Seongdong Korean restaurant lunch with crispy lasagna: Out of Order

Visiting Out of Order near Seongsu Station

For a friend’s birthday party, four of us girls finally visited Out of Order, a newly opened hot restaurant in Seongsu-dong, after ages! It has become such a hot spot lately, popular with international visitors too for its Seongsu-dong vibe and fusion Korean dishes >< They have a great-value lunch menu, so we enjoyed a full course from drinks to dessert.

• Location: 2F, 2 Achasan-ro 13-gil, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, South Korea (서울 성동구 아차산로13길 2 2층)
• Hours: 11:30–22:00 (last order 14:15, 21:15)
• Break time: 15:00–17:00
• Parking: None. Use a nearby public parking lot or the Musinsa Store building.
• Reservations: Available via Naver and Catch Table

From Exit 2 of Seongsu Station, just walk straight for 400 m to Out of Order. It is so close to the station that even walkers like us could get there easily! Keep going straight and you will find this Seongsu favorite on the second floor.

Doesn’t it feel so Seongsu-dong right from the entrance? The name is a little unusual, but the introduction explained the owner’s motto :) Out of Order aims to be a space that holds a lifestyle anyone from anywhere in the world can enjoy without feeling awkward, while offering an experience beyond the image of Korea—an experience beyond an order, if you will.

The lush green plants that welcomed us as soon as we entered, along with the many bottles displayed on the wall, gave the place an exotic feel.

Even though we came for the first seating on a weekend, there were so many customers. Luckily, we had made a reservation, so we were seated right away at our reserved table with no wait.

It is a fusion Korean restaurant, but the atmosphere feels like a bar abroad, so I was really looking forward to this Korean course 👏

The seating is divided into bar tables and dining-room tables, and we chose a dining-room table~ Personally, I love bar seating, and the bar tables here had even more atmosphere. I would recommend them for a blind date or a date :) I think the sound is also part of why this place has become known as such a good-vibes restaurant lately. Maybe because they use high-end speakers, the sound quality was so good—such a strong recommendation for a date course!! I especially recommend pairing fusion Korean food with traditional Korean liquor, wine, or whiskey at dinner 👍

Ordering the Out of Order lunch menu

The Out of Order menu.

What we ordered 🧑🍳

• Lunch menu for 3, ₩78,000: Snow White kimchi fried rice, scallion tteokgalbi risotto, crispy three-color lasagna, napa cabbage salad
• Doenjang carbonara sujebi, ₩19,000

The four of us ordered the lunch course for three, then added one more main and one more ade each. The course includes drinks and sorbet for dessert, so I recommend it—you can have the mains and salad too at a great value!

First out was the set of three ades. We wanted to try every flavor, so we ordered all three: green grape, orange-hallabong, and strawberry ade 🥤

Doenjang carbonara sujebi and barley risotto

The doenjang carbonara sujebi and scallion tteokgalbi risotto arrived. These were fusion Korean dishes I had never tried before. The combinations made me wonder whether they would really work, but I understood immediately after one bite.

It was a very rich, true carbonara cream with an egg yolk on top, the kind you might eat in Italy, plus a touch of doenjang (fermented soybean paste) for extra savory depth. Mixing the chewy sujebi (hand-torn dough flakes) into that thick sauce felt novel, yet I just kept scooping it up with a spoon! It would be perfect with beer too 🍺

The scallion tteokgalbi risotto was unusually made with barley, which gave the grains a distinctive texture. Eating it with the scallion pesto and tteokgalbi—seasoned grilled beef patties—made me understand why it had to be barley instead of rice! We scraped this one clean to the very end.

Napa cabbage salad and the best lasagna

And this was the dish I had personally been looking forward to most. It was a little different from the napa cabbage salad we know: a little chili powder made it spicy, and somehow it had the flavor of cooked kimchi. There were lots of creamy dishes, but eating them with the napa cabbage salad cleared away all that richness. You cannot taste this napa cabbage salad anywhere else, so please make sure to order it!!

I love lasagna so much that I had to order it. It was honestly much tastier than the super-famous lasagna place I visited recently on Yongridan-gil? The staff kindly explained that Out of Order’s lasagna should be pulled apart along its layers, so we ate it in a slightly different way. It held its shape well, and the vegetables, pasta, meat, and cheese all went into one bite—it was pure happiness. The lasagna was my personal favorite!! A highly recommended dish.

The Snow Cheese kimchi fried rice is also one of the signatures here. You could call it cheese-bomb kimchi fried rice! The fried rice was hidden under the cheese, and its fairly spicy kick went so well with that explosion of cheese.

Overall, the dishes were familiar things we have probably eaten many times somewhere, but they had the fun freshness of feeling completely new!! I have not been to many fusion Korean restaurants, but I could feel how much thought and care the owner had put into these dishes ⭐️

We enjoyed the full Out of Order lunch course right through to the sorbet ice cream that came last! It is a hugely popular restaurant on weekends especially, so please! make a reservation in advance. If you are looking for somewhere special for a special day or a Seongsu-dong date, I strongly recommend Out of Order!