Must-Eat Korean Traditional Food Place in Outskirt of Seoul : Horaengi Gotgan

 

Songdo International City, Incheonsi

October 10th, 2022

  When we had a trip to Triple Street, a big shopping and dining mall in Songdo, it was rainy, windy and cold. So we had a craving for warm soup things and could find this Korean traditional guk-bab restaurant, Horaengi Gotgan. And it turned out that this place has been attracted by influencers and instagrammers.  

  First of all, ho-raeng-i(호랭이)is a dialect of ho-rang-i(호랑이) which means a tiger in Korean. Got-gan(곳간) is a kind of barn in an old Korean traditional house to store things including food, straw, and firewood. So I can guess Horaengi Gotgan means a space where a tiger stores food. In reality, tigers don’t store their food, I believe. The restaurant mainly supplies soup made with beef bone, probably that is why they named it Horaengi Gotgan.

  Guk(국) is Korean soup. There are hundreds kinds of guk in Korea. Bab(밥) means steamed rice. So guk-bob is just guk and bob. Normally we Koreans put bob into warm guk, and mix and eat together, but some Koreans eat these two things separately. Sometimes I do either.

  Horaengi Gotgan‘s representative menu is beef bone soup. We call it sagol-guk in Korean. Sagol(사골) means bone of beef or pork to make broth. Basically we boil sagol long time. Sometimes it takes almost a day. Anyway they supply three kinds of sagol-guk-bab, mild one, spicy one, and another spicy one with beef intestine. All of three are topped with sliced beef. We ordered mild one and spicy one, and beef rice ball for Soo. Beef rice ball is a mixing bowl of a small portion of finely chopped beef, pickled radish, seaweed and rice for kids.

  I ate mild sagol-guk-bob, because I had a mild stomachache at that time, and it worked. It tasted good, and Alex said his spicy sagol-guk-bob was good too. Most of guk-bob goes with radish kimchi well. So how good radish kimchi of a guk-bab restaurant is matters. Oh, when you eat mild sagol-guk, in many cases it isn’t seasoned at all. First taste a bit and put salt little by little in it, till it is salty as much as you want.

  Other than sagol-guk-bab, bibim-bob(비빔밥), bibim-myeon(비빔면, noodle), jeyuk-bokeum(제육볶음, pork bulgogi), tteok-galbi(떡갈비, Korean meat patties) are on their menu.

  The restaurant is decorated with tiger things including a stuffed tiger in front of the entrance and tiger paintings on the wall. Staffers were very nice. And there is a note of waiting list. You have to write your name on the note, if there are waiting people outside of the restaurant.

  

- How to get Horangi Gotgan

  It is on B2 floor in block C of Triple Street, the mall. Information about the location of Triple Street is here. https://tnb4earlybirds.blogspot.com/2022/10/triple-street-and-hyundai-premium.html 

- Opening hours of Horangi Gotgan

 

  11:00 - 22:00 All year round