Simhaksan bingsu café with 2nd-floor window seats, Paju: Fruit Forest

I found a fruit bingsu spot that just opened in the Simhaksan food alley, where all the good restaurants are supposed to be. I drive by this road all the time anyway, so when a bingsu place popped up I had to try it — and it was so good I'm writing this Paju bingsu review.

📎 Fruit Forest Paju Direct Store / Daily 10:00–21:00, no closed days

How to find Fruit Forest Paju Direct Store in the Simhaksan food alley

Walk up from the entrance of the Simhaksan food alley and Fruit Forest is on the right, standing alone in its own building. The alley itself gets packed with cars and can be confusing, but the road in front of this place is relatively wide and the building is big, so it's easy to spot. The visuals alone make you crave mango bingsu.

Mango bingsu seems to be the main thing, but there's actually a separate reason the store is called 'Fruit Forest' (more on that below 👇🏻).

Parking at Simhaksan: Fruit Forest has its own lot under the building

If you've been to Simhaksan before, you know it — tons of good restaurants, zero decent parking. But since this place has its own building, there's plenty of parking space underneath it, so no worries there.

What the 2nd-floor window-seat café feels like

You reach the Fruit Forest café by heading up to the 2nd floor, and it's way bigger inside than it looked from outside — kind of surprising. The exterior looked so dim I didn't expect much, but walking in felt like a whole new world opened up, haha. And with the floor-to-ceiling windows, the view is wide open too, which I loved.

Heading straight to order, you're greeted by mangoes and desserts. I thought this place specialized only in bingsu, but there were way more other desserts than I expected!

Croffles, mont blanc, and lots more — so even if you're not into bingsu, there's plenty else to eat (there was even more that I couldn't fit into photos).

The mango tower display and the fresh fruit counter

The visuals here are jaw-dropping... mangoes ripening away deliciously, haha. I've never seen mangoes piled up like a mountain before. And every single one of them looked delicious.

I got curious and looked it up — apparently they go to the first wholesale market auction every dawn and only bring in fruit they've personally tasted and checked for high sugar content 🫢. They sell top-grade fruit fresh, at a reasonable price.

And on one side, besides mango, there are other fruits too — since they only bring in fruit with guaranteed sweetness, you can actually buy fresh fruit right there in the store, and apparently a lot of people do pick and buy fruit themselves!

The fruit looked so good I wanted to try everything else too, but I decided to start with the mango bingsu I was most curious about (figs next time, haha).

Fresh mango snow bingsu (2–3 servings): thick mango and mango purée

Here comes the fresh mango snow bingsu (2-3 servings) from Fruit Forest. Wow, mango bingsu. I feel like I've had a lot of mango bingsu, but I've never seen this much thick fresh mango piled on top before.

On top there's also vanilla ice cream and cube cheese, and it comes with mango purée on the side to drizzle on as you eat!

Since the portion is huge and you need to portion it out, they give you a separate spoon for scooping — but I honestly had no idea where or how to even start digging in.

Scooped some straight out with the spoon onto my side plate. The mango pieces are just so huge and thick. Looks sweet just by looking at it, haha.

Inside is the milk-ice base I love. Not a single part of this felt lacking in quality. Why go eat the Shilla Hotel's mango bingsu when this exists, haha.

Halfway through I poured on some mango purée — apparently everyone but me thought drizzling it on made it taste better. I'm usually the one person who doesn't like purée poured on bingsu... but everyone next to me kept saying it was so good, so now I kind of regret not trying it sooner 😇

Mango to the very last bite: why Fruit Forest is worth a return trip

By the end I got too lazy to keep portioning it out and just dug straight in with the spoon, haha. At other places I've had to ration the mango because there wasn't enough, but at Fruit Forest there were still big chunks of mango left until the very last bite — genuinely worth every won. Amazing!

Most of all, you could really feel how proud the owner is of the fruit, and it actually tasted that good — so I'll definitely be back next time to try a different bingsu, for sure.