Minsok Restaurant, Makati

One of the best Korean meals I’ve had in a looong time. The Samgyupsal/Samgyeopsal is a winner!

Flashback: My mom had a brief stint working in a travel agency in Makati when I was younger. She had Saturday work which ended at lunch time so the whole family would pick her up and have lunch together in Makati. One of my most vivid memories of these Saturday lunches was us going to a small Korean restaurant named Masan. It was actually a house wherein the first story was converted into a restaurant. We always had the best meals there and was a great introduction for me and my family on Korean food.

Fast forward to today and Minsok. I got really excited when Dan (who was the first to try out the resto) described what it was — a house that was turned into a resto that served really good food. Memories of Masan translated into really high expectations for Minsok.

Me, Dan and two of our officemates hied off to Poblacion one weekday to try the place out. We were there at 11 as we were forewarned that the place gets full pretty quickly by 12 p.m. We were the only customers there.

We ordered the Samgyeopsal which was highly recommended by Dan. According to Wikipedia, Samgyeopsal “can be translated as Three (sam) layered (gyeop) meat (sal), of course hinting at the three layers that are visible in the meat.” The pork belly came to us pre-cut. The helpful waitress turned on the hot plate and slathered lard all over it. The dish was off to a good start I thought hehe :)

The pork slices were then arranged and were cooked right away. The dish was served with tofu soup (like sukiyaki but red) and a dozen or so condiments including kimchi and dwenjang. I usually do not eat kimchi or any other spicy food because my tolerance for them is pathetic. However, the kimchi at Minsok is really mild but was still very tasty actually ate some of the kimchi by itself because it was that good (not to mention tolerable). One other condiment that was a big hit was the salt pepper sesame oil dip. Do not forget to dip the pork in this seemingly simple conconction in order to give it flavor as well as to have that sweet salty counterpoint for the spicy kimchi. Along with these two are different vegetables and a korean pancake.

There are two ways to eat this dish, the most preferred (and traditional) way is to wrap the pork and the condiments in a lettuce leaf. Here’s a step by step:

(1) Dip the pork in the salt sesame oil pepper dip; (2) the rice and the Dwenjang, a mildy salty bean paste; (3) lettuce, pork, dwenjang; (4) lettuce, pork, dwenjang, rice; (5) Add PaMuchim, a spring onion salad with red pepper flakes; (6) winner!

It’s really up to you on how to layer the condiments and figure out the best flavors for your own wrap. That’s probably one of the fun parts of eating this dish this way.

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