Mapo Korean restaurant lunch for a work-weary friend: Usu

I heard there was a place with a great beef course, so I took a friend who has been worn out by work lately. In the end, the beef and every dish were genuinely delicious, and it gave my exhausted friend some much-needed healing. I thought it was a lovely restaurant for a restorative meal for two, but also perfectly suitable for a formal family introduction, a family gathering, or more. Here is my honest record of Usu, a restaurant I’m grateful for.

Usu basics, connected to Gongdeok Station

• B2, Lotte Castle President, 467 Gongdeok-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul
• Directly connected to Exit 2 of Gongdeok Station on Subway Line 5
• Reservations available by phone, Catchtable, and Naver Reservation
• Daily 11:00 AM–10:00 PM / break time 3:00–5:00 PM / open year-round
• Use the shopping arcade parking lot, not the hotel or officetel lot; 3 hours free

Lunch C Course and an anniversary Hanwoo cake

It would be a nice place to visit for an anniversary, too. The meat is priced separately, and they can arrange it in the form of a Hanwoo cake.

The signature here is, of course, the course meal. Lunch has a varied range from ₩40,000 to ₩100,000, and dinner also comes in different arrangements from ₩110,000 to ₩190,000. We ordered the Lunch C Course, 80g, for two. Naturally, you can also have individual grilled Hanwoo dishes, and there is a wide selection of drinks including wine, champagne, and soju. And importantly, corkage is free!

The private-room atmosphere on B2

It is located on B2. After parking, take the elevator down to B2; if you arrive through Subway Exit 2, you will need to go down one level.

It is past Seonhyangjeong Shabu Shabu, next to Muscle Care Pilates.

You are shown in at the counter by the entrance.

The overall gray palette feels calm. The soft overhead lighting really sets the mood.

There is nature-inspired landscaping on one side. Every seat is in a private room, and group rooms are available for anywhere from 4 to 30 people!

Our assigned room was a comfortable size, with a white-and-gray palette and an atmosphere that made conversation easy. If you are looking for a private-room restaurant for a company dinner in Yeouido or Gongdeok, this fits the bill.

Lunch C Course begins with an ingredient presentation

We ordered the Lunch C Menu for two. Once seated, we were first served barley tea. While you wait after ordering, they show you a presentation box containing the ingredients for that day’s dishes.

Fresh seafood, mushrooms, lobster, and so many other ingredients. The beef marbling was a work of art. After briefly showing us the box, dish after dish began arriving. Starting after seeing the ingredients made me so excited. Hurry up and come out, dishes!

Beef-and-chicken rich porridge and three one-bite dishes

The first dish was u-gye jinjuk, a rich porridge based on Hanwoo bone broth and chicken broth, deeply simmered with beef and chicken. As with the dishes that followed, the food was beautiful overall. It was garnished with scorched rice, leek crust, shiitake mushrooms, asparagus, and white wood ear mushrooms. Its texture sat somewhere between thin rice gruel and porridge, with a fresh flavor that was a great way to start the meal. The second course was three one-bite dishes.

First, inside brick pastry were a seared scallop, aburaga (herring roe), clam cream sauce, apple, and onion, finished with gamtae (seaweed) powder. It was my first time trying clam cream sauce. I expected it to be rich, but it was not at all, and it was not overly sweet either, so it brought out the one-bite dish beautifully. It looked so pretty that I almost hated to eat it. Pleasantly crisp pastry plus cream sauce—there was no way it could be bad.

The second and third bites were a bulgogi sandwich and lobster taco, respectively. The bulgogi sandwich had Hanwoo bulgogi, mushroom duxelles, truffle cream cheese, and apple pickle tossed together over brioche, topped with Hanwoo jerky powder and porcini powder. It tasted just as you would imagine, and I liked that the bulgogi flavor was not too strong. The third was a lobster taco: sous-vide lobster, tomato, onion, smoky gochujang mayo, frisée, and amaranth in a squid-ink taco shell. The server told us to eat them in order, and there was a reason. The lobster taco, eaten last, was bright and a little spicy, with the clearest flavor of the three. Rather than intensely stimulating, it was a new taste where many flavors came through.

Shiitake mushroom shrimp and five-color abalone saffron noodles

The next dish featured A-grade shiitake mushrooms grilled with shrimp, plus what I would call a zucchini wrap? It contained zucchini, tofu, aged kimchi, and golden enoki mushrooms, with peanut tofu sauce and chamnamul herb oil underneath.

Perhaps because they were A-grade, the shiitakes felt especially chewy and fragrant, and they paired well with the shrimp. The zucchini roll was a combination I had never had before, but it had that healthy-tasting quality. Above all, the peanut tofu sauce underneath met the fragrant chamnamul oil, adding a gentle sweetness and aroma that made it wonderfully moreish.

Next came five-color abalone saffron noodles. It was garnished with shredded radish in black sesame, bracken fern, shiitake mushrooms, seasoned chamnamul, perilla leaf, and abalone, with gamtae dressing and mustard-garlic sauce. It was a noodle dish with a nicely restrained ocean aroma, and the chewy abalone worked beautifully with it.

Golden eye snapper pot rice and charcoal-grilled striploin set

Then came the golden eye snapper pot rice, one of the mains. They mix it for you so it is easy to eat, but first they give you time for photos. So glossy, with perfectly cooked golden eye snapper. The mustard seeds scattered on top went so well with the colors. And then came the final main: grilled Hanwoo and its accompanying set.

Personally, this looked the most ordinary, but familiar flavors really are delicious. It was completely my style, seasoned just the way I like it. Pot rice and miyeokguk (seaweed soup) that anyone would enjoy. That Hanwoo seaweed soup was cooked so well. Seaweed soup gets better the longer it simmers, and this had a good amount of beef inside; it was tender, the seaweed flavor spread delicately, and the seasoning was truly perfect.

No matter what anyone says, Usu is known in Gongdeok for great beef, and the striploin... the visuals alone were incredible. The vegetables were cut so beautifully too that I wanted to put them straight on the charcoal grill.

What a sight. The charcoal grill had plenty of heat, so the meat browned beautifully.

Good beef should taste best simply dipped in salt, and as you would expect from a great beef restaurant, this melted away so softly when eaten with salt, releasing such delicious beefy aroma... This Hanwoo set was impressive enough to feel like the conclusion of the course, not just one stage of it.

Grill it with wasabi on top. But the meat was so good that, without any extra additions, properly grilled with a little dab of salt was the best.

The golden eye snapper pot rice had just the right amount of fish, so it was lovely to come across those well-grilled flakes of fish throughout. And the mustard seeds? They played a big part in the texture. Top it with the beef and the combination is seriously perfect.

Finishing with corn ice cream

The final dessert was corn ice cream. It included corn cream cheese, apricot, corn crumble, sponge cake, green tangerine cream sauce, dill, coconut chips, and more. The server told us to have everything together, and I am glad I listened. (When the food arrives, they explain it to you, so listen carefully to that explanation...) Corn was the main flavor, but corn plus all those varied flavors made the corn taste so much more layered, like a dessert fully doing its job? We ate everything so, so happily. I was glad that it seemed to give my friend some real healing! It was an extremely satisfying meal.