Meal in the City: Daeyang Korean Restaurant, Kalayaan Avenue, Quezon City

[Hey, it's the much-awaited return of "Meal in the City"!]

It's been a very hot and humid few weeks in the city and temperatures are expected to keep rising. And eating-wise, that means my partner and I are turning up our noses at most soups. We'd rather have lighter meals, or if we have to eat a lot can we please have a lot of cold drinks on hand too?

This weekend we'd both been suffering some serious food cravings: he wanted lots of vegetables, while I was dreaming about kimchi, the older the better.

So we struck out on a hot and sunny Sunday morning for a serious, home-style Korean meal.

[Related Meal in the City post: Bibimbap, Mashitta - UP Diliman.]

We first went to a rather large Korean supermarket in the general vicinity of QC's City Hall - we wanted to know if they also served food. Unfortunately, we were told by the salesladies to come back in a month or so as they were still ironing out the kinks in their restaurant-to-be.

So we walked off along Kalayaan Avenue in QC in search of the next nearest Korean enclave, about a block or so away. Seeing an open door under the sign "Daeyang Korean Restaurant", my partner asked if we could try that place. I balked a little because I had hoped we'd at least go somewhere with air-conditioning, but finally gave in - Daeyang it was.

The restaurant had a rather...quirky...idea of interior decoration [the walls were full of scribbles from other patrons and visitors!] but the menu looked damn good, so we nodded at the waitress and placed a large order.


Bring on the banchan!


Here is a closer look at the appetizers: fish cakes kimchi-style, flash-wilted spinach with sesame seeds, paper-thin radish slices in a sour brine, and our favorite kind of kimchi. The kimchi was very strong, very bracing, and very welcome on that hot day!


More kimchi goodness in the form of kimchi jeon - sort of an omelet or pancake filled with chopped kimchi, other veggies, and squid bits.


My lunch: a massive bowl of dolseot bibimbap. The rice crust on the bottom was amazingly crispy and delicious. I doctored mine as customary - with a lot of gochujang, or chili soybean paste - and happily waded in as soon as it arrived.

Oh, and how massive is massive?


THIS massive! I mean, look at that - the stone bowl is so big it makes the nearby water pitcher look small!


And my partner's entree: a heap of beef bulgogi, which he ate with a bowl of plain white rice and the lettuces presented at table along with the banchan.

We started out the meal as the only patrons in the restaurant, but by the time we'd dug in a large Filipino family came in, followed by an unrelated group of four who ALSO ordered soju to go with their meal ["Well, someONE's getting blasted at lunchtime," I whispered to my partner].

And as we were finishing up we found out that the restaurant has this sort of eat-all-you-can promo going on: eat all the pork rib you want, charcoal-grilled right at the table, for 300 PHP per head, every Sunday. So we're definitely going back to Daeyang when a Sunday finds us in the mood for a feast that's straight out of the Flintstones.