Yeontan Galbi — Ansan

There is a restaurant I discovered late in my first year in Korea. Actually, I had known it existed, but I heard from someone it was a vegetarian restaurant, so I steered clear of it.

Jeremy and Liz then informed me it was a galbi restaurant, and a good one at that. I never walked on the side with the sign. I guess that’s a signal of my own laziness, if anything.

This is a cool place. It looks like a log cabin hunting lodge. In the middle is a stove filled with burning logs, which heats the place. In the winter, the open air windows are covered with thick plastic. The inside has a hickory smoky atmosphere with a dirt floor and high ceiling.

Eun Jeong, my girlfriend who has a bit of a snobby side when it comes to restaurants, doesn’t like this place, which is exactly why I like it. One thing she does like about it is that they roast sweet potatoes in the fire stove.

Okay, now location. This is located in Ansan, in between Handaeap (Hanyang University at Ansan) and Seongnaksu stations. It’s behind the Seowon Tourist Hotel. It’s not a convenient walk from any of the stations, so get a taxi to take you to the hotel. At the hotel, just look for a log cabin looking building.

It’s funny because it seems to cater to high-paying hotel guests, and I have seen many business types there. But it also has the feeling of the dive at the edge of nowhere. Jeremy and Liz have been known to adopt some of the stray cats that frequent the place.

Recently, we went back to Ansan for a Friday night dinner. Injoo asked where to go. I insisted on this place, and everyone agreed it was a good choice. Injoo said it was good because it was one of the places that used charcoal fire for the meat.

The atmosphere was great, but the food was underwhelming a year ago. This time, though, the food had noticeably improved. The galbi has more flavor, and they were generous with the daenjeong jjigae. The kimchi was also very good, which is always the mark of a quality Korean restaurant.

The service was a bit slow, but they explained to us that they were making everything fresh for us. The soup was being made from scratch. I was so ecstatic over the daenjeong jjigae that they gave me another bowl for free.

We finished the meal with some of the famous roasted sweet potatoes. They were very hot and charred. That was great on a cold winter evening (it started snowing later). Injoo said that the best way he remembered from his childhood to eat these was to put kimchi on them. Lars and I tried this experiment. He liked it. I felt it tasted like, um, kimchi and sweet potatoes. Eun Jeong later said it was a very country thing to do.

And what’s wrong with that?