Hongdae Korean BBQ: yukhoe on a street-stall style terrace, Yookmong

Korean pork tastes even better when you get to try a few cuts. This is Yookmong Hongdae Main Branch (육몽 홍대본점), a meat spot with a Hongdae open-air street-stall vibe.

Yookmong Hongdae Main Branch: location and opening hours

The address is 355-13 Seogyo-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul. It is open 11:30 - 24:00, and until 01:00 on weekends. It is near the Hongdae Station median bus lane.

How to get to Yookmong from Hongik University Station

Head up the alley with the famous Mega Coffee, where a car once flew in and crashed. Keep going and at a small fork by the Nanta Theater, you will see Yookmong, which uses an entire two-story building.

Inside Yookmong: the street-stall style terrace

Yookmong Hongdae Main Branch has a vintage, friendly BBQ-joint feel. The second floor is large, so it can handle groups too.

Above all, the terrace with its open-air street-stall mood, where you can look outside, is really charming.

Yookmong menu: only hanwoo beef and Korean pork

Yookmong's concept is jujiyuklim (주지육림), meaning a pond of liquor and a forest of meat, bringing tasty meat and good drinks together in one place. It serves only hanwoo (Korean beef) and handon (Korean pork).

Honestly, we Koreans know perfectly well how to eat meat deliciously. But lots of foreigners come to Hongdae restaurants these days, so there are kind explanations in other languages like this.

What comes with the basic table setting?

There is a range of seasonings: salt, wasabi, spicy sauce, dipping sauce and ssamjang (seasoned soybean paste). The basic side dishes are seasoned scallion salad, scallion kimchi and dried seaweed. Kimchi is there too, though it missed the photo.

Yukhoe (beef tartare) to drink with before the BBQ

The yukhoe (육회, seasoned raw beef) at Yookmong Hongdae Main Branch is an appetizer and drinking snack for people who can't wait for the meat to cook and start clinking glasses. Since it is a hanwoo shop, the beef is fresh, chewy and juicy.

Pear strips cut to exactly the same thickness and length as the beef are tossed in together, so nothing dominates. Everything lands in your mouth and gets chewed at once, and the salty and sweet notes balance nicely.

Eaten plain, it was a bit salty, but once I broke the egg yolk and mixed it in for extra nuttiness, the seasoning became subtly good. The mild sweetness of natural pear, the richness of the yolk and the savory juiciness of the beef make a good balance.

Is the 550g Korean pork set enough for two men?

The handon mixed set puts three kinds of Korean pork on one plate. It is 550g without bones, and even though we were two adult men, it was more than enough.

It consists of snowflake collar (nunkkot moksal), famous for its tenderness, samgyeopsal (pork belly), the soul food, and whole galmaegisal (skirt meat).

They say Yookmong serves, among pork belly, only the part around the ribs of top 1% female Korean pigs. The color is lovely and the lean-to-fat ratio is good, so it already looks delicious.

Staff grilling service at Yookmong

The grill has charcoal below and a cast-iron plate on top. The pork belly never caught fire, and the charcoal aroma seeped in through the gaps.

Like the menu line about serving you as if you were a king, a Yookmong Hongdae Main Branch staff member is dedicated to grilling for you. I worried because all three cuts went on the grill at once, but they cooked each cut in the right order.

Galbi pork belly is delicious, but the bone in the middle always bothers me when I eat it, so it was a relief that the staff removed it beforehand. The first batter is the pork belly.

It is cut vertically so every piece has layers of fat and meat. Thanks to that, even one bite has a rich mix of textures, soft and chewy.

The fat melts softly and adds richness, and the more you chew, the deeper the meat flavor gets. The grill has the advantages of both charcoal and cast iron, so it maximizes the taste of the pork belly.

Dried seaweed, which you don't see at other Hongdae BBQ places. Lightly grilled on the plate and used to wrap the meat, it was a treat.

Since the first batter was pork belly, some grease lingers in your mouth, and a big spoonful of the doenjang jjigae (soybean paste stew) included in the set washes it down refreshingly. It isn't dainty like a typical complimentary stew, and again there was enough left over even for two adult men.

Snowflake pork collar and whole skirt meat

The collar, the thickest cut, was slowly cooked on the grill for a long time. Unlike other collar I've had, it is not dry but tender, true to the name snowflake, and juice flows out softly like the fat of pork belly.

Last is galmaegisal, a special cut that comes in only tiny amounts from each pig. Being whole, it is extra chewy with an intense texture, perfect with a drink.

Yookmong was a Hongdae BBQ place with an open-air street-stall mood, where you can feel the vibe of this hip spot up close.