Magok Station eel restaurant: tomato tsukemono and roe bowl, Una Magok

I visited Una Magok, a restaurant near One Grove Mall in Magok where you can enjoy premium eel dining in the authentic Nagoya style :D I'll share everything in detail, from the location and parking to the menu lineup and my taste review.

How far is Una Magok from Magok Station?

Una Magok is on the 1st floor of K Square Magok Tower 2, a 4-minute walk from Exit 2 of Magok Station on Line 5. That makes it very easy to reach by public transport or by car.

Leave Magok Station by Exit 2 and walk about 150 m straight toward LG Science Park (north). You'll see the K Square Magok building on your left.

Is parking free at Una Magok?

If you drive to Una Magok, you can use the underground car park of the K Square building and get 1 hour 30 minutes of free parking. After that, it's ₩2,000 per 30 minutes, up to ₩30,000 per day.

Una Magok atmosphere, seating and private rooms

Una Magok has hall seating with partitions and private rooms for 4 to 10 people. The moment I walked in, instead of the greasy smell of a typical grilled-eel place, a pleasant musk scent drifted softly through the space, which made a great first impression.

The interior is clean and modern. The rooms hold a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 10, so they suit group gatherings, and the hall tables also have tall partitions, so I could eat in a cozy, separate space.

It's a tidy, upscale space, so it's a popular spot for gatherings too. If you book a wedding invitation gathering, you get free champagne, and you can bring a birthday cake and blow out candles inside the restaurant, which makes it a great place to celebrate.

Una Magok menu and portion sizes

Besides hitsumabushi (eel rice bowl), the Una Magok menu includes a variety of rice bowls such as tori mabushi (chicken) and mero mabushi (grilled toothfish). You can choose from small, regular and special sizes depending on how hungry you are, which I found reasonable.

I ordered the regular hitsumabushi, the roe hitsumabushi, and a tomato tsukemono (pickled tomato) as a side.

Una Magok grills its eel in-house, and the grilling is visible through a clear glass window, so watching it while waiting for the food was a lot of fun.

How do the regular and roe hitsumabushi taste?

Regular hitsumabushi

I'm told Una Magok's hitsumabushi is made by soaking the eel in a secret tare sauce simmered for 10 hours with about 30 herbal ingredients, then grilling it three times over charcoal. The regular size uses one whole eel, and the flesh was plump and tender, with great chew and flavor.

Pollock roe hitsumabushi

The roe hitsumabushi adds nutty, mild low-salt white pollock roe to the signature hitsumabushi. The salty, deeply savory roe lifted the flavor of the eel and made it even tastier.

How to eat hitsumabushi the right way

You can enjoy hitsumabushi in a variety of ways by eating it in three stages.

• First, enjoy the eel's pure flavor with the rice.
• Next, add the four toppings (scallion, perilla leaf, seaweed flakes and wasabi) for extra flavor.
• Finally, put some eel into the empty bowl and pour in warm ocha (tea broth) to eat it as a soup.

Una Magok also serves a range of side dishes as standard, such as seasoned konjac and sweet potato salad, so I never got tired of the main dish all the way through the meal.

Is the tomato tsukemono worth ordering as a side?

Una Magok's tomato tsukemono is a side dish where the tomato skins are peeled one by one and the tomatoes are aged for a long time in a special vinegar-pickling sauce. Its hallmarks were a pleasant tanginess and a subtle sweetness that soaked deep into the flesh.

It tidied up my mouth mid-meal and finished things off cleanly afterward, so it was a sensible side.

Dessert: green tea ice cream

Toward the end of the meal at Una Magok, you can ask for green tea ice cream as dessert. The bittersweet green tea ice cream let me finish the meal on a clean note.

Una Magok review events

When I visited, Una Magok was running several review events. If you write a Naver or Google review and show it to the staff, you get a lucky scratch ticket on the spot, with a top prize of up to ₩500 million.

You can also get a free Una ginseng liquor for writing a review. If you're visiting, it may be worth joining in on these small events.

If you're looking for a high-quality hitsumabushi restaurant in Magok, I'd say give it a visit b(￣▽￣)d

Una Magok in 3 lines

• 4-minute walk from Magok Station Exit 2
• 1 hour 30 minutes of free parking in the K Square underground car park
• Menus available in small, regular and special sizes