I meant to post these in chronological order, but somehow they ended up all jumbled. Oh well.. I’ll keep the fun memories of the get-together as memories and just leave a record of the food here on the blog.
NCHEESE is, of course, a cheese restaurant, and it’s near Apgujeong. Though calling it “near” might be a stretch, since it’s a bit tricky to find. I went there following the Naver map, but the map was wrong, so I had a bit of a hard time. Then again, even if I’d known the right spot, it’s tucked away in such a corner that I don’t think it would have been that easy to find..
Fondue in winter.. such an ideal match, right.. (better than naengmyeon, at least ^_^) So I went in with high hopes. I even brought a bottle of Margaux wine, Château Rauzan-Ségla.. But maybe it got shaken too much on the way, or maybe it was because it’s an ’04 vintage and I didn’t decant it properly, but it didn’t show its full potential.. A bit of a waste.. Had I known, I should have brought the Jordan instead. That one I bought in Korea, so it hadn’t been shaken around at all..
The fondue pot.
Hmm..
Here’s what it looks like from the side..
So you dip the bread in like this..
Is this all??? Was I expecting something way too fantastic? It wasn’t bad, but as I kept forcing down lumps of fat and carbs.. I started thinking this wasn’t quite right.
So then came the pasta..
…
I don’t really remember this one..
It’s been a while since I had a dinner with no main dish -_-;; or rather, a somewhat underwhelming one.. It was a really fun meetup, and everyone who came was someone I was glad to see, so what a shame..
This is the gift I brought that day.
It’s a rice cake with ume plums pickled in vinegar and honey inside.. The taste.. sweet and refreshing, I’d say.. Exactly my kind of thing.
Cheeses, as you’d expect from a cheese restaurant..
The cheese is good.. but I think the cooking needs a bit more work.. Or maybe I just expected too much..
The mood was so good that night that we couldn’t just split up, so we headed straight for a second round. If I remember right, it was a Jeju seafood restaurant called Haesam (though I’m more likely wrong than right), on the second floor of a building with a Japanese restaurant called Shojin on the ground floor.
Somaek in the making…
We drank quite a bit. ^_^ Luckily, even after drinking like this I still made my flight on time.. If I’d missed it, I’d have cried..
This is the kind of seafood we got.
The freshness was amazing. We drank somaek until our limits late into the night and ate a fair amount of food with it, and it came to only about 20,000 won per person, so I was very happy with the price too. When you meet fellow food lovers, you get plenty of chances to be introduced to really good places, so just knowing them is a huge plus. ^_^