Korean department stores: Part 3: Food courts

Food courts in Korea are a bit different than those in North America. They do not have the massive line up of chain restaurant booths that I am accustomed to seeing. They do have a small selection, like McDonald's, KFC, Pizza Hut, Baskin Robin's, etc., but there's usually only a minimal selection of these places. Also, there is often a selection of island booths, offering everything from mandu, to rice cakes, to pizza. Mexican food is virtually non-existant in Korea. The main feature of these food courts are the generic, department store owned, theme restaurant booths. There is usually a Korean booth, a Chinese booth, a Japanese booth, a "western" booth and an Italian booth. Of course, it's usually the Korean version of whatever is offered. If you like kimchi with your sweet and sour pork, speghetti or mandu (kimchi mandu rocks!), then you'll love the selection. They love to serve kimchi with everything here.

For those that don't know, most kimchi is just fermented cabbage. It's a lot like the cabbage that you'll find in a Ukranian cabbage roll. Sometimes it's spicier, sometimes it's not. Kimchi can also be fermented just-about-anything. Kimchi raddish is also popular. Pickles are very similar to kimchi. Koreans must think so too, because you are always given pickles as a side dish to your pizza.

Anyway, these food courts feature a menu, in the front area of the court, that consists of plastic models of the meals. There is a number associated with each meal. Beside these models is a cashier. You tell the girl what you want and pay her. In return, you get a receipt with the number of the food, or the name of the food, that you ordered. You take this receipt to the appropriate booth and then they make your food for you. It's really easy and convenient.


















A food court in Homeplus/Tesco.
















An island booth, featuring a regular assortment of Korean favorites.
















This kid thought that I was an American. He kept yelling "meegook saram! meegook saram!" ("American person! American person!) at me like he'd never seen a white man in his life before. Maybe he hadn't.
















Here we are in Carrefour now. Who wants ice cream?
















Here's a good view of some of the plastic food.
















There's the girl that you give your order to.
















There's my receit. Man-rhe-myeon is what I ordered. That's spicy seafood and noodles. It came to 5,000 won, which is exactly $5.69 Canadian as of today. The tax is included in the advertized price, which is nice. Why don't we do that in North America? I'm pretty sure that Europe is like that too. You can see that the actual price was 4,545 won plus 455 won in tax. That's just under 10% for you math wizards.
















Here's the booth where I got my food. I think this was considered "Chinese food", whatever that is...
















It was about 3pm on a Sunday, so it wasn't very busy. Come to think of it, this was also my birthday. Hooray! I spend half the day in department stores taking pictures!
















Well, this was my birthday lunch! Spicy seafood and noodles, raddish kimchi and egg soup. I used the chopsticks. I kind of like them.