Cheonan Korean restaurant for a family dumpling hot pot dinner: Omi Omi

For Mom’s 70th birthday, the whole family took a trip to Cheonan. Choosing what to eat is always a dilemma at every meal! For dinner on the second day, we went for Omi Omi’s dumpling hot pot. It seemed like quite a popular place. One thing I noticed during our two-night, three-day Cheonan trip is that people here are so generous with their food. I came away touched by how generously every meal was served. Omi Omi was generous too.

A great restaurant to visit with parents

The restaurant was already full of people. I didn’t take photos of every corner because I didn’t want to disturb anyone, but it was comfortable and clean. Above all, the staff were incredibly kind. It was just perfect for taking parents out to eat. Such a good choice.

Handmade dumpling hot pot split into mild and spicy

There were six adults and two children, so we ordered three servings each of the mild and spicy handmade dumpling hot pot. Our table, where we sat with our parents, had the spicy one, while my brother’s table with the little one had the mild one.

They provide the basic side dishes, and you can get more at the self-service bar. There are sujebi (hand-torn dough flakes) and ramen noodles there too. Honestly, the hot pot was generous enough that we didn’t need either, but broth with sujebi tastes different, doesn’t it? I wasn’t really drawn to the ramen noodles, so I only brought back sujebi. The white kimchi was delicious too. It paired so well with that cool, refreshing white kimchi.

Large starter dumplings served for each portion

These are the starter dumplings. When you order hot pot, they give you these per serving. They’re huge dumplings... honestly, I think these alone could fill you up. We ordered three servings of the spicy hot pot at our table, so we got three meat dumplings and three kimchi dumplings.

This is the meat dumpling. It looks really substantial just from the outside, but the filling is even more generous. It had bracken fern inside too, and the texture was lovely.

The kimchi dumplings were delicious too, with a nice crisp bite to the filling. Maybe because they were handmade, they felt even tastier. I don’t like thick dumpling wrappers, and these were exactly my taste, exactly my style!

A hot pot full of dumplings, meat, and vegetables

Then the hot pot arrived. There are more dumplings in the pot too. There’s meat, glass noodles, and shrimp. All kinds of vegetables as well—it’s really generous. On the other side were napa cabbage and crown daisy.

The pot was overflowing, so we rescued the dumplings first. Even after taking them out, it was still this generous. The cabbage wilted down and made it a little smaller, but it was still packed full. So generous. There were bean sprouts in there too.

We enjoyed it in all sorts of combinations—with bean sprouts, cabbage, and crown daisy. Slurp up those glass noodles too. The sujebi was another little specialty. Even when I was full, I just kept eating. We were supposed to have cake that evening too, but I completely failed at portion control... The little one in my belly had a festival today as well.

Dessert cold noodles I declined, then loved

These were the dessert cold noodles. I was so full that I said no thank you, but they insisted on giving them to us. They said they were really good and that we should at least try them, then said they would give us just four portions, so I reluctantly took them—but I would have been sad if I hadn’t tried them. They were just right for cleansing the palate. My niece dipped cooked sujebi into the cold-noodle broth here and ate it so happily. Even one chopstickful had a savory depth and a refreshing chill; it was good enough that I thought I could come just for the cold noodles.

It looks like group reservations are available here too. If you’re visiting Cheonan Sono Bell, I think this would be a good place to come for a meal. It’s the kind of restaurant that works well with children and with parents, which is probably why it has so many steady customers. The staff were so kind and it was clean—at this point, isn’t it a pretty great place?