The Unlawyer

On a recent trip to Seoul, my eldest son remarked that he couldn’t find any McDonald’s hamburger restaurants lining the city’s streets. In reply, our guide said that the Lotteria chain of fast-food restaurants was by far the most popular burger joint in The Land of the Morning Calm, in the same way that Jollibee is king in the Philippines. So I resolved to try it, but alas our schedule was too tight for me to go out and find one immediately.

And so my family and I wound up our trip and found ourselves waiting for our outbound flight at the Seoul Incheon airport. I was resigned at not having tried this restaurant, which was founded not in Korea as I first supposed but in Japan, until my sister came up to me and said that she saw a Lotteria restaurant at the terminal’s food court. I lost no time and rushed to buy what was available. Fortunately, the food court was only a few meters away from our departure gate and I made it back with just minutes to spare before boarding time.

I would have wanted to try what the menu described as a steak burger but no, the Lotteria stall at the airport had just run out of stock, so I had to settle for what I now know as a regular bulgogi burger, which cost me about KRW 3,000 or so. I resolved to eat my sandwich on the plane and as a consequence, by the time I opened the package inside the plane, it had become cold.

So the time came when I tore open the wrapper that encased my bulgogi burger and I took a bite out of it. The patty itself was moist and sweet, no doubt because of the bulgogi sauce it was steeped in. The lettuce and tomato sandwiched inside helped moderate the sweetness somewhat. Overall, Lotteria’s bulgogi burger wasn’t too bad; I suppose it would have tasted better if I had managed to eat it while it was still hot.

I was to learn much later, as I was writing this entry, that a bulgogi burger is a staple item sold in Korea’s fast food restaurants. Even McDonald’s sells it too, and for those of you who want to compare how it stacks up with Lotteria’s, this article from The Korea Times may be able to help you choose between the two.

A Hamburger Today has her own impressions about Lotteria, and we may have bought our bulgogi burger at the same airport stand as I did. She also links to a site called FatManSeoul that compares not one, not two, but four bulgogi burgers: two produced by Lotteria, and one each from McDonald’s and Burger King.