Gangnam eel restaurant with perilla-leaf ochazuke: Unagiwa

Today, after work, I went with my wife to have an eel rice bowl somewhere close to our workplace.

Unagiwa near Yeoksam Station: location and hours

• A 5-minute walk from Exit 7 of Yeoksam Station
• Mon–Fri 11:00–21:00
• Break time 15:00–17:00; last order 20:00
• Closed every Saturday and Sunday
• Parking available; valet costs ₩5,000 for 2 hours

You can tell the restaurant is on the second floor, and it really shows that the owner put a lot of thought into the interior.

Right from the entrance, how should I put it? It has a strong Japanese feel. It looks like a huge parking lot, and they apparently remodeled the whole place to use it.

The left side looks like it is meant to evoke a bamboo forest.

An eel is drawn as the signature. It kind of has the feel of Japanese hiragana too, haha.

As soon as you walk in, there is this pure-white interior. It feels like they paid a huge amount of attention to it.

There is a wine cellar in the middle, plus a refrigerator that I assume has sake in it, haha.

What is the seating like on a weekday evening?

The inside is quite spacious. We visited at 6:30 p.m. on a weekday and it was already nearly full, but fortunately we had a reservation and were seated right away. The tables were well spaced and comfortable, which was nice.

I took this when I had to use the restroom in the middle of the meal.

Inside too, there was a bidet toilet rather than a urinal, haha. It was very clean and nice. I assume the women’s restroom is also very clean, so it looked like a good place for a group company dinner. There really were two men who looked like department heads? eating there, along with people who seemed to be couples like us or maybe on blind dates, haha. Still, the tables were far enough apart that you could not really hear conversations, so it should be perfectly fine. A blind-date spot or a company-dinner spot, haha.

Ordering the hitsumabushi eel rice bowl

From the menu, we ordered two ₩38,000 hitsumabushi eel rice bowls. We will try the special version later, haha. The wait was not long—maybe just over 10 minutes? It came out quickly. A staff member explained how to eat it, and the method was pretty fun.

The long-awaited full hitsumabushi set. We ordered for two, and to put it simply, the eel was wonderfully firm and nutty, brushed with sauce, and seriously delicious.

The staff member showed us how to gently separate it with the spoon on the right. When you sweep the eel aside, there is white rice underneath that has soaked up the seasoning, making an absolutely crazy harmony, haha.

Perilla-leaf chawanmushi and ochazuke too

The chawanmushi (Japanese steamed egg custard) that came with it had mushrooms on top. Its softness helped whet the appetite before the meal, haha. Unlike other places, this one had perilla leaf in the topping, and sprinkling it over was so Korean and went really well with the dish, hahaha. I think the owner quietly did a lot of research.

Look at this close-up spoonful of white rice soaked with seasoning. It was definitely not plain rice—there was eel sauce? on it, so the flavor was amazing, haha. There are some bones, but they are small enough to just chew and eat.

The chawanmushi that came with it. I do not know whether I photographed it well, but wow, as you keep eating, it is great for cutting through the richness.

As we kept eating, there was the ochazuke (rice in tea or broth) on the side. It is usually made with green tea, but this seemed to use bonito-broth water instead. It feels like they researched it as a menu better suited to Korea.

It is like mixing rice into water, but with perilla leaf and seaweed flakes on top, it almost feels like having a hot eel soup.

Can you see my empty bowl after I completely cleared it? Haha. Honestly, it was so good that I think this is an eel rice bowl place near Yeoksam Station I would recommend to people around me for a workday lunch, haha.