

Then you have the Korean restaurants that specialize in soup.  Beef broth soup and beef bone soup. 

The red stuff in the bowl is the spicy kimchi.  The bowl of soup is beef broth.  It had shredded beef in it.  

The bowls sit in a plate, that you can use to prop the bowl up against when you've eaten most of the big chunks and are ready to lap up the broth.  

Eric had the beef bone soup, with the beef still on the bone.  

This is a bowl of salt.  The soup needed a little salt to perk up the flavor.

The next Korean favorite is mandu, or dumplings.  We have tried the gogi mandu, or meat dumplings, and also the kimchi mandu, with the cabbage inside.  We like dipping the mandu in soy sauce.

Charlie and Willow trying to pick up mandu with chopsticks.

This cute poster is hanging in the mandu shop across the street from us.  We regularly pop in there to get mandu takeout.  

And next, we have Korean fried chicken.  It is not the same as any fried chicken they serve in the USA.  It is unbelievably delicious, and spicy, and sweet, and totally addicting.  And the chicken takeout, of course includes a container or two of radish kimchi.  

There is also amazing street food.  We found this little donut stand in a subway station.  The donuts are cream filled and served piping hot.  

And street food also includes corn dogs.  We have eaten A LOT of corn dogs.  You have the typical hot dog covered in cornbread.  And then you have the hot dog with corn on top. 

The last thing I want to mention is the menus.  They are not easy to decipher in a Korean restaurant.  They usually look like this:

 The waiter hands you this and you are supposed to check off what you want.  But if you can't read Korean, you have to first translate it with Google Translate.   Or else start learning the Korean words for what you want: gogi mandu, bulgogi, galbi, etc.  

There are many other Korean dishes that we have tried and enjoyed.  This was just a sampling.