Dangjin squid restaurant for a day-trip dinner with friends: Ojjingeo

The most satisfying meal of our Dangjin day trip: Ojjingeo Dangjin

Ojjingeo Dangjin (오찡어 당진점) was the squid restaurant I liked best of everything we ate on a sudden day trip to Dangjin with friends. We went at 7 pm on a weeknight and every table was still full!

Ojjingeo Dangjin hours and parking

Ojjingeo Dangjin is open Tuesday to Sunday, 11:00–22:00, with last order at 21:00, and closed every Monday. The address is 17 Cheongnyong-gil, Dangjin-si, Chungnam (Daedeok-dong), and you can park behind the building.

There's a separate parking lot in the building behind Ojjingeo! When it's full, there's a free public lot nearby, and that's where we parked.

Ladies, a restroom inside the restaurant matters so much, right? Ojjingeo Dangjin has one indoors, which was handy.

There's also a self-serve side dish bar, which is convenient.

There wasn't a single empty table, and the place was buzzing. Office dinner groups, local residents, families eating out, and tourists who looked like us!

What we ordered at Ojjingeo Dangjin, and the spice levels

That day we ordered the squid hot pot (small), squid stir-fry (small) and minari squid pancake, and we got the squid tangsuyuk (Korean sweet and sour squid) free for joining the Naver receipt review event. Every table has a tablet, so ordering was easy.

• Squid hot pot (small)
• Squid stir-fry (small)
• Minari (water dropwort) squid pancake
• Squid tangsuyuk (free for joining the Naver receipt review event!)

You can adjust the spice level, so we went medium for the hot pot and mild for the stir-fry. I think even medium would have been nicely spicy and tasty for the stir-fry! Mild is good too, but spicy is what makes it good, right?~~🦑💦

The side dishes came out and they matched the food well. They go so well with the spicy dishes that we kept reaching for them.

The squid is so fresh that even just looking at it, the flesh is plump and glossy💦 The moment I saw the squid hot pot and squid stir-fry, my mouth started watering.

A deep broth, the natural refreshing flavor coming out of the squid, and the fragrance of minari🍃 Haaah... please order the hot pot!

Squid pancake: vegetables or minari?

The menu at Ojjingeo Dangjin lets you choose vegetables or minari for the squid pancake, and I'm really glad we picked minari. It was crispy and fragrant, and went so well with the spicy dishes.

The minari squid pancake comes already cut, so all we had to do was eat. Maybe because they fry the minari whole, its distinctive aroma completely cut the greasiness of the oil, and the chewy bits of squid here and there, oh wow~

Squid tangsuyuk from the review event

If you go to Ojjingeo Dangjin, definitely do the review event and try the squid tangsuyuk. It was even tastier than I expected, which surprised me!

Add udon noodles to the squid hot pot

The squid hot pot at Ojjingeo Dangjin is tastier and richer than squid stew, I'd say? It even has a hint of jjamppong (spicy seafood noodle soup) flavor, and it's a hot pot you just keep eating. Definitely add the udon noodles! There's thinly sliced radish inside too, so I drank the broth in one go.

I'm genuinely curious how they blend the seasoning, because it's not salty at all yet perfectly seasoned. Adding glass noodles or udon noodles makes it even better, so add them!

Mild squid stir-fry is a rice thief

Unlike the broth of the hot pot, the stir-fry's sauce clings to the surface of the squid, so the first bite is intensely spicy-sweet. My friend next to me said, "This is a 3-bowls-of-rice dish" (my friend is a woman, by the way). She says jeyuk-bokkeum (spicy stir-fried pork) is her soul food, and that day she scraped the pot clean.

The red broth soaks softly between the noodles until they're plump, translucent and full of soup. Then you lift a big bunch with a well-cooked squid leg and slurp it all up, and wow, the whole day's fatigue melts away🦑

Finish with self-serve fried rice in the squid stir-fry sauce

My friend kept talking about wanting rice, so we ordered the self-serve fried rice. We were full, but it felt like such a waste to leave the leftover squid stir-fry sauce, and since that sauce is a rice thief itself, we ate until we'd scraped the pot! If you come to Dangjin, do stop by Ojjingeo💕🦑