Nowon sushi buffet with a playroom and pastry soup: Kuu Kuu, Seoul

Do you all eat at buffets often? Honestly I'm more the type to properly enjoy delicious food than to eat a ton of it, but there's something about a buffet where you can pick and choose exactly what you want that makes me want to go every once in a while, haha. So after quite a long time, I went with friends to "Kuu Kuu Nowon Branch."

Kuu Kuu Nowon Branch hours and parking

Kuu Kuu Nowon Branch is open weekdays 11:00–21:30 (last order 21:00) and weekends 11:00–22:00 (last order 21:30). The first 120 minutes of parking are free.

How to walk from Hagye Station to the 6th-floor entrance

Kuu Kuu Nowon Branch is a short walk from Hagye Station, located on the 6th floor of a really big building! It clearly gets a lot of waiting lines, since there's a CatchTable sign right out front and an extremely long bench next to the entrance.

Inside Kuu Kuu Nowon: group rooms and a playroom

The interior was bigger and more spacious than I expected — especially great for group visits, with lots of tables where many people can sit together. And toward the back, there's a room-like separate space for things like dol (first birthday) parties or birthday parties where a big group can gather at once, which I thought was really nice.

Right next to it is a playroom too, so bringing young kids along should make for a comfortable, enjoyable meal.

Salad corner: smoked salmon salad

Kuu Kuu has all kinds of food ready, including a wide variety of salads that are great for waking up your appetite. There's a salad topped with smoked salmon, and its bright, refreshing flavor helps you keep going through a long meal.

Sushi and sashimi corner, with mulhoe and marinated raw crab

Still, when you think of Kuu Kuu, sashimi and sushi are really the main event. Maybe because it had been a while since my last visit, but the variety of sushi felt huge — from basic raw fish sushi to pieces topped with all kinds of sauces and ingredients, plus rolls that look like gimbap (seaweed rice roll). There were so many kinds it was almost too much to try even one of each.

There was even more than plain sashimi — they also had mulhoe (cold raw fish soup) and yangnyeom gejang (marinated crab in spicy sauce).

Fried food, pizza, pork ribs, lamb and Chinese dishes

Eating only sushi can get a little tiring, but Kuu Kuu Nowon Branch has plenty of cooked dishes too — various fried items, pizza and pasta, pork ribs and lamb, and a whole range of Chinese menu items. There was so much of it that it was hard to even remember it all.

Dessert corner and 12 kinds of tea

Finally, at the dessert corner there was a mountain of bread of every kind and fresh, sweet fruit, plus a coffee machine to drink alongside it and almost 12 kinds of tea.

And one of the things I was really looking forward to was the ice cream — so many flavors, and there was even marble ice cream, so you could get your money's worth on this alone, haha.

My plate at Kuu Kuu: sushi and pastry-topped soup

I had a variety of sushi along with the salad and also tried several grill dishes. In particular, the soup topped with a pastry lid felt a bit plain on its own, but eating it together with sushi was really delicious.

Since the sushi rice portions were basically small to begin with, I didn't even need to skip the rice — it felt like I was eating more of the fish itself, which was really satisfying.

Waffles grilled to order by the staff

And something that surprised me more than expected — the Kuu Kuu waffles were genuinely delicious. At Kuu Kuu Nowon Branch, staff grill the waffles themselves, so the waffle iron doesn't get dirty and you get a perfectly shaped waffle every time. They even let it cool slightly before handing it over, so it was perfectly crispy. I wrapped up the meal by loading up on marble ice cream, haha.

By the time we finished eating, almost 2 hours had passed. It was great being able to properly enjoy everything from the appetizers through the main dishes to dessert, all in one place.