Day 5: Star Café Miss Lee

Today I decided to visit the sights in and around Insadong. I would usually decide which of the many itineraries I wanted to go on the night before and somewhat the next morning. I deliberately started with the closer proximity itineraries first so that I could get accustomed to Seoul so that way I would be more familiar with my way around the city and riding the metro when I needed to travel farther away. Insadong is actually located not too far down stream from the start of the Cheonggyecheon so you could hit both places in one visit if you wanted to.

One of the places I planned to visit was a café in Insadong. As I mentioned before, while watching an episode of MBC’s We Got Married, one of the early episodes starring the YongSeo Couple (Jung Yong Hwa of CN Blue and Seohyun of Girls’ Generation) took place in a café where they had a traditional boxed lunch and some tea. While watching the episode, the place looked really cute and I thought it would be neat to visit. I kind of said it in passing though because there’s tons of places that peak my interest while watching TV that I would love to visit someday. Korean broadcasting tends to block things out such as restaurant names or trademarks when they appear on TV so I never figured what the name of the place was.

A couple of months before while preparing for my trip and scouring the internet for resources on Seoul, I found that the city had their own Facebook page and started following it. Shortly after following it, they posted information about the café and that’s when I learned it was called Star Café Miss Lee and that it was located in Insadong. The details of the location weren’t specific enough however so I turned to Google Maps and Daum Maps (like the Korean version of Google Maps) and through Daum’s Road View (like Google Street View), I was able to see the place and pinpoint where it was. I just basically had to get off at Anguk Station on Line 3, leave by Exit 6 and then find the GS25 convenience store. If you are interested in checking it out, I plotted the directions on Google Maps.

View Star Cafe Miss Lee in a larger map
I left my aunt’s place later than usual that morning with the intentions of getting to café for lunch. Just like I had seen on the internet, I went looking for the GS25 convenience store first and then found the café located right above it. If you are planning to visit the main road in Insadong, the café is located right at the start of it on the North end.

The café had super-cute signage and a little cute Miss Lee statue sitting out front.

As I walked up the stairs, there’s was a collection of print articles about the café and when I entered it, it very much resembled what I had seen on TV. I got to the café around 11:30AM and there weren’t too many people while I was there. The tables and chairs were on the smaller size but it wasn’t uncomfortable or anything at all.

Adorned all over the restaurant were little small sheets of paper, left by patrons with personal messages written on them. Most of the messages were written to someone, kind of like the Locks of Love at Namsan Tower, that expressed gratitude, thanks, friendship and love.

The menus continued the whole cute theme and had that personal touch as if they were hand-made.

I wanted to go to this place not only because it was featured on We Got Married but because of my desire to try a traditional boxed lunch called 도시락 (dosirak, or sometimes call bento box which is the Japanese way). Like how kids today use lunch boxes to bring their lunches to school, the dosirak is what kids in Korean used to take their lunches to school when my mom was a child. She had told me all these stories around the famed lunch box. These lunch containers were made of a thin metal with a removable lid but there was no seal. As they had no seals, when kids use to take their lunch boxes and books to school, it was common to find their school books and bags all stained by kimchi fluid. During the winter when it was cold and classrooms had wood furnaces, all the kids would stack their boxes on top of each other on top of the furnace to keep their lunches warm. As the bottom lunch box closest to the furnace would be the hottest, the kids would rotate the boxes with the very bottom one then going to the top so that all the lunches would be warm. Since the kids were essentially heating their meals, the classrooms would end up smelling like 김치찌개 (kimchi stew) by lunch time. Another thing my mom told me was what kids would bring for lunch and how it was like a status symbol. The wealthy kids would bring things like white rice, egg, and meat (it doesn’t sound like much but those items were considered luxuries at the time) and eat out of their lunch boxes with the tops off. The poorer kids would have brown rice and no meat or egg and because they were embarrassed, they would eat with their lids closed, shielding the contents of their poorer lunches.

I ordered the traditional dosirak and a lemon tea. The lunch came with 된장찌개 (bean paste soup) and some traditional Korean fried snacks. The bean paste soup is like the Korean version of Japanese miso soup except it isn’t. I love miso soup but bean paste soup not so much… Here is the dosirak lunch!

The dosirak contained rice, kimchi, egg, kelp and sausage. I felt like one of the rich kids on the block and opened my lid for all to see. ^^ I closed the lid back up and gave it a shake.

I think I’m the worst doshirak shaker in history because the before and after picture of the shake kind of looks the same. After I shook and opened it up, everything was pretty much where it was in the beginning, just a little messier now. As there was no seal, I couldn’t really give it the kind of shake I wanted to or risk the kimchi fluids potentially leaking out from the sides and flying all over the place. I gave it several more conservative shakes and dug in.

For a meal that’s intentionally suppose to be kind of plain, it wasn’t bad. It was also really filling and I only ended up eating about half my box. The lemon tea wasn’t as sweet as I was expecting but that was OK. I sat right next to the window of the restaurant facing the street so while I was eating I watched all the people head down the famed main road of Insadong. After I was done eating, I took my receipt to the cashier and paid. Overall, I was quite pleased with the experience and was happy that I could at least in spirit replicate what it was like for kids during my mom’s generation to have lunch from a dosirak lunch box. If I were to revisit Seoul, I wouldn’t hesitate to try this café again.
Here is a collection of clips I took while I was at Star Café Miss Lee. Enjoy.^^