Review on Sanchon Temple Cooking restaurant in Insadong

Lunch hours was almost over and we still strolling around the Insadong Street on our 2nd day in Seoul. Jean and I started to feel hungry so we looked for foods around. One of the popular cuisine you can find along Insadong Street is Korean royal court cooking. With recommendation from the internet, I decided to try the similar but vegetarian Sanchon Temple Cooking in Sanchon restaurant. It was fantastic! I would say it was my highlight of my second day in Seoul. Please read on.

Sanchon (山村) restaurant is located at one of the side lanes along Insadong Gil or road. You can spot the signboard from the main road. Followed the sign into the side lane, we saw quite a number of restaurants along the way serving Korean royal court cooking. Sanchon is at the end of the road. We walked in and a lady came out to serve us. I mentioned ‘came out’ is because the foyer is isolated from the rest of the  restaurant. She came out from the dining hall to bring us in.

There are 2 separate dining sections. One is external seating having skylight roofing and the other is internal with soft and warm lighting. We chose the internal seating with low tables and tatami seats.

Let me share my first impression when I first stepped into the restaurant. The entrance might looks small, but once the waitress led us into the dining hall, it is a world apart. We felt like we were in a temple garden with plants and decorations all over and in a serene environment. I thought we might have got to the wrong place as there were no other patrons except us!

Soon after we settled down, there were another 2 couples came, and were both tourists. “Could this be another tourist trap?”, the first thing struck my mind. I got the answer at the end of the day. In terms of pricing, could be. In terms of service and the quality of food, definitely not. The reasons? Please read on…

My first impression was generally positive. Everything is nicely laid out. Once we settled down, the waitress came forward and asked for our order.

There is basically only 1 single menu, which is the Full Course Menu complete with 20 items. What the waitress asked was our confirmation to proceed with the menu which would cost KW33,000 per set. The menu is printed with English and Japanese translation, which indicated touristic. When we queried on items of the menu, she could not understand much on English! Anyway, we ordered 2 sets for both of us.

Pardon me for my English, I couldn’t understand fully what exactly we were going to have later… 🙂 Below is some images of different dishes we got from the menu.

A pot of tea and a cup was served.

And chopstick wrapped with napkin.

After a short while, first came our appetizer, which includes porridge, soup, Kimchi, fritters, radish and don’t know what vegetable.

A pot of Soju is included. Soju is the popular alcoholic beverage in Korea which taste like vodka.

After we finished our appetizer, second set of the course was served immediately. We quickly realized that we were eating too slow and they were waiting for too long.  Another few varieties of vegetarian pancakes.

Finally, the main course came. Rice, soup, vegetables, Kimchi, red peppers, bean curb and others. Some tasted weird to me, but most of others were great. Either fermented or broiled, they seemed healthy cooking to me.

Jean loved this wooden scoop made from bamboo.

We spent a lot of time finishing our main course. For our desert, a few pieces of rice pastry with a cup of fermented tea.

The full course luncheon took us an hour to complete and it was definitely filling. After the lunch, I snapped photos around the premise.

After all, the food was great. Eventhough it was all-vegetarian-meal, with countless dishes being served in courses, it was actually quite filling. And most importantly, temple cuisine is considered as healthy food to consume. Maybe psychologically, I felt refreshed and lighter on the next few days. 🙂

View all above photos in my Flickr’s set.

It was amazing seeing how all kinds of vegetarian recipes being mixed together to make it the healthiest meal we had in my whole Korea trip. After the lunch, we continued to stroll down the street of Insadong but detoured shortly after that to another tourist spot. Guess where did we go? I will tell you shortly after this… 🙂 – Travel Feeder

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.