Itaewon hanjeongsik with perilla leaf ice cream: Modam Itaewon

A day I finally had proper Korean food in Itaewon after a long while! These days I'm drawn less to purely traditional-feeling Korean restaurants and more to places that take familiar menus and dress them up a bit more elegantly, and Modam Dining H Itaewon was exactly that kind of place. Modam builds its Korean dishes around signature jang (fermented sauces) and seasonal specialties, so the menu lineup was great haha. Honestly a top pick for a meeting-the-in-laws lunch or a family gathering!

Modam Itaewon hours, parking and location

• 🕒 Hours: Daily 11:00–21:30 / break time 15:00–17:00 / last order 13:40, 20:10
• 🚗 Parking: 1st floor of Mondrian Hotel Itaewon (hotel parking support available)
• 📍 Location: 1st floor, Mondrian Hotel, 23 Jangmun-ro, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, South Korea

Inside Modam Itaewon on the first floor of Mondrian Hotel

Located on the 1st floor of Mondrian Hotel, the restaurant greets you from the entrance with that hotel's signature vivid, playful, upbeat vibe haha.

The interior is clean and tidy, plain and simple! The private rooms all seemed to be fully booked.

What we ordered at Modam Itaewon: two sets at 49,000 won each

We ordered ✔ charcoal-grilled handmade tteokgalbi ₩49,000 ✔ charcoal-grilled dried gulbi ₩49,000. There's also a promotion where writing a Naver receipt review gets you 3 free handmade financiers haha.

It wasn't just the mains — the side dishes that came with the set menus were more varied than I expected, so there was real fun in enjoying the whole spread as an experience. Especially since it wasn't just a row of familiar Korean banchan (side dishes), there was visual fun to it too!

First course: bean porridge

🫘 Bean porridge. Starting the meal with a nutty, smooth bean porridge felt like it gently opened up the appetite for everything ahead! The thick, rich porridge was so nutty that my expectations shot up from the very start >_< It was nice to have such a pretty and delicious opening dish.

Barley shrimp chip salad with mustard seed dressing

🦐 A unique salad built around barley shrimp chips and a mustard seed dressing. The shrimp chips added a fun texture, and the sharp, tangy flavor of the mustard seed made this a refreshing bite to have in the middle of a Korean set meal. Combining familiar ingredients in slightly different ways like this felt like a Modam signature.

Black sesame dressing, grilled vegetables, crispy laver and seasonal fruit

🥬 This plate had a really varied composition. Grilled vegetables paired with a nutty black sesame dressing, plus crispy seasoned laver crisps and seasonal fruit all together! Even within one plate, the textures and flavors were varied enough that it was fun to mix and match small bites. The black sesame dressing in particular really brought out that nutty savoriness typical of Korean food.

Buckwheat noodles in perilla oil sauce

🍜 A dish where you get to enjoy the nutty aroma of perilla oil together with the clean, plain flavor unique to buckwheat! It paired well with the grilled dishes too, giving us a nice palate reset with noodles in between courses.

Sweet crispy shiitake mushrooms and amberjack

🍄 Sweet crispy shiitake mushrooms. Enjoying shiitake mushrooms cooked candied-style like gangjeong reminded me of tofu-shiitake sweet and sour, my all-time favorite dish from the vegetarian buffet at school haha.

🐟 Grilled amberjack. Using seasonal fish gave this dish a real sense of the season! It made the whole spread feel even richer. With fish and vegetables spread evenly throughout, there was plenty to taste and enjoy even while waiting for the mains.

The two mains: charcoal-grilled tteokgalbi and charcoal-grilled gulbi

🥩 Finally, the main event — charcoal-grilled handmade tteokgalbi! Tteokgalbi (grilled minced beef patties) is such a familiar Korean dish already, but made by hand and grilled over charcoal, it felt like a proper, substantial Korean main course. After tasting a handful of the earlier courses, eating the tteokgalbi with rice was exactly right.

🐟 Charcoal-grilled gulbi (barley-cured dried corvina). If tteokgalbi is the meat main, gulbi is the fish main, so ordering both together made the whole spread feel much more substantial. Mixing rice into green tea broth and eating it with the gulbi gave incredible savory depth!

Dessert: perilla leaf ice cream

🍃 An unexpected perilla leaf ice cream! The fragrant, fresh perilla leaf aroma was woven subtly into the ice cream, giving it a completely different charm from ordinary ice cream. After eating so much filling Korean food, having such a fragrant, cool dessert at the very end felt like a proper finish! Genuinely delicious ice cream. If you go to Modam, this is a must-try 👀

Is Modam Itaewon right for meeting the in-laws or a family meal?

Modam Itaewon had that feeling of enjoying a meal like a full course, tasting a variety of dishes one after another. What I found especially interesting was how it brought in classic Korean elements — seasonal ingredients, jang, charcoal grilling — while adding small twists throughout, like the mustard seed dressing, the black sesame dressing, and the perilla oil buckwheat noodles. If you want a properly put-together Korean meal in Itaewon, on a day when you want to take care of the mood too — a date or a family meal — I'd recommend Modam Dining H Itaewon ★