Yangjae Korean restaurant with straw-smoked mackerel course: MUSEO

MUSEO is a course-dining restaurant on the basement floor of 20 Gangnam-daero 47-gil, Seocho-gu, Seoul, near Yangjae Station, reinterpreting seasonal ingredients through a Korean base. It's open daily 10:00–22:00 with a break time of 14:30–17:30, and paid parking is available.

Lately I've gotten hooked on going out for Korean tasting courses, and this time I visited MUSEO near Yangjae Station. They build their menu around seasonal ingredients with a Korean base, but it's a bit different from what you'd usually picture as a Korean course — a lot of the dishes twist familiar ingredients into something pretty fun, so I kept wondering what was coming next the whole time.

Inside MUSEO: atmosphere and seating

The inside of MUSEO has a sleek, dark black-toned mood. There's a long bar table running through the middle lined with flowers, which set a nice tone. It felt less like a fine-dining place where you have to sit stiffly formal, and more relaxed while still keeping the atmosphere polished.

Further inside there are also separate tables like this one. The tables overall have generous spacing and the restaurant isn't noisy, so it seemed good not just for dates but also for a quiet Gangnam gathering where you need to actually talk, like a wedding invitation meetup.

Since I'd made a reservation ahead of time, the course menu along with plates and utensils were already set up at our table when we arrived.

How much is MUSEO's dinner tasting course?

• 📍Dinner Tasting Course ₩109,000
• 📍Heineken draft beer ₩15,000

What we had that day was the Dinner - Chef's Tasting. The lineup went from Sinan scallion to egg, seafood mulhoe, hanwoo (Korean beef) ox tail, Wando kelp, Goheung mackerel, Gangneung potato truffle, gim (dried seaweed) pesto buckwheat noodles, pear sorbet, all the way to braised chicken leg. Most of it is Korean ingredients, but just from the menu names I couldn't predict at all how they'd turn out, which made it even more exciting haha. And since alcohol is required for dinner, we ordered two Heineken drafts.

A cold one before the course started. Wine or traditional Korean liquor go well with a Korean course too, but I started with beer this time, haha.

Course opener: Sinan scallion tart and sesame-oil steamed egg

The first thing to come out was a scallion tart made with Sinan scallions, and egg. Extraordinary visuals right from the start.

Sinan scallion

Inside the scallion tart was softly steamed scallion cream cheese, topped with grappa cheese.

There's a serious amount of cheese piled on top lol. I expected a strong scallion smell, but the scallion's natural sweetness paired well with the cream cheese.

The tart was crisp outside and completely soft inside, so the texture contrast was great too. Super satisfying from the start, T_T.

Egg

Next was sesame-oil steamed egg. Inside was an anchovy-broth-based sauce, topped with seomcho (island spinach) and fried anchovies.

The steamed egg itself is super soft, but with the texture of the seomcho and the crunch of the anchovies coming in, it's definitely different from an ordinary steamed egg.

The fried anchovies in particular had more presence than I expected. Soft steamed egg + seomcho + crunchy anchovy — so many textures at once made it fun to eat.

Dongchimi seafood mulhoe and tteokgalbi (grilled short rib patty)

Next up were seafood mulhoe and tteokgalbi (grilled short rib patty).

Seafood mulhoe

This mulhoe (chilled raw fish soup) isn't the red, spicy style — it's a clear version made with a dongchimi (watery radish kimchi) base broth. Inside are seafoods like sea cucumber, sea squirt, and shrimp, and mustard jelly is placed on top of cucumber and radish.

The look alone was completely different from the mulhoe I knew, so I couldn't predict the taste at all before eating.

I tried the broth first — refreshing and clean, very dongchimi-like.

Eating the seafood together with the mustard jelly gave little pops of flavor here and there, which made it quite bright and clean.

Tteokgalbi

This round one is tteokgalbi. It smelled amazing before I even tasted it, T_T. Underneath is a bed of vegetables you can eat like a salad, and on the side comes a doenjang (soybean paste) sauce made with pine nuts.

Honestly tteokgalbi is such a common dish in Korean food that I wasn't expecting too much.

But the outside was seared hard and crisp, so it was savory, and the inside was moist — genuinely legendary.

Cutting into it, the meat was packed dense inside, and it went really well with beer.

What was fun about the doenjang sauce was that it wasn't purely traditional doenjang flavor — it had a hint of something almost like a Western sauce mixed in, which was surprising.

Wando kelp butter brioche and straw-smoked Goheung mackerel

Next were Wando kelp and Goheung mackerel.

Wando kelp

The Wando kelp dish is toasted brioche spread with a kelp-and-gamtae (sea moss) butter, I think?

There's kelp mixed into the butter, so it's salty with a pretty strong umami.

I spread it thick on the warm brioche. The butter itself was so good I scraped every bit of it off, haha.

Goheung mackerel

The Goheung mackerel is straw-smoked mackerel served with a baek-kimchi (white kimchi) sauce and kimchi powder.

The mackerel had a proper, strong smoky aroma. Pairing it with a baek-kimchi-based sauce was unusual too, but eating it together added a nice acidity that cut through the fish's richness well.

The flesh was thick too, so each big bite delivered layers of flavor, T_T. This was the joint number-one pick for my husband and me that day.

Gangneung potato truffle and buckwheat noodles with gim pesto

Gangneung potato truffle

This is signature fried julienned potato shaped like ice cream. Truffle is piled on top, and it's dipped in a white truffle mayonnaise sauce — a super-luxury version of fried potato.

Crispy potato plus truffle aroma plus mayonnaise — that's a combination that's just hard to make bad, haha. Having something in such a completely different style show up mid-course also felt like a nice reset of the mood.

And since it's not just fried potato but potato sliced thin and fried, the texture was seriously next level.

Gim pesto buckwheat noodles

And the dish I was most curious about, gim pesto buckwheat noodles. Made with a pesto from Wando gopchang gim (a type of seaweed) and topped with fried buckwheat and even sea urchin roe.

Even the color of the noodles was deep, so it looked like it would really taste of gim.

Eating it together with the uni on top, the umami of the gim combined with the rich, silky taste of the sea urchin — this one was quite a winner.

Main course: braised chicken leg and makgeolli ice cream

Pear sorbet

Before the main, a pear sorbet to cleanly reset the palate.

The cool, sweet taste of pear combined with lemon made it refreshing. After eating a bunch of things earlier, this completely reset my palate, haha.

Braised chicken leg

And the main, braised chicken leg. It's chicken leg slow-cooked over a long time at low temperature in pork fat, served with a pepper-based doenjang sauce.

The sauce had a faint hint of something like samgyetang (ginseng chicken soup), but with doenjang and pepper together it felt oddly, in a good way, almost like Chinese food too — completely Korean and yet subtly different, which I found interesting.

Maybe because it was cooked so long, it was seriously, insanely tender — soft enough to chew with just your gums.

Eaten with the sauce underneath, it was rich and filling, fitting for a final main.

Makgeolli

The last dessert was makgeolli (Korean rice wine) ice cream.

With Korean melon and blueberries, plus a granola-like crunchy topping on top, the texture stayed interesting right to the very end.

It was genuinely so, so good. It felt completely different from any Korean food I'd had before, so every single bite felt precious, T_T.

Is MUSEO worth it for a special-occasion dinner?

Rather than serving traditional Korean food as-is, MUSEO's Dinner Tasting Course takes familiar Korean ingredients — scallion, steamed egg, mulhoe, doenjang, kelp, gim — and reworks them in a completely different way, which was really special and impressive, haha. The atmosphere is also calm and the course itself gives you plenty to talk about, so it seems like a great fit for a special-occasion Gangnam course-dining date, a quiet Gangnam wedding-invitation gathering, or for anyone looking for a Gangnam restaurant to host a work dinner.

If you want to try a Korean course that reworks the ordinary into something a bit different, rather than plain traditional Korean food, I'd recommend MUSEO's Dinner Tasting Course, haha.