New Seoul Korean Restaurant: Review

Opened in 2014 as Dong Seoul, this Damansara Perdana restaurant re-branded itself as New Seoul some time ago and is now celebrating its one-year anniversary with a month-long promotion running through the end of October. What better time to try it out? We visited twice in the span of a couple of weeks to get a better sense of the service and food, and found this to be a worthwhile eatery, especially for those fond of Korean BBQ.

New Seoul is located in Perdana Shopping Centre just adjacent to Jaya Grocer in the Perdana Exclusive Condo development in Damansara Perdana. Inside, we found an inviting dining room area with pleasing earth tones, medium-brown laminate wood floors, and a generally minimalist Asian design. With fewer than 10 tables in the main dining area, which is on two sides of an open corridor, there’s a nice spacious feel here. Further down, there’s an equally spacious area with larger tables for big parties. Here, you’ll find the floor-level tables with the sunken area for diners’ legs, so leave your shoes at the entryway. For the main dining room, however, it’s standard-height tables, padded benches, and chairs.

Table-Grilled BBQ Selections

Though there’s much more on the menu, you won’t go wrong with the table-grilled BBQ selections. We opted for the pork shoulder and pork belly, and supplemented this with some ramen and noodle dishes.

The Side Dishes

Like any good Korean BBQ place, side dishes are featured prominently here. At New Seoul, there seems to be some variation on the contents of these dishes from visit to visit: on one visit, we very much enjoyed what seemed to be small fillets of fried fish, something absent from the next visit’s procession of little dishes. However, that visit featured little sausage-and-veggie omelette pancakes that were delicious. Various veggies, pickles, potatoes, salads, and kimchi are all delivered, and each of these is cheerfully refilled upon request. The side dishes are not endlessly refillable, but the “limit” rather depends on what you order for your meals, which is fair. We had more than enough to complement our order, and were not refused any requests for refills, so there were no complaints from anyone at the table. The variety and flavour of all the side dishes was impressive, and the kimchi, with just the right level of spiciness, was met with unanimous approval.

The pork we ordered was grilled by the server right at our table, though you can request this be done “off table” if that’s your preference. Both the pork shoulder and pork belly were excellent, and it would be difficult to strongly choose one over the other, though I might give the slight edge to the belly. We were also given a wedge of onion and slices of garlic and green chillies, which we also threw on the grill. We enjoyed the shinramyon ramen and side dishes while waiting for the meat to cook, letting the pork belly in particular get nice and crispy on the outside.

Once the meat was cooked, we assembled our lettuce wraps using the freshly grilled meat, onions, garlic, and chillies, along with a salted sesame oil and a fragrant and flavour-packed sauce served in little dishes. Everything gets wrapped up in crisp, fresh greens and eaten like a wrap, and it’s absolutely delicious! If pork is not your preference, New Seoul also has plenty of beef options for the BBQ, along with one chicken option. Steamboat sets are also available, and take your pick here – seafood, beef, pork, and chicken are all available. In addition to the BBQ sets, soups, stews, and noodles are on the menu. We tried the shinramyon Korean ramen noodles (RM15), which was excellent, and the ddukboki, a large, glass noodle-based dish (RM25), which was also very tasty, though extra filling, and probably more than we needed!

Complimentary Tea

Meals are served with a complimentary free flow of a very nice roasted brown rice tea called hyeonmicha, and a decent range of soju, rice wine, and Korean beer is also on offer.

For those who might be unfamiliar with or intimidated by Korean BBQ, we feel that New Seoul is a good initiation. The menu is very approachable, with English translations of the Korean words, and full-colour photos of all of the dishes. The staff, a curious blend of Korean and Nepalese from what we could discern, are friendly and efficient, if not terribly fluent in English. Our only wish is that they offered cloth napkins or at least better paper ones, as the thin tissue paper in the dispensers is woefully inadequate when eating juicy lettuce wraps by hand.

Prices at New Seoul are very reasonable, with the pork BBQ selections typically hovering around RM30-35 and beef BBQ selections in the RM50-65 range. Our recommendation? Bring a couple of friends and order two BBQ selections and one noodle dish. There are also set menus from RM95 to RM210 which can easily satisfy three or four hungry diners, especially with the generous parade of little side dishes. If steamboat is more to your liking, there’s a very good range of choices here from RM50 to RM80.