Boiling crab with sauce fried rice & pasta in Yeouido: Gaetbeol-ui

A seafood spot near National Assembly Station: Gaetbeol-ui Jogae

Hi hi, it's Mando :)

I hadn't had a proper seafood meal in Yeouido in a while, so I went looking for somewhere good, and this time I visited Gaetbeol-ui Jogae Yeouido Main Branch.

I usually like seafood like clams, shrimp, and squid, but instead of just one dish I wanted a menu where I could enjoy a bunch of different seafood at once and eat my fill, so I decided to try the boil-in-crab style seafood boil.

Where to eat boiling crab near National Assembly Station: Gaetbeol-ui Jogae Yeouido Main Branch

Gaetbeol-ui Jogae Yeouido Main Branch is a great spot to visit in Yeouido whenever you're craving seafood or clam dishes. Yeouido has tons of office workers, so there are restaurants everywhere from lunch through dinner, but that day I wanted something a bit more special than the usual Korean food or meat.

For moments like that, a dish where you can enjoy a bunch of seafood at once, like the seafood boil, hits the spot.

It's great to visit with friends or family and eat generously together, and it suited chatting while sharing the dish with several people.

I especially thought it would be a great dish for days when you visit with a group and want to share a bunch of different things.

The free barley rice served with the meal

While sitting down and waiting for the food, the first thing that caught my eye was the free barley rice they provide.

It was nice being able to have a light bowl of barley rice before the seafood arrived — little touches like this quietly boost how satisfying the meal feels.

When you hear 'seafood boil,' you usually picture a big table piled high with seafood, eaten by hand. When it actually arrived, there was more variety and way more volume than I expected, and I was pretty surprised from the first look.

Since the seafood boil itself comes so loaded, I didn't eat much barley rice, but it was nice to have lightly before the meal or alongside the seafood. When you eat seafood nonstop, you sometimes crave rice midway, so having barley rice ready from the start was a nice touch.

Mini pajeon: the right size to share on the side

We also had the mini pajeon (scallion pancake) together. The pajeon wasn't a huge pancake but was, true to its name, a light, perfectly sized side to pick at one piece at a time before diving into the seafood.

It had that crispy, savory flavor unique to well-fried pajeon, offering a different vibe from the seafood. Since the seafood boil came in such a huge portion that day, adding in side dishes like this along the way made the meal feel much more varied.

The moment the food arrived, my first thought was 'that's a LOT.' You could tell at a glance that the seafood was piled on generously, filling up the whole table.

What's in the boiling crab, and how the sauce tastes

What I liked most was that it wasn't just one or two kinds of seafood — there was real variety packed in. Assorted clams, squid, rice cakes, abalone, shrimp, and more were all in there together, so it was fun picking through and eating one thing at a time.

With a seafood boil, the seafood itself matters, but the sauce really seems to be what makes or breaks the flavor. Eating the seafood together with the boil's signature sauce brought the flavor to life way more than eating it plain.

With mild ingredients like shrimp or squid, the sauce added a salty, savory depth, and it paired well with the clams too.

Finishing the leftover sauce with fried rice and pasta

After finishing the seafood boil, I mixed rice into the leftover sauce and made fried rice, and it worked way better than I expected. Frying rice in a sauce infused with seafood flavor gave it a taste that was clearly different from ordinary fried rice.

Since the sauce had been mixing in as we ate the seafood earlier, the fried rice carried that same savory seafood depth, and even though I was full, my spoon kept going back for more.

And finishing it off with pasta too, it genuinely felt like I'd had several meals from one order. I especially liked that instead of just tossing out the leftover sauce from the seafood boil, they put it to use for fried rice and pasta.

At first I thought, 'can I really finish all of this?' given how much there was, but once I actually started eating, the variety of ingredients made it go down easier than expected.