Being able to order fried chicken and booze at 3am is certainly one of the charms of Seoul, but if you’re tired of the watered-down Cass and over-fried delivery chicken, you might want to way down to Yeonnam-dong's Little Taiwan. Casual in both the atmosphere and menu, it serves up Taiwanese street food and mango & pineapple beers. Including ji pai (Taiwanese chicken cutlets), noodle soups and rice and meat dishes, most all of the dishes on the menu are priced below 7000 won. The ji pai, especially, is a choice you can't go wrong with: a generous portion of fried chicken fillet, with crispy batter and extremely juicy and tender pieces of chicken. The original kind is 6,000 won, and with an additional 1,000 won-bill, you can get it with a Thai-style fish sauce, which is nice and tangy. If you think some soup and more carbs would go nicely with the crispy goodness, there's shrimp wonton noodle soup. There are 4 pieces of savory, nicely springy shrimp wontons in the soup. Made mostly with rice flour, the noodles are pretty clear and soft, but we wished the soup only came with wontons without the noodles.
Even during early afternoons, there are always a few groups of people here getting the mango and pineapple beers with the savory ji pai as to share. Would we come here for a date? Probably not. But for stepping up our chimaek game with just 10,000 won, we most certainly will.