Korea - Palsaek Samgyeopsal (8 Flavour Pork Belly BBQ)

As you can tell by the entrance, this restaurant has received a lot of media coverage for its famous 8 different flavours of pork belly.

Each table is setup like the below minus the meat where it was brought out upon ordering.

These are the condiments to go along with your pork belly. They offered three types of leaves for you to wrap your pork belly with. Perilla leaf, romaine lettuce and ???

Complimentary seafood tofu soup. Looks like it's not spicy right? No, once it starts boiling... it's get red and very spicy. It's a light but spicy seafood tofu soup.

The server will help you cook all the pork belly. All you need to do is eat.

My favorite flavour out of the 8 was the hot one. The hot flavour wasn't spicy at all, it was sweet and that's why I liked it. The second best one I liked was herb. It was something I never really tasted before. Overall, everything was alright, nothing really stood out. You definitely cannot eat the pork belly alone, or else you will get sick of it quickly. Having it wrapped with lettuce makes it not as heavy. Honestly, this was more gimmicky than anything else. The cost was 30,000WON enough to feed 2ppl which is less than $15CDN per person. Still worth a try when you are in Korea.

Korea - Bukchon Ginseng Chicken Soup

I only had 4 full days in Seoul and everyday was jammed packed with activities. My flight arrived in the evening and I had to hang around the airport to wait for my friend to arrive 2hrs later. By the time we checked into our guesthouse, it was late and we were exhausted. This was our first meal in Korea and we were super hungry since we didn't eat anything the night before aside from airplane food. This place was actually discovered by my friend and it's known to have super long line ups. We got up early and got there around 11am, and to our surprise there were already a lot of people eating inside already. We really couldn't waste our precious time in line so we always go early to avoid lineups.

It was funny how once we are seated, the servers didn't even asked us what we wanted and just assumed we wanted to order the most original ginseng chicken soup. She actually spoke Chinese to us since it's known to have lots of Asian tourists here. She said "ginseng chicken soup? ok." We didn't even have a chance to say no, but it's okay, it was what we wanted to order anyways.

You help yourself to the banchans on the table where it was just the simple kimchi and kimchi turnips.

The wait wasn't long and our food was here! Piping hot ginseng chicken soup with sunflower seed and green onion on top. We were given a tiny cup of "I don't know what" soju? so we just left it...

You literally get a whole chicken/hen.

The hen was stuffed with delicious glutinous rice and dates. The chicken was tender and the broth was flavorful  I thought it could of used a tiny bit of salt to bring out the flavor a little more. No artificial flavor or MSG here.

There you go, a real ginseng. It didn't taste bad, but it did have a strong ginseng-y taste if you are into that.



Overall, it was really delicious but it wasn't as good as I imagined it to be. I think the salt would of really brought it up a notch.