Tag Archives: chinese food

Mak’s noodle

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Noodle house!

Another food place worthy of commenting! We’d have to say, there really isn’t a whole lot of authentic Chinese cuisines when it comes to being in Korea. This is really surprising, considering how close we are to China. Infact, North Korea is connected to China! The peninsula is only seperated by the Yellow Sea.

Regardless, we finally found a Chinese restaurant, kind of, worthy to say “GO AND EAT SOOOOME!”

This Chinese restaurant isn’t your typical Chinese restaraunt, and it isn’t serving Korean-ized Chinese food either! If you lived in Hong Kong or Guangzhou (Canton), you would have this stuff for breakfast/lunch/snack. It’s fast, easy and incredibly delicious! This is something Ian ate almost everyday for breakfast when him and his brother went to China. And because it`s kind of a “fast food”, it’s not your typical restaurant.

What this is called, wonton soup. It’s a soup served with egg noodles and these dumplings called wonton, a Cantonese word. But that`s not all they have. They have a few more selections of different dumplings, and braised beef in wonton soup. This is, afterall, a “wonton dim” (roughly translated would be: “wonton house”). You can order large or small portions, 8,500 and 5,500 Korean won, respectively for your straight up wonton noodle soup. That’s about 8 or 5 USD. If you order the large portion, it could be a meal. The smaller portions are tie-overs to your next meal.


The dumplings were incredibly flavourful. The kind of flavourful like dim sum’s har gaow tastes. Infact, this is how it should taste in the har gaow. It’s authentic, that’s for sure, unlike the Western China restaurant that we went to before. The broth and the noodles are dead on. It feels like it straight out of Hong Kong.

From Hong Kong to Seoul, the food finally made a debut! You can see the noodles being prepared in one of the pictures by two sweet old ladies.Can’t get your dim sum fix? This place’ll tame those cravings for now. But still searching for dim sum… Ian is a happy guy.

We’re not sure who the owner is, but they were all speaking Korean when we entered. The restaurant itself is a franchise stretching out of Hong Kong called Mak`s Noodle Co., LTD. Yes, a company limited. The business card is all in Chinese and a seperate one in Korean. Mak’s Noodle is located right on Itaewon Street, infact outside the station. This is one of those places to eat in Seoul, one to mark down, and one for us to come back to again and again.

To get there: Itaewon Station (Line 6, brown line) Exit 4. Do an about turn and walk toward the IBK bank, and Gecko’s is above. Go to the left of the bank (don’t enter the bank) the house is tucked in the back corner. 

Western China dim sum

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Dim Sum!

Considering Korea is so close to China, you’d expect it to have some amazing Chinese food. This is entirely not the case.

Since Ian arrived, he’s been scouring the corners of Seoul to find a decent Chinese restaurant that serves dim sum. The most recent expedition brought Explorations to a place called Western China restaurant. It prided itself with dim sum and that’s what sold us to try it out, finally.

We ordered a chicken dish that seemed Asiatic in flavour, a noodle dish, and four dim sum dishes.We should also note, this was dim sum a-la-carte; and we don’t mean the usual push around carts that defined Ian’s childhood of dim sum meal times.You had to order it from the menu.

We’ll skip the other dishes as dim sum was the heart of the course for tonight. The dim sum dishes we had were Har Gaow, Siu Mao, Siu Long Bao, and Law Mai Fahn. Hovering at around 5,000 Korean won a piece or approximately 4.50(USD). Your usual dishes came with 3 pieces. Usually it’s 4 pieces an order elsewhere.
First, Har Gaow. This dish is one of the staple dim sum foods. You can tell the skill of the chef, and subsequently the quality of the restaurant by this dish. It was incredibly underwhelming. You could barely taste the shrimp, let alone the other spices that’s supposed to go with it.

Next, Siu Mai. Also one of the staple dim sum foods. Sure, there was pork and a little garnish of roe on top, but the shrimp was missing and most other spices that go into making this piece. Things are looking very grave for the next few dishes.

Along came Siu Long Bao. Ian’s first time trying this dim sum piece was, actually, in Korea. It was on par with the other dim sum retaurants he’s tried. but, we’re not entirely sure how good this is. This one is a dumpling with soup inside the dumpling. There’s promise that it could go well, but not here.

Last but not least was the Law Mai Fahn. This dish comes pre-wrapped in lotus leaf as it’s steamed in it. Inside the lotus leaf is sticky rice and in the middle of it, a concoction of chicken blend of spices. This was the closest tasting dish to what dim sum actually is. But having said that, it was still lacking in most flavours that define what this dish is. The sticky rice also wasn’t very sticky.

All in all at the end of the meal, we were full. The flavours of dim sum were less than impressive and even more so, a bill to rub salt in the wound really doesn’t justify the cost vs. taste ratio. First and last time we’ll ever go there.

The quest for dim sum continues…

We have Pictures of the other dishes. If you so chose to go to this restaurant, it’s in Itaewon in Hannam-Dong. The website and phone number is in the pictures, however we don’t reccommend destroying your hope of dim sum by going here. Good for Korean-ized Chinese food.