Yeouido Japanese restaurant for crisp gyukatsu: Izawa

I had plans in Yeouido and stopped by. It was mealtime, so I’m sharing my visit to Izawa Yeouido Direct Store (이자와 여의도직영점), a place I already liked.

🍽️ Izawa Yeouido Direct Store

A gyukatsu restaurant close to Exit 5 of Yeouido Station

The access was excellent. I was hungry and my legs were so tired, but it is really close to Exit 5 of Yeouido Station. Maybe because it was dinner time, there were quite a few guests inside and a wait as well. It is already very well known as a good restaurant near Yeouido Station.

After waiting a little, we sat down and found a small brazier set up on every table. The moment I saw it, my anticipation went up for no reason. 😆

Ordering the gyukatsu and steak set meals

We ordered the gyukatsu set meal and steak set meal. Ordering the set meals was a better deal than ordering items separately!

Grill it as much as you like over an individual mini brazier

Gyukatsu (breaded beef cutlet) is a little different from regular tonkatsu, which comes fully cooked. It arrives crisp on the outside and almost rare inside, then you grill it yourself over the individual mini brazier on the table.

Putting on one piece at a time and cooking it as much as you want is surprisingly fun. I think it would be a different kind of fun with kids, too.

I also liked that people who prefer their meat well done and people who prefer it lightly cooked can go together and each enjoy it their own way.

At first, I put several pieces on at once and had to flip them in a frenzy. 😂 The brazier gets hot faster than you might expect, so it was much better to put on just one or two pieces at a time.

Crisp, juicy gyukatsu and house-made sauce

The gyukatsu was crisp on the outside, while the meat inside was tender and juicy. More than anything, the sauce was really good. They said it was house-made.

Dipping the meat in the sauce added a savory, umami-rich flavor that kept me reaching for more. Salt and the other accompaniments were good too, but the sauce pairing was my favorite. It was tasty with wasabi as well.

The unbreaded steak set meal, too

We also ordered the steak set meal, and lightly grilling this over the brazier was fun too. The steak is not breaded. Its flavor was different from the gyukatsu, so I was glad we ordered both. Above all, grilling the meat ourselves over the little brazier brought back a faint memory of eating gyukatsu in Japan.

Rather than simply eating and leaving, grilling as we went and taking our time made the whole dining process fun.

If you have dinner plans in Yeouido or are looking for something a little different near Yeouido Station, this was a solid choice. Especially if you like gyukatsu, it is worth trying at least once for the fun of cooking it to your preferred doneness over a mini brazier.

Leave extra time for the dinner wait

This place gets enough customers to have a wait, so it would be best to visit with a little extra time during the dinner rush. It looks like Lim Young-woong has visited too. There are celebrity signatures here and there.

We had the gyukatsu set meal and steak set meal, but if I went again, I would probably order the gyukatsu again. The sauce was much more my taste than I expected. 😊