Yeouido Japanese restaurant with kaisendon after work: Ilpum

A great kaisendon spot by Yeouido's National Assembly Station 🍣 Ilpum Yeouido 🍣

Open Monday through Saturday from 11:00 to 21:30, with a break from 15:00 to 17:30 and last orders at 20:00. Lunch last orders are at 14:00, and it is regularly closed every Sunday. Parking is free for two hours, with spaces on the building's ground floor, B2, and B3.

Ilpum Yeouido near National Assembly Station

After work, I made plans with a friend and visited this great Japanese restaurant near the office! For kaisendon! 🍣

Ilpum Yeouido Branch is over by National Assembly Station! It is close to Yeouido Park too, so I totally recommend a walk through the park after eating 💚 The weather has been so pleasantly cool lately~

Inside, there are table seats and counter seats! Tables are available from three people onward, so I recommend reserving ahead of time!

We sat at the counter, and it faced an open kitchen where we could watch everything being made! It was so spotless that it really stayed with me, haha.

The menu and our full spread

Here is the menu! Most dishes are in the ₩20,000–₩30,000 range. The portions were seriously generous, so the price did not feel like a waste at all.

They even had ankimo (monkfish liver), which is popular these days, as a pop-up menu item!

You order by QR code, and we got the kaisendon, the special Ilpum-don, and two orders of vinegared shrimp sushi (4 pieces total).

When you order, soup, white kimchi, and chawanmushi (steamed egg custard) come as standard!

The chawanmushi was so soft, and there was shrimp hiding underneath! Basic soy sauce was set out at every seat too.

Kaisendon piled high with aged sashimi

The food arrived! My kaisendon and my friend's Ilpum-don! ✦ Kaisendon ₩26,000 ✦

The presentation is insane, right?.. 🥹 It is piled high with all kinds of aged sashimi!

The kaisendon (seafood rice bowl) is so pretty that I had to admire it again.. 🖤 It comes with seaweed to wrap everything up in!

There is seaweed for wrapping, plus cold udon topped with karaage as a side! First off, the karaage on the cold udon was so crisp and delicious, and the udon noodles were wonderfully chewy!!

This is how the whole kaisendon set comes out, and there was so much food—not to mention all the sides—that we could eat until we burst!

It is topped with seasonal aged sashimi such as salmon, tuna, rolled omelet, scallop, shrimp, and red sea bream!

And behind the shiso were ankimo and some crab meat whose name I do not know! The crab was seriously delicious.. and the ankimo was pure rich, creamy goodnessㅠㅠ

Just pile the rice with sashimi, ankimo, and crab meat and take a bite—it is genuinely so good ❤️ The rice itself was seasoned and so tasty that I just kept inhaling it, haha.

I also wrapped it in seaweed, and since I love seaweed so much, that was incredibly good too 🫶

There was also some lightly hidden fried lotus root, which added a little texture here and there!

Special Ilpum-don topped with uni and negitoro

✦ Special Ilpum-don ₩30,000 ✦ The Ilpum-don looked enormous too. Negitoro... you know it, right? They heap on something like finely minced tuna negitoro, then add salmon roe and uni (sea urchin) on top!!! ✨

There was a generous amount of uni too, and both the portion and presentation absolutely blew everything away for the price!

Everything was set up so we could wrap the Ilpum-don in seaweed too, and it was much tastier that way ❤️

I am not usually a tuna person, but the Ilpum-don was so soft with not even a hint of fishiness—it was so delicious that it hardly felt like sashimi at all!

Such a perfect Ilpum-don set, right~?

Vinegared shrimp sushi and dessert

✦ Vinegared shrimp sushi (4 pieces) ₩4,000 ✦

I love vinegared shrimp sushi so much that my friend and I ordered two portions so we could each have two pieces! They were so large and satisfying that two pieces were plenty!

And once you finish, they prepare dessert separately like this.

The dessert was really delicious too.. 💛 It was not quite pudding and not quite yogurt, but something right in between, full of both texture and sweetness! Overall, I loved that even one menu item came as a full set, from the basic sides through dessert. It was so substantial and made me feel looked after. Such a happy dinner for the first time in a while!