Huam-dong gastropub in Seoul with mix-your-own sangria: Heui Huam

It had been so, so long since I'd wandered around Daehangno, and I ended up making my way down toward Jongno for a Seoul date day!

I wanted to hang out around Yongsan but didn't want the Samgakji area, so I went looking near Sukdae Ipgu Station and found this Huam-dong bar, Heui :)

Where is Heui Huam, and what are its hours?

Heui Huam is a bar and restaurant in Huam-dong at 71 Duteopbawi-ro, 1st floor, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, right in front of Yongsan High School. It's open from 17:00 to 24:00, closed every Tuesday.

• Hours: 17:00 - 24:00
• Closed every Tuesday

Heui Huam, a bar in Yongsan's Huam-dong, was right in front of Yongsan High School. It's a little over 10 minutes on foot from Sukdae Ipgu Station, on the ground floor facing the road, so there was no need to search hard for it.

What does the name Heui mean, and what is the space like?

I was curious what the name 'Heui' meant, and the neon sign on the wall told me the answer as soon as I walked in, haha. It was the Korean word 'hui' spelled out phonetically!

At first I thought the name was just simple, but then I realized it holds both 喜 (joy) and 噫 (sorrow/sigh) at once — such a perfect name for a bar, lol. The interior was calm and clean too.

Heui Huam has regular tables as well as a bar table. If you're just stopping by for a quick drink, the bar seats look great, but since we were there to eat like champions (?), we took a regular table.

The Heui Huam menu and what we ordered

The Heui Huam menu had a whopping eight kinds of pasta. With that many pastas, it looked like a lot of the food leaned Western-style, though there was also dakdoritang (spicy braised chicken) and perilla leaf tteokbokki. We went with Heui's signature dishes: Egg in Hell and Heui Pasta.

The bowls of crackers and pickles that come as basic sides were cute, but the soju glasses were way too cute, lol. I'd asked for just one glass since I wasn't planning to drink, but then I thought — when am I ever coming back to such a nice-vibe Huam-dong bar again? — so I canceled my soft drink and ordered the sangria instead, haha.

How to mix Heui Huam's house-made sangria at your table

Heui's house-made sangria turned out to be something you mix yourself! They told us to combine half cider (Korean lemon-lime soda) and half sangria.

The color once it mixed with the cider was gorgeous... Mixing it half-and-half made it perfectly drinkable for a lightweight like me, and the best part is you can adjust it to your own taste!

I'm still nostalgic for my trip to Portugal and Spain, and this brought back memories of the sangria I had there — it was so good. If I come back to Heui, I'm definitely ordering the sangria again.

Heui Pasta, 18,000 won: what gochujang rosé tastes like

The first dish to arrive was the Heui Pasta (₩18,000). Randomly but cutely, it came with two quail eggs and two pieces of bread bigger than my fist (I'm not exaggerating).

Okay, twirl twirl~ this was exactly the thick, rich cream pasta I love.

The menu listed it as gochujang rosé, and I didn't get any of the heaviness that sometimes comes with that kind of sauce — instead there was a subtle, spicy-sweet gochujang flavor running through it, making it a genuinely delicious rosé pasta. The generous amount of bacon really lifted the overall flavor too. Anyway, it was so good I scraped the plate clean.

Egg in Hell, 20,000 won: three jammy soft-boiled eggs

Egg in Hell (₩20,000). The perfect dish for me, a tomato lover, and K, an egg fanatic, lol. Writing it out, it really is the perfect match — though K had never properly had Egg in Hell before.

K's first Egg in Hell experience happened at exactly the right place. There were three eggs on top with cheese, and each one was seriously huge.

And a perfect soft-boil to top it off... what I mean by 'perfect' is that it was soft-boiled without the yolk breaking messily — that kind of ideal soft-boil.

The remaining tomato sauce and everything else went great with the garlic bread, nom nom. The combination of tangy tomato and savory cheese was genuinely delicious.

But then it turned out there was cream cheese hiding underneath the garlic bread too, lol — now it was tangy + sweet + creamy all at once.

The food was so much better than expected that I ended up, by my standards, overdoing it on the sangria. So much for not drinking. K stubbornly stuck with soju for a while but eventually joined the sangria team too.

Lastly, the bread that came with the Heui Pasta. It looked like a dinner roll but the size was... practically a midnight-sized roll. Anyway, we devoured that too and called it a night.

Why choose Heui Huam over the bars at Sukdae Ipgu Station?

We wrapped up at Heui, a Huam-dong bar that gets even more atmospheric after dark. The bars near Sukdae Ipgu Station tend to be crammed together and, personally, felt a bit chaotic, but Heui Huam's location right in Huam-dong made it easy to enjoy a calmer mood.

Egg in Hell and the cream pasta exceeded expectations, and I was especially happy with the house-made sangria... ^,^ Heui Huam works well for a casual hangout or even a blind date spot. It's close to Namsan too, so I'd recommend it as part of a Namsan date course :)