Seongsu eel restaurant with a self-serve meat bar: Songnim Bok Jangeo

Where is Songnim Bok Jangeo Seongsu Branch?

Songnim Bok Jangeo Unlimited Freshwater Eel Seongsu Branch is an all-you-can-eat freshwater eel restaurant located on the 1st floor of 148 Seongdeokjeong-gil, Seongsu-dong 2-ga 209-5, Seongdong-gu, Seoul. It's open daily from 11:50am to 11:00pm.

Between Konkuk University Station and Seongsu Station on Line 2, heading from the north end of Yeongdong Bridge toward Ttukdo Market, there's this eel restaurant where you can grill freshwater eel over charcoal, unlimited.

Inside Songnim Bok Jangeo at 6:30pm on a weekday: seating and mood

Sliding open the door at the entrance, you step inside. Songnim Bok Jangeo Seongsu Branch has large tables that seat up to 8 people plus several round tables. I arrived at 6:30pm on a weekday and there were already plenty of people enjoying grilled eel with bokbunja wine. As I ate, some early guests got up and left, and I grabbed the chance to snap some interior photos once their table was cleared.

Menu, prices and how the unlimited eel refill works

There's a menu board on the wall. The signature item is the unlimited freshwater eel refill, and for lunchtime there's also eel soup, galbitang, yukgaejang, and buckwheat mak-guksu (cold buckwheat noodles).

We settled at a table and ordered the unlimited refill at ₩29,900 per person x2 and the table setting at ₩3,000 per person x2. Staff bring out the initial side dishes, and any extras you need are free to grab yourself from the self-serve bar. The unlimited refill runs for 2 hours.

What side dishes come with the meal?

They brought pickled onion, green onion kimchi, pickled perilla leaves, julienned ginger, and baek kimchi (white kimchi), and there were even more varieties at the self-serve bar than what we got initially, so we could just help ourselves to whatever we needed.

A free bottle of Sejong bokbunja wine per table

Once you order, they bring a bottle of Sejong bokbunja (black raspberry) wine to every table. And listen — this whole bottle is complimentary, wow!! I've had plenty of other bokbunja wines but never this particular one, and it turned out to be pleasantly sweet, a great match with grilled eel! At 12% ABV it went down clean, so I finished the whole bottle! An extra bottle costs ₩9,000, and I noticed the table next to us — just two people — went through four bottles! Looking around, other tables were ordering several bottles too.

Staff grill the first round of eel for you

They bring the charcoal, and for the first round the staff put the eel, pork belly and duck neck on the grill and cook it.

They cut everything into bite-sized pieces and grill it nicely. The first round we ate plain, no sauce, popping pieces straight into our mouths.

What's on the self-serve bar at Songnim Bok Jangeo?

We headed to the self-serve bar for more lettuce, ssamjang (dipping sauce), cheongyang chili peppers, and garlic. The self-serve bar has side dishes, eel, pork belly and duck neck kept in a commercial refrigerated tray table, and staff kept it well stocked throughout the meal, which I appreciated. Next to the fridge there are sauce dishes, personal plates, and a basket for lettuce, so it's all easy to grab.

The eel at the self-serve bar is nicely trimmed, and personally I prefer soft red leaf lettuce over the crunchier green leaf lettuce — and sure enough, the bar was fully stocked with fresh flowering lettuce.

They also kept thick pork belly and well-trimmed duck neck well stocked.

How to eat the charcoal-grilled eel for the best flavor

Put a piece of eel on a leaf of pickled perilla, add a bit of julienned ginger, then a little eel sauce, and eat it that way — or pair it with well-fermented green onion kimchi.

A full round of chicken neck, then back to pork belly

The duck neck was so clean-tasting and tender that we ended up grilling a whole round of just duck neck. If you order it separately elsewhere it's actually pretty pricey, so being able to eat as much as you want here was great. We also grabbed more pork belly and grilled that too. No need to ask staff for extras — you just go get it yourself, which is so convenient.

It's not just eel — with pork belly too, alternating between the two meant we never got tired of it and actually ended up eating even more.

Piling two pieces of meat into a lettuce leaf with a dab of ssamjang, we kept eating happily. I burned one piece slightly while taking photos, but the duck neck, well-grilled over charcoal, still went down great.