Ogeum-dong bakery café with custard-packed egg tarts: Grid Cafe

Egg tarts packed with custard

You might ask what's so different about an egg tart, but unlike the usual kind — where the filling is nowhere near enough to fill your mouth and the pastry shell is closer to a cookie — here the shell is a dough closer to puff pastry, and there's enough cream to fill your whole mouth.

A good spot in Ogeum-dong for bread and coffee

Grid Cafe (그리드 카페) is a good place in Ogeum-dong to enjoy bread and coffee together. Grid says they mix, proof and shape the dough in-house to make their bakery items, and whatever is baked that day is sold that day.

The interior and vibe are those of a café you'd find in your own neighborhood. The inside is decently laid out, so it works both for a quick pickup and for coming out to spend some time over a coffee.

The bread schedule by time of day is clearly posted, so people who love warm bread can time their visit to match!

There are lots of small tables that seat one or two.

Breads that are easy to pick for everyday

Overall, both the bread prices and the café menu prices are on the reasonable side, so picking out several things wasn't much of a burden. Most of the lineup is everyday-friendly items like salt bread, olive ciabatta and scones, and the prices for the different egg tarts are relatively reasonable too.

This time I ordered the soboro (crumble-topped) salt bread, olive ciabatta, plain ciabatta, egg tart and coconut smoothie.

There's even a separate spot for the freshly baked breads, hahaha. Cute.

Coconut smoothie and egg tart

I decided to take the ciabatta to go and just have the egg tart and coconut smoothie here.

Coconut smoothie

The coconut aroma is generous and it has a smooth, milk-tea-latte-like feel, with a heap of coconut powder on top. If you like coconut, the aroma itself comes through clearly, so it should be a good pick.

Egg tart

This one was so good I bought two more on the way out. The pastry walls are a bit higher than egg tarts I've had elsewhere, and inside the sweet, puff-pastry-style shell, egg and cream fill it up in soft, pillowy clouds.

The filling in particular has quite a bit of moisture, so I liked the feeling of my mouth filling up with cream in one bite. The taste of the soft, moist filling was considerably better than I expected.

When they appeared on TV, they introduced the egg tart as their signature but couldn't quite say exactly why it's good — it's not a regular egg tart, it's more like a taste that satisfies anyone who wants a big mouthful of custard cream? That kind of flavor.

Each egg tart gets wrapped individually in paper and packed up again, haha.

How the soboro salt bread and ciabatta taste

The soboro salt bread isn't just a regular salt bread with a bit of soboro sprinkled on top — it feels like the soboro dough goes in inside and out. The sweet-salty combination is pretty fun, and since the soboro layer is thick, the texture is great too. The chewy salt bread dough carries through to the flavor of the salt on top, so there's a definite bite to it.

There's quite a bit of space inside, so personally I thought filling it with something like whipped cream would be pretty delicious too.

The olive ciabatta comes with truffle olive oil. It seems like truffle oil as the aromatic base blended with olive oil and such, and there's balsamic in there too, which goes well with the oily richness. I also liked catching the black olive aroma between bites of the ciabatta. The basic texture is similar to a plain ciabatta, but the olives clearly change the flavor.

The plain ciabatta is chewy yet soft. Rather than adding this and that, it feels like it sticks to the basics, and with its moist texture I think it would be really good made into a sandwich.

The egg tart filling seems to be twice what you get elsewhere.

Grid Cafe, memorable for its basic breads

Overall, Grid Cafe's bakery strength seems to be that rather than pushing flashy items, it offers a varied lineup of basic breads like salt bread, ciabatta and egg tarts, making it a good place to visit on an everyday basis. The fact that they handle everything from mixing to proofing and shaping and bake bread every day is also what makes you expect good things from these basic breads.

If you're looking for somewhere in Ogeum-dong to casually enjoy bread and coffee, Grid Cafe is worth a stop. I usually make a point of finding and remembering places with great custard cream puffs, and I decided to note this one down as one of them. The egg tart was genuinely impressive, and since they pack everything carefully, I recommend taking a few extras home. Or, covering your protein every morning with these could be its own kind of strategy, hahaha.