I wanted to catch up with Nathalie before her family visited. So I made my way to Gangnam to go with her to dinner.
There’s a lot of Shabu Shabu places in the area she wanted to try. We looked at a couple, one with a sushi bar and a bit more expensive than we’d hoped because of the sushi bar and Spoon the Street. Spoon the Street included a salad bar where we got everything to add to our shabu shabu except for the meat and broth. We had a choice of three different types of beef and we went with the cheapest option. Then we grabbed plates and filled them with noodles, vegetables, dumplings and mushrooms to add to our broth.
The set up was a bit weird. Our soup sat on a little heating pad that worked like a stove. I’m use to there being an actual fire underneath the pot that reminds me that everything is hot. Because it was just sitting without any source of flame whenever it stopped boiling I’d forget and burn my mouth. On the side of our table was a dial to change the temperature, turn up the heat or turn it off. We and several others in the restaurant had difficulty getting it to work. Eventually Nathalie realized there’s a bit of a delay which is probably why we didn’t understand.
It was quite good, and there were plenty of other things to eat as well in the included salad bar which was more like a mini buffet, from pizza, pasta, soups and diy spring rolls and ice cream. We stuck to spring rolls. The bowls they supplied were too small for dunking the rice paper and we didn’t have any space to put the rice paper without getting it a separate plate that would take up our tiny table space. We ended up trying to balance the rice paper on the water bowl or on top of the vegetables but it made the rice paper soggy and less appetizing.
Minus our misadventures with the spring rolls we enjoyed the shabu shabu. (Though I think it’s a meal that’s difficult to screw up). I liked that they had different types of broth so you just had to let them know whether you wanted it spicy, mild, or not at all which was helpful to my poor taste buds. They also have an elevator but since it was only on the second floor we walked. We also enjoyed the atmosphere which had faux train signs and lights like you were downtown a busy city. (Which we were)
