Cheonho chicken galbi with mom, garlic salt and soy sauce: Ondogye

Ondogye

Location and hours near Cheonho Station

• Address: 15 Cheonho-daero158-gil, 1F, Gangdong-gu, Seoul, South Korea
• Hours: Daily 16:00–23:00 (last order 22:00)

My mom came to visit Seoul after a while, so we went out to eat together. While we were deciding what to have, since my mom loves dakgalbi, we went for grill-it-yourself chicken galbi. Both my mom and I really love chicken haha •• 🫶🏻 Ondogye is located near Cheonho Station, so it's easy to reach by subway, and there are lots of buses nearby too, so it's convenient by public transit.

Atmosphere and seating

I made a reservation on Naver for 5:30pm and visited, and the staff seated us right away. I sat at an inner table close to the kitchen. The inside was decently spacious, and the tables were round. It looked like a great spot for a small group dinner..! I couldn't drink since I'd just had an endoscopy, but a lot of other guests were having drinks with their dakgalbi.

The kitchen is toward the back of the restaurant, and the restroom is right next to it, so you can use it without having to step outside. Personally, whether a restaurant has a restroom inside matters a lot to me, so it was nice that this place did.

What's on the menu at Ondogye

The menu was posted on the wall, so I gave it a quick look and ordered right away. Since Ondogye is a dakgalbi place, there are three flavors — garlic salt, soy sauce, and spicy sauce — plus salt-grilled chicken neck meat. For extras, there's fried chicken gizzards, vegetable skewers, steamed egg, extra stew, and rice balls, along with various alcoholic drinks. Fried gizzards and stew come included by default, so if you want more, you just order them as extras.

How to eat it the tasty way

Next to my seat was a guide on how to eat it best — apparently the first bite should be dipped in the sesame salt that comes with the fried gizzards, and after that it's tastier with radish pickle + wasabi, scallion salad, and other side dishes mixed in. Grilling the rice ball on the pan is supposedly a special treat..!

On the table were water and water cups, small plates, spoons and chopsticks, and a spread of side dishes. The sides included radish pickle, scallion salad, scallion kimchi, several sauces, and wasabi. My favorite combo is radish pickle + wasabi. 🤤

Fried gizzards, included by default

After we ordered two servings of dakgalbi to share, the staff first brought out the fried gizzards. They came with sesame salt for dipping. I already love fried gizzards normally, and getting to have them again at Ondogye made me really happy... 🥺

Rice ball / ₩3,000

You need carbs when eating dakgalbi, right..! I saw the rice ball on the extras menu and ordered it without a second thought. I rolled it into a round shape and ate it with the dakgalbi — having rice alongside made it much more filling. Dakgalbi + rice ball is a combo that can't fail ••

The default stew: doenjang stew

While the rice ball was being shaped, the stew arrived. Ondogye's default stew is doenjang stew (soybean paste stew), and it had big chunks of tofu in it? It also had all kinds of vegetables, making it a perfect side to eat alongside the dakgalbi.

Garlic salt and soy sauce dakgalbi, ₩17,000 each

Garlic salt dakgalbi / ₩17,000, soy sauce dakgalbi / ₩17,000. Here, you can order dakgalbi in single servings by flavor, so I got one serving of garlic salt and one of soy sauce. The staff grilled all of it for us, which made things so easy. The dakgalbi is grilled together with rice cakes and mushrooms.

Once the dakgalbi was cooked through, the staff cut it into bite-sized pieces for us. They moved the fully cooked pieces to the edge of the grill, and put the bone-in pieces in the center since the meat around the bone needed a bit more time.

How did it taste

I followed the recommended way of eating it, but honestly, maybe because the dakgalbi itself was so good, it tasted great no matter what combo I tried..? There was absolutely no gamey smell, and the texture was so tender it melted in my mouth. Both the garlic salt and soy sauce flavors suited my taste, and next time I want to try the spicy sauce too. 🥹

Dessert ice cream

Right around when we finished the dakgalbi, the staff came by with dessert ice cream. They gave us strawberry ice cream, which was just the right level of sweet — exactly my style. It's a nice way to cleanse the palate after dakgalbi... 💗