Daegu Korean restaurant for a family dinner: Cafe Dongyi Chimsan

Weekend evenings are definitely the days I don’t want to cook at home, haha. While my husband, child, and I were wondering what to eat and looking for something that would be good to share with our child, we went to Cafe Dongyi Chimsan Branch (카페동이 침산점). Since it was the weekend, we couldn’t just walk in—we even had to wait before eating.

Cafe Dongyi Chimsan Branch location and parking

Cafe Dongyi Chimsan Branch is inside the Samsung Creative Economy Complex in Buk-gu, Daegu.

Parking was very convenient because you can park inside the complex. The first 2 hours are free, which was nice because we could come for a meal without worrying about parking.

Maybe because it was a weekend evening, there were people waiting at the entrance when we arrived too. We put our name on the Tableling waitlist first and waited by the entrance for a little while.

Thankfully, it wasn’t too hot and the weather was cool, so waiting was better than expected. There was hovenia tea ready at the entrance, so we had a cup while we waited.

There was also a menu banner outside, so while waiting we had a little look through it and thought, what should we eat...?

A comfortable dining atmosphere with children

Once inside, there were quite a lot of tables, and as you’d expect on a weekend evening, lots of people were dining. There were families with children too, and overall it felt like a relaxed place to eat!

Cafe Dongyi Chimsan Branch menu and ordering

You order through the table kiosk, and the menu photos were clear, so it wasn’t difficult to choose!

A service bar where you can even get fried eggs

What I liked most at Cafe Dongyi was the service bar.

It’s self-service, with fried eggs, five-grain rice, drinks, and barley crunch snacks ready for you, so you can bring back as much as you want! The fried eggs were my favorite in particular. I added one to the yeolmu bibimbap and got some for my child too!

Summer-special yeolmu bibimbap and fire-grilled pork bulgogi

This is the summer-special yeolmu bibimbap set my husband ordered.

Mixing the rice with yeolmu (young radish greens) and eating it, the crisp texture of the greens was so good—just the right menu for summer.

Add a fried egg from the service bar and mix it all together, and you have one totally delicious bowl of bibimbap!

The yeolmu bibimbap set also came with miyeokguk (seaweed soup), which made it good for feeding our child too.

The fire-grilled pork bulgogi is a Korean set meal with rice, stew, and bulgogi all served together. The standard stew is doenjang jjigae (soybean paste stew), but I was craving kimchi jjigae that day, so I changed it to kimchi stew.

Cafe Dongyi says it uses grade-one Gimpo Geum rice sourced directly, and that it makes all of its sauces and dishes in-house.

True to its name, the fire-grilled pork bulgogi had a subtle smoky char-grilled aroma.

There was also plenty of cabbage, which was nice to eat together with the bulgogi.

As suited the Korean set meal name, side dishes that go well with rice, including green-onion kimchi and braised lotus root, came along with it.

The kimchi stew was pleasantly spicy with a rich broth and plenty of pork, so it was great with rice. It was the kind of stew where you could finish a whole bowl of rice with just that, haha.

Big pieces of tangsuyuk and a barley crunch snack dessert

The tangsuyuk (Korean sweet-and-sour pork) came in much bigger chunks of meat than the usual tangsuyuk I had expected!

The pieces were really big! They were a little too large to eat as they were, so we cut them into bite-size pieces with scissors.

We cut some up so our child could eat them easily too, then dipped them in the tangy sauce and each picked one up—it disappeared in no time, lol.

The tangsuyuk was also delicious with wasabi.

After the meal, we each brought back a barley crunch snack for dessert. The barley snack was such a treat too!

There was a wait because it was a weekend evening, but we could join the Tableling waitlist and wait. Most of all, there were lots of dishes to eat with our child, so I think it was great for a family meal out. If you’re looking for a good restaurant in Chimsan-dong or somewhere to eat Korean food with your child, you might want to try Cafe Dongyi. We had a hearty weekend meal and came home full and satisfied 😊