Insadong birthday dinner

A friend of ours decided to celebrate her birthday with friends and family over a dinner on Saturday. I suggested this place called Insadong, not because it was Korean Cuisine but because it was easy on the wallet for large groups of people. It's also plentiful in food and the service isn't always that bad. That restaurant is usually packed and so, the service isn't great all the time. It differs from time to time, but the staff are generally pretty helpful. The restaurant itself is quite spacious and open, until you get a table in one of their rooms. The room we were in had several tables to fit maybe four or six large parties. It was quite suffocating and I don't think their ventilation was awesome. It's better to have a party out of those rooms and I wish they would change their water bottles; those darn things always leak. If you visit their website, you will see that they have a link to their blog. It has pictures of their restaurant, food dishes and other events. The restaurant is quite big and it can seat a lot of people. They also have WiFi Hot Spots.

We had several dishes and I only managed to take a few photos of some of the dishes.

One of them was Japche. It's stir fry potato noodle with marinated beef Bulgogi and mixed vegetables. This one was really tasty and you can really taste all the flavors absorbed by the noodles.

This is the Seafood Salad. It has jelly fish, shrimp, seaweed, julienne cucumber, pea shoots, minced garlic and small scallops. Also, there's some small side dishes at the back. It's light and refreshing and has a great mouth feel.

We also had Seafood Pancake, Stir Fry Beef Udon Noodles and Noodle Soup.

Then we have the BBQ. It's Beef Bulgogi, Chicken Bulgogi & Beef Galbi. Obviously, there's more than just what you see in that photo. Their Korean BBQ is decent. I have had better, but their Spicy Pork Bulgogi is the best.

And here we have a very expensive looking pink rolled fondant, butter cream and three layered marble cake that comes with a plaque. I've never been a cake fan, especially a butter cream one. This one isn't even close to winning me over. However, I do like ice cream and really well made chocolate cakes. It can't be extremely sweet.



Location:

Insadong
301 - 403 North Road
Coquitlam, BC
V3K 3V9
1-604-936-3778
http://www.insadong.ca

Kicking off with...

Lunch on Saturday. My family and I went to this Vietnamese restaurant called, Pho Hong and the prices went up again. My dad was saying how there's more noodles than meat now than before. Needless to say, he was not impressed. As for me, I order the Grilled Lemongrass Chicken.

It's not as good as before and there's hardly any lemongrass flavor to it. It was like that before and it's still like that now. The chicken was a bit rubbery and tough. However, the shredded lettuce is always fresh and crispy! The only thing that never changes in taste is their deep fried spring rolls; it's always good.

Not much happened on Saturday so I'll just skip right along to dinner. We went to Yaohan center which has a less than average food court there. Depending on what you're eating, there is good and bad food choices to pick. If you're just there for bbtea and various drinks, then you're in luck. There's about two vendors there that's ALWAYS packed, which says their drinks taste good. There's an unspoken competition between food courts here for some reason and speaking from experience, most Asians have 3 rules that pretty much applies to most things.

1) It has to be cheap
2) It has to be good quality
3) It has to be plentiful

That's mostly what you see in Asian food courts nowadays. On the contrary, the food sucks in the Yaohan Center food court! Just the food court now. I may be a bit harsh and not all of it sucks, just a bit of this and that here and there. The foreign specialty food vendors is pretty decent. It's not awesome, but it taste so much better than the average 3 food items with rice for $4.25 - $4.75. Given the price, you can see why the food isn't so great. My parents had a bad experience with what and where they ordered from. I ordered from the Korean place =p

BBQ beef spare ribs on rice. It comes with a light and refreshing miso soup and a side dish of sweet roasted potatoes (which, were slightly burnt), bean sprouts and spicy pickled daikons. It's good because it cost me $5.90! It's still cheap if you think about what normal Korean places charges for BBQ. However, the taste of the beef isn't that authentic and yet, the staff that runs the place are Koreans.

What a long first post with pictures...



Locations:

Pho Hong Vietnamese Restaurant
MN-5975 Kingsway
Burnaby, BC
V5J 1H1
1-604-454-9727

Yaohan Center Location
No. 3 Road
Richmond, BC
V6X 3X2
1-604-231-0602