Yongsusan Traditional Palace Food

The average Korean meal will cost KRW5-7,000 (USD 5-7 dollars). But for KRW30-40,000 you can try an excellent traditional palace-style meal at Yongsusan. It's located beneath the Seoul Finance Center and caters mainly to businessmen and their foreign business partners.


I thought the decor was kind of nice because they used traditional fabric for runners and patchwork lighting.



Millet and rice porridge. This was really blah as it looks.



Acorn jelly with toasted seaweed and stewed beef, various pickled veggies.



Bossam is wrapping boiled pork belly and spicy pickled radishes in blanched cabbage with a little salted shrimp. This was excellent because they also broiled the pork slightly so it wasn't just a hot gray mess.



Jellyfish and cucumbers in a mustard sauce and frozen sashimi in a hot pepper sauce. I love jellyfish! The rubbery texture gets me every time. But Koreans are always putting hot sauce on raw fish which totally masks the flavor.



Rice cake soup. I was just reading that the rice cakes are shaped to resemble silk worm cocoons for prosperity...EWWWW!!



Okay it starts getting messy because the idea is you are served various courses but all on the same plate. But I'm not really a plate cleaner so you end up with various debris under the new course. This is a skewer of rice cake, beef and mushroom. It tasted exactly how it looked. Don't you hate that? I mean fries should taste like fries but I hate cooked beef that just tastes like cooked beef.



Holy shit this was mad good. It was minced up beef short ribs sprinkled with pinenuts. You can see how fatty it was. Served with stew and rice.




Dessert included rice cakes with sweet white bean and TOMATO filling. Drink was the 5 flavor tea which is really bizarre and salty, vinegary and sweet. But it's supposedly good for the complexion.

"Hanshik" (traditional multi-course Korean meal) isn't really as fancy a meal as a full course French meal would be but it is a departure from the norm. I don't think it's that popular with the younger generation who prefer to splurge on Western food, but it's definitely a must for anyone who likes Korean food. Like me.

Yongsusan
148, Wonso-dong, Jongro-gu
Seoul, Korea
Tel : 02-743-5999