There was an incredible restaurant in Yeoksam all along, and I’ve only just found out about it.
A place like this
The menu
The menu looks pretty short, but depending on what ingredients come in on the day, all sorts of dishes turn up.
Today’s menu
Grilled ogyeopsal (skin-on pork belly), blue crab stew, hanwoo beef tendon jjigae, blanched octopus, nakji tangtangi, yukjeon (beef pancake), shredded potato pancake, stir-fried live octopus, and so on..
Eoriguljeot (spicy salted oysters) with tofu
The eoriguljeot had really come into its flavour. Eaten with the tofu, there is no better drinking snack..
The Mori Izo I brought along since corkage is free, “with all my heart”
Mori Izo itself is a sweet potato shochu that’s hard to get hold of, and this one is the higher-grade model on top of that. The list price seems to be around 250,000 won, but price aside, it simply isn’t an easy bottle to find. I’d bought it a while back, and since I was meeting friends, of course it had to be opened. Mori Izo is fruity and bright in a way you wouldn’t expect from a sweet potato shochu. You could even say it smells of flowers. Then again, is a shochu smelling of flowers a good thing.. that comes down to taste, but it’s delicious and very much top-shelf..
Blanched cuttlefish
Even the innards are the real deal. Just the size tells you how impressive it is, and to think I’d run into ingredients like this in Yeoksam.
Maou
This one is a first-class sweet potato shochu too. It sits closer to the true flavour of sweet potato shochu, and yet it’s smooth and deep. If you like that distinctive sweet potato shochu character, you might well prefer this one. Anyway, that night we did a side-by-side tasting of the two top-level Japanese sweet potato shochu brands, and each had a clear personality of its own. I liked Mori Izo better, though my friend said Maou was the better one. I did think Maou might be the better match for Korean food.
Braised hairtail
They cook it with hairtail flown in from Jeju Island, and the size is ridiculous. Eaten with the sauce, it melts softly in the mouth. To think a place serving ingredients like this was in Yeoksam all along.. It makes me want to set up an office in Yeoksam and drop by once or twice a week.
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