Madagascar
My friend Sammie showed me the way to this cafe out near Sookmyung Women’s University. It’s a nice looking cafe, with a spacious and eclectic interior full of National Geographic style photography (the theme is Madagascar after all), photo gear, photo books, and random curios. I guess the owner is a photographer who visited Madagascar...
Lugo Coffee
Lugo is a well appointed cafe in the huge Garden 5 shopping mall, complete with their own roaster in shop, La Cimbali and Ditting espresso set up, as well as kit for hand drip. Combining the two main Korean cafe trends, they offer all their coffees (around ~10 single origins) as either espresso shots or...
Choi Ga
I’ve been keeping an eye out for good coffee on the northeast side of Seoul, but so far I’d only been able to find Star City’s Star Kitchen and Lotte Mall’s Cantata kiosk, which are above average, but nothing to go out of your way for. Then I came across a post at Jihye Chang’s...
Dallmayr Kaffee
Dallmayr is a German coffee company that has several cafes in Seoul. I tried visiting their Gangnam location, but it’s either out of business or being renovated. Their Nambu Terminal location is open, however, and it’s unique and quirky, even by Korean standards. With its operatic sound track, dark interior and antique accoutrements, it’s not...
Star City’s Star Kitchen
Korea is a nation of giant apartment blocs, and many of the nicer ones have large shopping complexes at the lower levels. The Star City development next to Konkuk University station (Gundae Ipgu) has an E-mart, Lotte mall, and a bunch of shops, complete with a weird Brian Eno-esque soundtrack piped in to the hallways...
Coffee Mill
The Korean “Kuh-pi Bang-aht-gan” is roughly equivalent to “Coffee Mill.” This is one of the cafes I visited in 2007 on my first trip to Korea. It’s located in the Samcheongdong neighborhood near the Blue House Presidential residence and Gyeongbokgung Palace. While their coffee is not really worth mentioning, the interior style is pretty cool...
Cafe DeBibes
Spotted this coming out of exit six at Gyeongbokgung station. The Korean text says “Illy Cafe” but this cafe is also branded with the name ‘Cafe DeBibes’ (pronounced Bee-Bays in the Korean text). I tried an espresso here thinking it might be good, but there were a lot of fines in the cup and it...
