WARNING: A THOROUGHLY 'NICE' DAY OUT
A few weeks ago we headed to Yeouido for a friend date amongst the young couples and the crowds. We unwittingly found ourselves in the midst of a large, minimalist, white domed space after exiting the subway in an unfamiliar part of town. Upon entering we felt a strange sense of déjà vu until we realised we had both been to an IFC Mall before. We don't normally frequent shopping centre food courts (snobs we know, but they are rarely good outside of SE Asia, in our humble experience) and in Seoul they're just chain restaurants and overpriced Korean food you can get better elsewhere; if you know what you want that's great but we don't head to such places intending to review or recommend them to people... OK, rant over, to the food:
It was a struggle to find a non-chain restaurant and a place open in between lunch and dinner, weird for a food court, but after some persistence we found ourselves in Honest Kitchen, place JGirl had heard of on the foodie app MangoPlate.
The menu was kind-of sprawling, Asian fusion: don katsu, sashimi, crabcakes, bibimbap, barbecued meat (Korean style, like bulgogi) alongside Asian beers and 'rollerskating' waitresses, all organic, apparently... The menu matched the décor: kind-of funky, beechwood furniture, white lamps, faux-rustic with a giant cherry tree and Kpop playing softly in the background. In short, it felt like a teenage 'eatery' trying to be a grown up, proper restaurant.
We had crabcakes to start, which were nice, followed California rolls which were nicely arranged and went down nicely (it was nice to have avocado, because avocado is nice) and a deep-fried prawn katsu curry and all rounded off with a nice chilled Tsingtao.
As you may have gather, dear reader: everything was NICE but nothing was amazing.
Honest Kitchen is, honestly, one of those places where you can't quite put your finger on why it wasn't great or why you wouldn't walk out thinking to yourself "I SIMPLY MUST tell all my friends about this place".
As mentioned above, everything food-wise was satisfactory. Service-wise we admit we do usually have some strange requests such as 'is this vegetarian?' which weren't immediately obvious from a glance at the menu so our waitress had to enquire a couple of times about our choices (eventually we discovered that our prawn katsu curry was made with chicken broth but we didn't mind - JGirl, after four years in Asia, had already assumed this would be the case). For people with less patience and used to Western-style pickiness being tolerated by waiting staff this could be quite hard to swallow. We thought that even omnivores would struggle with such an extensive menu, however.
THE VERDICT (all marks are out of ten)
FOOD
Originality: 5 (a bit too eclectic)
Taste: 7
Quality Of Ingredients: 8
Niceness: 10
SERVICE: 7.5
VALUE FOR MONEY: 6
OVERALL EXPERIENCE: a nice 6
After such a nice meal we needed a nice walk along the cherry-blossom-lined crowded river so we joined the many, many Seoulite couples taking selfies and enjoying the first days of spring.
After such a romantic stroll in such nice surroundings we felt, like Cinderella approaching the midnight hour that it was time to head back to the foreigner ghetto in gritty Yongsan for a real drink. Who should we happen to stumble upon at that very moment but our new best friend Super Nice Cocktail In A Bag Van Man (SNCIABVM, of course!) ...
pic
Not the best mojito ever but... can't say it wasn't... nice.
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