Seoul Kitchen

During our short time in Seoul, we were impressed by a contrast of Korean culture with the rest of Asia. And by Korean food of course 😋

Our first stop was near the Gimpo airport. We arrived during a cherry blossom season, so these beauties were everywhere. The surroundings are typical Asian city streets.

We were tired after a 12 hours flight, yet we were hungry. We quickly found a few places with good ratings on the maps and took a walk around. One restaurant caught my attention because of its very local and very authentic vibe. It didn’t look any touristy and clearly nobody spoke any English there, but the dishes at the tables looked very attractive, so I pushed my family inside, through their cultural shock resistance. Hunger and curiosity took over the hesitation 😋

We were hosted by an old lady who did her best to make sure nobody leaves the table without being full. The main dish this restaurant serves is a duck, which you roast yourself in a special pot with mushrooms, onions and sweet potatoes.

And of course, being a traditional Korean dinner, it is served with a dozen of side dishes, most of which we didn’t know. Except for kimchi and lettuce maybe.

Our favorite was the one in the left bottom corner, next to the heater. We couldn’t identify what it was, and neither could our Korean friend who we showed this pictures. One thing she was sure about: this place serves great food for its money, because all the elder people. They know good eating and know where to go to for that. So we were not wrong. And we enjoyed the food and the atmosphere a lot.

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The streets of Seoul center resembled me of a mixture of Moscow with other Asian metropolitan areas.

We walked down the Seoul’s main pedestrian street, which is very very very similar to Staryy Arbat in Moscow and Bolshaya Pokrovskaya in Nizhny Novgorod.

To my friends from NN: they even have a “Художественные промыслы” shop there 😂 Here is how it looks:

Our destination in that area though was a lovely Korean grill restaurant with amazing food and atmosphere. This is glance at the kitchen and a row of rice steamers:

And the dinner itself looks like this:

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A few words about airports. Here is how Gimpo looks, whish is a low coster (take that, Berlin-Brandenburg! 🥊) airport in Seoul:

They serve great noodles there, totally worth standing in the queue 😉

The bigger international airport is Incheon. It has more futuristic fleur about it and we’ve made a few encounters with human-alike robots there:

And the last glimpse of outstanding Korean cuisine before our 13 hour flight back to Europe:

We only stayed one night in Seoul on our way to Tokyo and one night back, hence this list of impressions is so short. We will definitely come again and dedicate more time to explore and taste South Korea! 🇰🇷🍜

📷 Shot mainly on Canon PowerShot G5 X Mark II