Best Posts in Thread: Soban Korean Restaurant

So this was a glowing recommendation - for a good soda?

 

I lived and worked in Korea for the past 5 years, plus have been eating Korean food often in Hawaii since 1981. It’s one of my favorite foods!

Today, when the wife asked me what I wanted for lunch, I finally thought we should try Korean food in Dumaguete. I noticed there’s the 2 Story Kitchen, but the menu was varied and it seemed as if Korean foods were a minor part of their menu. Whereas the Soban menu was only Korean foods. I opted for Soban.

It’s located across the street from the Provincial Hospital just off the National Highway (before the airport).

Ordered a small (stainless steel) bowl of rice, thinking it would be Korean rice. Au Contraire! It was Filipino rice! Yaks! The wife ate a bit of hers and I completely ignored mine.

The cokes we ordered were fine though and served with glasses of ice. Refreshing after riding for maybe 1 hour on the scooter. The hot tea also tasted okay. J

Ordered fried mandu and it came out over-cooked. The insides were not tasty anyways, so it wouldn’t have mattered. The soy sauce based dipping sauce was fine though.

The complimentary side dishes were all old. Cabbage KimChi was so old that it had turned vinegary. Sure, there’s some Koreans that like it “extra” spoiled, but most Koreans that I know prefer fresh KimChi. The other small dishes were basically inedible.

They served a complimentary PaJun (vegetable pancake) that was the thinnest I’ve seen since I had a crepe. The vegetables added were so sparse as to be completely unnoticeable in the taste.

Barley tea was served free of charge, but the taste only had the slightest hint of barley and was clear in color. The barley tea I’ve had often in Korea and Japan is light brown in color and has a nice flavor.

Iced tea was also served, but it tasted like the chemical stuff you buy locally and mix it with water.

The main dish was Osam-bulgogi (spicy squid / pork). It was very difficult to find any pork in the dish, but next to impossible to find any squid. As it was, the pork was the lowest quality I’ve ever eaten and tasted a bit rancid. The squid, however, was just kind of old and pathetic. The dish might have contained 1% squid and perhaps 8% pork. The rice cake noodles tasted like they’d passed their expiration date months ago.

Service was fine though and we had 2 attentive waitresses. One of the main reasons was because we were the only customers in the restaurant. I tried using some basic Korean language on the waitresses, but they could not understand a simple greeting or thank you. I'm told (by Koreans) that my basic Korean is perfect in every respect and I shock Koreans with it oftentimes.

I can say that the restaurant was clean and looked well maintained. The air conditioning was working reasonably well and set at 23 degrees, although it was probably 29 degrees at our table.

Parking was very easy for the scooter, just outside the door. Cost of the lunch was 1,030p!

 

We finally got around to trying out Soban today. We had the bacon, fried tofu, and kim bob.

The negatives first; the rice in the kim bob was overcooked to mush, the girl try telling me that it was "sticky" rice so I had to tell her I lived over 12 years in Korea and 6 1/2 in Japan and that was not sticky rice. I almost gagged trying to get that first and only piece down. Worst I've ever had and had her get it off the table so I would not have to look at it. They also used regular lettuce which was a first for me.

The bacon, Sam Gyup Sal, was pretty good. The fried tofu was fantastic as well as all the side dishes. They even give you a Korean pancake that was quite tasty. Everything (other than the kim bob) tasted authentic and we were stuffed. The even sell kimchi to go, 250 peso for 1 kilo, and it is real kimchi. I had kimchi one other time in Dumaguete (don't remember the place) and it was horrible and tasted nothing like kimchi.

We will definitely be stopping by again.

Shawn