Gyukatsu restaurant near Seoul Station, steak set double: Ichigyu

Today I went for lunch at Ichigyu Seoul Station Branch, a place that's word-of-mouth famous as a haha date restaurant near Seoul Station! My boyfriend and I went for a weekend lunch date :)

We went partly to recharge with a hearty lunch on our weekend date haha. I really think there's nothing better than gyukatsu for eating beef on a budget haha. So whenever my boyfriend and I get a craving for meat, we tend to come get gyukatsu hahaha.

Is there a wait for weekend lunch at Ichigyu Seoul Station?

At 11:30am on a Saturday, we walked straight into Ichigyu Seoul Station Branch with no wait at all. I deliberately went at around 11:30 worried about a weekend lunch wait, and luckily it wasn't full so we got seated right away.

Just in case there was a wait, I checked Catch Table for the waitlist on the way there. You can put your name on the waitlist in advance through Catch Table, so if you haven't made a reservation, keep that in mind!

Seating and interior at Ichigyu Seoul Station Branch

Since there were two of us, we were seated at a 2-top table. There's a mix of 4-tops and 2-tops, and the interior was bigger than I expected. It's in the basement, but there were quite a lot of seats.

They've apparently gotten a hygiene certification too. Meat restaurants can get a bit greasy and, honestly, hygienically uncomfortable sometimes... I hadn't seen this before, but knowing it's certified hygienic made me feel good about it.

Maybe because it was the weekend, the place was packed, so it was hard to get a clean shot of the seating... There were families, but even more couples on dates, which makes sense for a weekend.

The fried shrimp perk and the mochi rice cake

Ichigyu Seoul Station Branch gives you a free fried shrimp for every Naver receipt review you leave — I meant to do it but forgot, argh. The table next to us just ordered their fried shrimp outright, but getting it free via a Naver review is definitely the better deal.

You know that mochi rice cake Shin-chan eats at home in the Japanese cartoon? They actually sell that here too. If you've ever watched Shin-chan, you know how much he loves that mochi. It's genuinely delicious — I've had it before and I recommend it big time. So chewy inside and crispy outside, it's impossible not to like.

Ichigyu's menu: basic set or steak set double?

From the Ichigyu menu we ordered the gyukatsu and the steak set double. The basic set is ₩19,500, and honestly, for women the basic size should be plenty, while I'd recommend the double for men with a bigger appetite. The basic set might leave guys a bit hungry haha.

A big stone plate for grilling the gyukatsu yourself. I've been to other gyukatsu places where they gave us a smaller stone plate to share between two people, which honestly caught me off guard a little... but the stone plate at Ichigyu Seoul Station Branch was big enough for two people to share and grill together comfortably.

My boyfriend's steak set double! Since it's the double, the meat is stacked in two layers hahaha. Both the soup and rice come with free refills.

Here's my sirloin gyukatsu. I was so hungry I put it on the stone plate and snapped the photo in a rush, so please excuse the missing pieces of meat ^^ Ichigyu's gyukatsu was so much tastier than I expected that I ended up scarfing it down...

How good was the beef at Ichigyu?

Here's why I thought Ichigyu Seoul Station Branch was so good! I recently went to a different gyukatsu place with my boyfriend, and honestly, the meat quality was almost not worth paying for... Usually good-quality meat should have a reddish color and some marbling, right? But at that place the meat color was dark and murky, and the gyukatsu was mushy and soft, so we both said let's not eat gyukatsu again for a while. But look at this meat's color here. Bright red and genuinely firm;;;

You can tell the meat color is great just from the photo. It genuinely tastes worth every won. (The meat quality was so good I thought this would be a great place to bring my parents too...)

One butter per person, melted on the hot stone plate

Ichigyu Seoul Station Branch gives one butter portion per person, so you coat the stone plate with butter before grilling the meat. Usually with gyukatsu you just grill the meat on a plain hot stone plate. But here they first grease the plate with butter, then grill the meat in that butter. It's the same idea as grilling beef in a frying pan with butter at home, and grilling it that way gives it that real buttery savoriness.

That bubbling oil next to the meat is all butter~~~ This is the first time I've had a gyukatsu place (Japan included) give you butter like this. And when the flame went out, we didn't even have to ask — the staff kept checking and swapped it out for us on their own! Great attention to detail!

Rice refills and eating gyukatsu with wasabi

The rice comes out like this, served with a spatula for scooping, and refills are free, so we finished ours and got a bit more. Eating beef and rice starting from lunch left us feeling really full and satisfied ha-ha.

I like eating beef with wasabi, so I put some on top and ate it that way. And with the rice, it really felt like eating home-cooked beef, like a home meal.

We shared little bits of each other's dishes, and both the steak and the sirloin were delicious, so honestly if you're visiting as two people, I'd recommend ordering one of each and sharing. This isn't a place with so-so gyukatsu — I genuinely recommend it. The meat quality earns it a passing grade for sure!

I'll definitely be back to Ichigyu Seoul Station Branch, a genuine Seoul Station favorite. Out of all the gyukatsu places I've eaten at recently, this one had the best meat quality — 100000% for real.