Seohyeon Station kalguksu with meat topping and dumplings for dinner with a friend: Gangnam Gyoja

Finding Gangnam Gyoja from Exit 5 of Seohyeon Station

A kalguksu (knife-cut noodle soup) spot in Seohyeon, Bundang, that works for a light office-worker lunch as well as a hearty dinner with a friend.

The Bundang restaurant I'm introducing today is Gangnam Gyoja (강남교자), famous for its kalguksu. A friend of mine recently moved to Seohyeon, and we hadn't managed a single meal together since the move, so I looked for a restaurant near Seohyeon Station where I could stop by on my way home from work and meet him. Gangnam Gyoja Bundang Seohyeon Branch is over by Exit 5 of Seohyeon Station.

Seohyeon Station has exits opening in both directions, so Exit 5 and Exit 6 are genuinely confusing. That's why I took the photo below. When you step out of Exit 5, the part inside the white circle is trees, while out of Exit 6 it's a building, so use that to tell them apart.

Just a few steps out of Exit 5, you'll spot the building with Gangnam Gyoja on your left.

Gangnam Gyoja is up on the 2nd floor here. Go up to the 2nd floor, turn left, and you'll see Gangnam Gyoja right away, with its exterior done up like a traditional tiled-roof hanok.

A dinner of kalguksu, mandu and rice

The signature menu comes to roughly the six dishes below. I think the best choice is one main per person plus one plate of mandu (dumplings) between two people.

I had decided on kalguksu the moment I decided to visit Gangnam Gyoja, but my friend is more of a rice person than a noodle person, so I figured he'd go for one of the rice dishes like seolleongtang (ox bone soup) or dakgaejang (spicy chicken soup).

Since you get unlimited rice refills no matter what you order, my friend seemed to agonize over it quite a bit. The rice is a healthy millet rice, and I tried a spoonful stirred into my kalguksu — it's cooked just right for mixing into soup.

Mandu and geotjeori that came out first

Usually when you order a main plus mandu, some places bring the main first and the mandu you ordered as a side comes out ages later, but at Gangnam Gyoja the mandu came out fast, first. That's how it should be — you start with mandu as an appetizer.

There are 10 mandu to a plate, so honestly, for lighter eaters the mandu alone is enough to fill a meal.

The kimchi is geotjeori (fresh, lightly salted kimchi) made with domestic Korean cabbage you can eat with peace of mind, and it has that clean flavor at just the right level of ripeness that makes the best pairing with kalguksu. Some places have kimchi that's too ripe or too fresh and just doesn't match the kalguksu, but Gangnam Gyoja got the ripeness, the heat and the seasoning really spot on.

Every table has soy sauce, vinegar, red pepper flakes and black pepper ready for the mandu. I recently saw Japanese people dipping dumplings in just vinegar and pepper, tried it that way, and it's really good.

Kalguksu with meat topping and seolleongtang with noodles

I ordered the kalguksu, and the deep broth would have been great on its own, but the meat topping was the highlight.

On top of that, they thoughtfully add mandu into the kalguksu so that even people who didn't order dumplings don't miss out, and with this kalguksu, the mandu and rice stirred in, it's a portion that fills you up properly.

Looking at the seolleongtang my friend ordered, at first I wondered why he'd order seolleongtang at a place that isn't even a seolleongtang specialist.

But the seolleongtang has kalguksu noodles in it too, so I figured it really ought to count as a meat noodle soup.

The kalguksu noodles were really chewy and had soaked up that broth you could never get tired of, which I loved.

Keep slurping noodles nonstop with the kimchi and the bowl vanishes in the blink of an eye.

The mandu in the soup are a bit smaller than the ones we ordered, but think of them as boiled dumplings that have soaked up the kalguksu broth — deep-flavored boiled mandu like this have a charm of their own.

Naturally, we cleaned out the mandu and our own bowls completely, leaving nothing for the owner to clear, and headed out.

I'll probably be going to Seohyeon Station often to meet my friend from now on, and starting with the Bundang kalguksu place Gangnam Gyoja seems just right.