Seongsu café for jambon-beurre salted bread sandwiches: Childish

A review after eating nearly the entire menu at Childish. The café menu has a lot of unusual items, and the salted bread sandwiches were especially filling and satisfying.

What kind of café is Childish in Seongsu?

Childish is a bakery café on the 2nd floor of a building on Yeonmujang-gil in Seongsu. Built around salted bread, the menu is surprisingly varied — salted bread sandwiches, salted taiyaki, bingsu (shaved ice dessert), and cream coffee. There are especially many menu items that use salted bread as a base, which makes it fun to pick and choose.

Overall the store has a clean, tidy café style, and there's quite a lot of seating too.

The bakery lineup is centered on salted bread, but it's used to make sandwiches and mini salted breads too — plenty of variety.

You can also order taiyaki (fish-shaped pastry) — at ₩700 each! — and the bingsu comes in a huge portion.

What we ordered at Childish this time

This time I deliberately ordered a lot: one mango bingsu, ang-butter salted bread, egg mayo sandwich, jambon-beurre sandwich, plain salted bread, 4 mini salted breads, salted bread rusk, and Buljangnan cream coffee. On top of that, I ordered every kind of taiyaki too.

They even have a taiyaki machine — the staff here must be run off their feet.

Childish salted bread sandwiches: jambon-beurre and egg mayo

The Childish jambon-beurre sandwich is packed with ham. The amount of jambon (ham) is substantial, and since the center of the salted bread is hollow, there's plenty of room for both ham and butter. So with each bite, you get the texture of bread, ham, and butter all at once — really satisfying.

The egg mayo sandwich has boiled egg mashed into a salad with just the right amount of mayonnaise, and the whole bread is spread with strawberry jam. I liked that the egg mayo wasn't a fully mashed paste but kept a soft, crumbly texture. With the sweetness of the strawberry jam added in, it lands as a softer, more familiar flavor than expected.

Ang-butter salted bread and plain salted bread at Childish

The ang-butter salted bread has an insane amount of butter and red bean paste. Because the salted bread itself has a hollow center, the effect of stuffing in ang-butter is huge. It's not just a little butter and red bean tucked in — it's packed full, so the presence of ang-butter is unmistakable in one bite.

The plain salted bread has a slightly different character. It's made with rice flour and 100% dairy-fat unsalted butter, with less gluten, so instead of the strong wheat aroma of typical flour-based salted bread, it has a clearly cleaner, plainer taste. That actually makes it a menu item worth considering for young kids too. The mini salted bread tastes the same as the plain one but is smaller, making it easier for kids to pick up one at a time.

Childish salted bread rusk: what does it taste like?

The salted bread rusk is firmly in dessert territory. The salted bread is sliced, baked until crisp, and coated in sugar — the crunchy texture plus the sugary sweetness goes great with coffee. It's less like a crunchy version of salted bread and more like its own separate cookie.

How big is the Taiwanese-style mango bingsu at Childish?

The mango bingsu. The portion is enormous. As if trying to justify the price any way it can, the bowl itself is quite large and there's plenty of mango piled in. For 4 people or fewer, I personally think it might be enough to just get the fresh mango cup bingsu instead of the big one. The mango is perfectly ripe and genuinely delicious.

It's soft enough that a spoon glides right through, and the part that looked like a whole apple mango was especially soft-fleshed and great. The ice, true to Taiwanese-style mango bingsu, keeps some of its ice crystal texture intact — a different feel from the smooth milk-ice type. The mango aroma comes through strongly even deep inside, so it really does feel like eating mango.

And surprisingly, salted bread pairs well with mango bingsu. Eating the warm, plain bread alongside the cold, sweet mango bingsu keeps the sweetness from piling up in one direction — a bit of saltiness cuts in between bites.

Comparing Childish's four salted taiyaki flavours (700 won each)

Red bean taiyaki and custard cream taiyaki. Childish's taiyaki lean more moist than crisp-cookie style, thanks to the filling inside. The red bean in particular is genuinely generous — enough to make you wonder if it's really okay to put in this much. Split it in half and the inside is packed with red bean rather than feeling hollow — clearly satisfying. Same with the custard cream taiyaki — there's so much custard cream inside that it properly oozes out with the first bite.

The plain salted taiyaki feels like it's been pan-fried well in butter, so the outside is crisp. It crackles when you bite in, and the butter aroma really comes through. Since the batter itself is different from regular taiyaki, the texture is clearly distinct from the start.

Mammoth chewy salted taiyaki. Overall it's closer to eating rice cake with ang-butter. Inside are mugwort rice cake and jeolpyeon (a type of rice cake), and they're bigger than you'd expect. Too big for one bite, haha — you end up chewing the rice cake for quite a while. With chewy rice cake, red bean, and butter all in there, it's pretty heavy.

Cheese bacon potato sweet potato pizza salted taiyaki. The name alone is quite long, haha. Inside the slightly salty batter is cheese, and on top sits a slice of pepperoni, sweet potato mousse, and pizza cheese. It really does feel like every ingredient in the name went in at once. Between the sweetness of the sweet potato, the saltiness of bacon and pepperoni, and the savoriness of the cheese, this feels less like a snack and more like it could pass for a meal.

How to drink the Buljangnan cream coffee at Childish

The Buljangnan cream coffee is a fun menu item too. Think of it as a coffee with a strong chocolate character — the rim of the cup, where your lips touch, is coated all around in chocolate.

So every time you sip the coffee, you nibble off a bit of the chocolate along the rim. It feels like the drinking process itself has been made part of the menu, not just the coffee — a fun touch that fits as Childish's signature item.

Is Childish in Seongsu worth a visit?

Childish isn't just a café you'd go to for a single salted bread — it takes one ingredient, salted bread, and runs it through sandwiches, rusks, and taiyaki, which makes it genuinely fun. The staff must have their hands full, honestly... On top of that, with items like Taiwanese-style fresh mango bingsu and Buljangnan cream coffee, there's a wide range of options when you want to try a bunch of different desserts.

If you're looking for bread or dessert in Seongsu, Childish Seongsu is worth recommending, and if you like salted bread, it's better to share several menu items rather than just eating one plain salted bread and leaving. The salted breads and sandwiches were generous with ingredients and tasted good, and pairing bread with bingsu for something cool and refreshing works well too.