Keeping with the Mexican series, we focus on something a little off of Seoul’s culinary radar. WAY off down to Masan, where you can find a small mexican restaurant simply called ‘Mexico‘, nestled in Masan’s popular nightlife area of Chang-dong (expect a wiki article on that local scene sometime soon).
‘Mexico’ doesn’t just sling out the token Mexican fare, but is much more authentic, offering real Mexican dishes like allambre, queso fundido, and salpicon. This place is the real deal, so much as that it should give Masan some pause for consideration from prospective teachers who have local job offers that would otherwise go unnoticed amongst offers from the bigger cities.
From MCJfood, a great Daum Cafe site that profiles restaurants in the Masan, Changwon, and Jinhae corridor.
While I’m spending most of my available wiki time on Sinchon, these days, I might as well start the Mexican series off with the famed Choi’s Tacos, in the local area.
Choi’s Tacos (초이스 타코) first appeared on the scene in the spring of 2005 and word-of-mouth has sprung like wildfire, ever since. Not just among expats, but moreso among Koreans. In fact, at any given moment, if you were to walk past Choi’s, you’d see that all seats in his small little place are almost always full of Koreans. That’s obviously the difference here. If you open up anything that plays well to foreign tastes, you better pray to god that Koreans will embrace it, otherwise you are dead in the water. In this case, Choi’s opened up in a vital location where pretty much anything would sell to at least somebody. Even Snot-Covered-Ass-On-A-Stick might even get people walking up to that location. Sinchon street locations seem to sometimes make the damndest of successes, like Mr.Wow and its huge line-ups, for instance. But the great location should not discount what great food is there. He’s likely paying a fair price for that spot and in an area notorious for high turnover and he has been there for 3 years. And that kind of recipe for long-term success can only come in the form of great food and the word-of-mouth that stems from it.
Choi’s Tacos circa 2006. From Yahoo 거기 profile.
Present day:
As an aside, I must say that I absolutely love Choi’s logo and branding. Props for understanding the importance of investing in that, particularly the patience to evolve over time.
Although we’ve documented all known Mexican places in Korea, on the wiki, the wiki has some restrictions due to the rules we’ve placed on it to try and offer a neutral POV. So I’ve decided to make a Best of Korea series and kick it off with Mexican food. There are a number of places that haven’t been to, nor have sampled a large cross-section of their menus, so its not going to be ironclad testimonies, moreso than profiling the experiences others have had and offering links and images. When I come back to Korea again, it’d be nice to take a week and do a cross-country tour of these places, maybe with supplementary video, and we can offer critiques and ratings based on best marg, best nachos, best burrito, best ambience, etc…But for now, I’ll put all of these in blog review format, to supplement their wiki profiles.
