Weekend dinner: knife-cut beef noodles and quabaorou in Jongno

Hello! This place is already famous among Gwanghwamun office workers for its beef knife-cut noodles!! I stop by often for lunch — it's Cheonghwa Uyuk Dosakmyeon (청화 우육도삭면)!

Why it's a Chinese restaurant you can eat solo in Gwanghwamun

Great for solo dining, and also great for a group to order noodle dishes plus one extra dish to share — a real value spot! The menu ranges from beef noodles to mixed noodles to eggplant dishes, with a variety of solo-meal options!!

A lot of Chinese restaurants only serve dish-style items, which makes solo dining tricky, but here everything runs ₩9,000 to ₩10,000, making it a value-priced Chinese restaurant that's popular with Gwanghwamun solo diners! In this era of crazy prices, finding a value spot like this is amazing. No wonder people keep streaming in.

Location: ground floor of the Le Meilleur Jongno Town alley

Cheonghwa Uyuk Dosakmyeon is a genuine local favorite spanning two floors. It's on the ground floor in the alley of Le Meilleur Jongno Town, where all the popular restaurants cluster, so it's easy to find.

Even late on a weekend evening, there were tons of people in for dinner!! With the cooler autumn weather, there were families dropping in after a walk along Cheonggyecheon stream, as well as solo diners in for dinner. And it looked like many were neighborhood regulars eating alone too! That's how convenient and tasty this place is.

The menu — from dim sum to quabaorou

This place serves everything from dim sum to solo-meal noodle dishes to quabaorou and full dishes. If you're looking for a simple Chinese restaurant near Gwanghwamun, I highly recommend it.

All the beef noodles are dosakmyeon (knife-cut noodles), so the texture is great, and there are even three kinds of dumplings.

If you love rice, the fried rice dishes look like a good call, and the stir-fried eggplant dish looked delicious too!!

There are menu photos posted around the restaurant too, so it was easy to order by just looking at the pictures.

What I ordered

• Uyuk dosakmyeon (beef knife-cut noodles) ₩11,000
• Quabaorou (sweet-and-sour pork) ₩19,000

Since it had been a while since my last visit, I just ordered the signature dishes. If you're at a beef noodle place, you've gotta have the beef noodles, haha. Next time I want to try some other menu items.

Even the peanut side dish gets refills

They give you peanuts and pickled cabbage as basic side dishes, which was perfect to munch on while waiting haha. Great for when your mouth gets bored waiting for the food to come out. They even refill it! Such a generous place.

The beef noodles and quabaorou arrive

And here come the beef noodles and quabaorou!! Even at ₩19,000, the quabaorou arrived incredibly generous — truly a spot worthy of office workers' loyalty. See that mountain-high pile? Haha, there were at least 10 pieces or more in there.

The beef noodles were loaded with a generous amount of meat too.

The dosakmyeon texture is like sujebi

All the noodles here are dosakmyeon, giving that appealing sujebi (hand-torn dough soup)-like texture.

The meat had clearly been simmered a long time — it was so tender and went perfectly with the noodles.

Above all, the broth of this beef noodle dish was rich and deeply savory, so I kept going back for more.

Quabaorou is great for sharing with a group

Next up was the quabaorou!! Crispy, chewy, all of it — but also seriously generous in portion, making it a main dish that would be great to share with a group.

The meat cross-sections were nice and substantial, so it was satisfying to cut into and eat!! The sauce was pleasantly tangy and delicious too, so I highly recommend the quabaorou~! I left having eaten so well at this Gwanghwamun office workers' favorite, Cheonghwa Uyuk Dosakmyeon — a place that welcomes solo diners too, so I recommend it.