Gimhae Korean restaurant, pregnant mom's family meal with sotbap

Heading to Juchon for gamjatang after Costco groceries

Today I played with my baby all day, then went to Sasang, and told my husband I was craving haejangguk (hangover soup) or gamjatang. He suggested stopping by Costco for groceries and then finding a gamjatang place nearby. Perfect timing since I was already in the mood for haejangguk or gamjatang, so we looked for somewhere to eat around Juchon and ended up at Ppyeodae Itneun Haejangguk.

Inside, the tables were spaced apart just enough that it wasn't cramped for a family to sit down. After we ordered, the staff brought water and wet wipes, and the table already had a big bucket for the bones, tongs, scissors, and mustard sauce for dipping the meat from the bone haejangguk. There were baby chairs available too, though you need to grab one yourself rather than have staff bring it over. Aprons were also set out on one side, so you could wear light-colored clothes without worrying about stains.

How about the parking and size of the place

The parking lot was well laid out and clean. It was spacious enough that pulling in and out was easy. Even being very pregnant, I could get out of the car comfortably. The exterior was tidy and the restaurant itself was huge.

The interior was on the larger side, big enough for groups. There was also separate room-style seating inside. Both the exterior and interior were pretty large overall. We ordered 3 sotbap and the 3-person gamjatang set. Looking around at the nearby tables, a lot of people were eating haejangguk too.

Side dishes and boiled pork slices

The side dishes came out neat and clean. Boiled pork slices came too — I cut them small for my baby, but they normally come thinly sliced. The kimchi was exactly to my taste. Along with that came chili peppers, onion, and the dipping sauce for the bone haejangguk.

Portion and taste of the 3-person gamjatang set

The gamjatang came from the kitchen already loaded into a big hot pot. There's a separate burner at the table, and they set the pot right on top. Mushrooms, glass noodles, potatoes, and ugeoji were piled up generously, so we turned on the burner, boiled it well, and picked out the meat. The chunks of meat on the pork bones were quite big, and the meat fell right off with chopsticks. We dipped it in the sauce. The ugeoji came out well-cooked, so we cut it into bite-sized pieces with scissors and ate it together with rice and meat. The 3-person portion was quite a lot.

The sotbap nurungji (scorched rice) all three of us loved

My husband, my baby, and I all really love nurungji-tang (scorched rice soup) or the nurungji at the bottom of sotbap, and the rice was cooked perfectly fluffy. After finishing the rice, the nurungji at the bottom of the sotbap was such a hit with all three of us that we didn't leave a single grain — my husband didn't even get to taste it because our baby loved it so much. Even while we were eating, people kept coming in nonstop.

I rinsed off some gamjatang for my baby, but it was still too spicy for a four-year-old, so after a bite or two she just kept eating the nurungji. She ate a whole lot of the scorched rice from the sotbap. The kimchi was just the right level of fermented, not too much or too little, and the gamjatang had plenty of ugeoji with a generous portion overall. I'm a kkakdugi person so I ate that, while my husband went through the kimchi. The nurungji in the sotbap was clean-tasting and nutty.

Finishing up with free ramen noodles

After we'd picked out most of the meat and ingredients, they gave us free ramen noodles (ramen sarai) separately. I'm a glass noodle person so I finished off the glass noodles myself, while my husband, who loves ramen noodles, polished off a whole pack of them. When they boil the ramen noodles in the leftover broth, the noodles soak up the rich gamjatang seasoning, and eating them chewy with kimchi on top wrapped up the meal nicely. Our baby seemed to have found her perfect match in the sotbap nurungji — she went back for seconds and ended up with a full, round belly.