Dae Myoung Ok Korean Restaurant

Today I decided to try out the Korean restaurant that was located near my high school. This isn't the first time I've gone out to eat Korean food here in Irvine, though, as I have previously eaten at Kaya. There was a lot of construction around the plaza where Dae Myoung Ok Korean Restaurant was located because they were remodelling some of the buildings.

The restaurant was very quiet when I entered, and there was only one group of customers there. But that's something to be expected when you come in at around 2 in the afternoon. It's also pretty small. After I glanced around their menu for a bit, I ordered their Soft Kimchi Tofu Soup. First thing they gave me was a cup of hot tea (either oolong or ginseng. I can't tell). While I waited for my food to come out, I took a quick picture of the restaurant interior:

OK, so now the good part comes. One of the servers came out with all these various types of banchan and a silver bowl of rice.

Mm, looks delicious, doesn't it? I enjoyed the broccoli, radish kimchi, and whatever that dish directly in front of the spoon was. The rest didn't suit my tastes, though. The Korean pancake tasted cold, unlike the Korean pancake at Kaya Restaurant that was served hot. In the middle of eating banchan, a server brought out my Soft Kimchi Tofu Soup. The broth was sizzling hot and boiling when she placed it on the table in front of me. I waited a while for the soup to cool down a bit before I ate it because super hot soup and my tongue don't mix.

The soup was delicious, but although I had ordered it spicy, it wasn't really spicy at all. It was just hot. A lot of the ingredients in this soup such as the egg seemed to be buried along near the bottom of this pot, because you don't notice them when you first dig into the soup.

In the end, my lunch total came out to be $8.99. Not bad. Definitely going to come back here in the future.

Oh, I forgot to mention that this is the first Korean restaurant I went to that used silver metallic chopsticks. I don't remember if Kaya used silver chopsticks at all.