In Dongdaemun there are some streets strewn with flags, this area seems to be “Little Russia”, a section near Dongdaemun History and Culture park with restaurants from Eastern Euroasia. The friend I was with was hoping to find a great Russian restaurant she’d stumbled upon last time she was out exploring but we were unable to find it and felt lucky enough to have found one of the side streets to begin with. We ended up at Mongol Nomadic which is on the second floor, so you’ll have to look up. The restaurant is a Mongolian restaurant that serves a wide variety of stews, meats and dumplings. The things we originally wanted (I wanted shepherds pie and a type of tea) were sold out. So after some panicked menu perusing we ended up with curds, zochin brand milk tea, naadam khuushuur, khuitsai, and beef noodle soup.
The curds were…buttery cheese which even though we had planned to split the drinks neither of us could stomach much of and for us was a poor choice. The milk tea wasn’t bad, it wasn’t sweet at all and we probably would’ve been fine without ordering any drinks since we were brought water. I ordered the beef noodle soup which was a bit oily but good. The noodles were thick and reminded me a bit of stroganoff noodles which I was more familiar with and the beef was thinly sliced, some of which were a bit fatty.
The Khuitsaid was a soup that my friend ordered that was chock full of vegetables. It gave off a healthier vibe though it too was still a bit oily. It came with two pieces of bread that looked suspiciously like dumplings and I was pretty convinced they were until I bit into one. They were more like rolls.
The last thing we had was the naadam khuushuur which was by far our favorite thing. It was a flattened deep fried pastry that on the inside was filled with a wonderfully seasoned and minced meat. We ordered five and would’ve been full just eating these. As it so happened we ended up only finishing the naadam khuushuur and took the left over soup home.
It was fun to try things that we had no clue what they were even though the menu had pictures and was in English, Korean and Mongolian. We still weren’t fully certain though and that made it fun. We were there around 3pm on a Saturday and the restaurant was already full when we arrived.