7D Korea Golden Rama Tour: Gogung, Myeongdong
Sometimes when you join a group tour, you may be able to see in the travel itinerary if breakfast, lunch and dinner are provided throughout the duration of the travel. The meals provided by Golden Rama for its 7D Korea tour is quite complete but it's nice to finally be able to roam Myeongdong on your own and hence, eat on your own. The food catered by a tour group usually must be provided by restaurants who have capacity to cater to a group tour which usualy have around 20pax participants in a group. This means the selection of the food will be rather limited. So on our last night at South Korea, we are gonna go feast at Myeongdong. Woots!
One of the Korean restaurants that I kinda miss is Gogung and I was so ecstatic to see the restaurant on the level 2 of this building in Myeongdong named Sunshine. I actually offered my Mom and Bro if they want to eat other things because Gogung is famous for its bibimbap and we have eated bibimbap before albeit it's a vegetable bibimbap. But it seems that they are pretty much tired after walking for so much in the past few days and decided to just go ahead with my suggestion.
The restaurant is not crowded around 6PM on a weekday but diners are slowly coming in around 7PM-ish, probably it's because that's the timing where people knock off from work. Gogung Myeongdong is actually a branch for its main flagship restaurant at Jeonju and it specialises in Jeonju Bibimbap. Bibimbap has always been one of the most favourite Korean meals amongst tourists and Jeonju Bibimbap is considered one of the best food in Korea, up to the point that the country celebrates annual bibimbap festival at Jeonju.
Gogung offers set meal which has quite good value of money. The set meal consists of one dolsot Jeonju bibimbap (hot stone bibimbap), one Jeonju traditional bibimbap (served on normal bowl), a choice of either seafood pajeon (pancake) or japchae (Korean clear glass noodle), salad, and two glasses of Makgeolli (Korean rice wine). The price of the set differs depend on what you want to have in your set. If I recall correctly, the price of the set meals is usually cheaper during the day. So if you want to be economical, you should visit Gogung for lunch instead.
If you are ordering pajeon, remember that the size of the pajeon in Korea is big so unless you come to Gogung in starvation mode, the set meal for two people is good enough to be shared amongst three people. So if there is only two of you dining at Gogung, remember to come with empty stomach. I love the seafood pajeon served at Gogung because they do not skimp on the amount of seafood thrown into the pajeon. Yumz.
Bibimbap is supposedly a nutritious and healthy food comprised of rice with bean sprouts, five colors and five tastes with 30 kinds of ingredients including gingko, pine nut, chestnut, walnut and fresh vegetables (cucumbers, seaweed, mushroom, etc). The different between dolsot bibimbap and traditional bibimbap is that the meat will be cooked by the heat of the hot stone bowl used to serve the dolsot bibimbap.
However, the Korean traditionally eat Jeonju bibimbap in its raw setting. So if you want to try the "original" taste of bibimbap, you should try the traditional Jeonju bibimbap. If you don't really like it raw, you can mix the egg and the meat to the dolsot bibimbap's hot-stone but then the two type of bibimbap will kinda taste similar to one another.
I personally think bibimbap is one of the comfort food which cannot go wrong because of the magic sauce named Gochujang. It taste good enough to eat rice + fried rice + gochujang sauce, let along mixing all of them together with veggie and meat. Oh right, you know you are supposed to mix all the ingredients (despite they look oh-so-pretty in the bowl) together with the gochujang sauce before eating? Once they are all mixed up, it's time to pop them into your mouth. Massiseoyo~~
Gogung Myeongdong's address:
37, Myeongdong 8ga-gil, Jung-gu, Seoul
Operating hours:
Daily 10AM - 10PM