FatManSeoul

Tired of all those adorably cute, design-y little cafe’s with charming little bites of food?
Nah, we didn’t think so!
Slow Garden is a massive take on the tiny corner cafe, and boasts an almost equally massive menu. Fight your way through the moldering carnage as college couples elbow their way into the best chairs to use their DSL to take shots (on auto mode) of all their edibles. Tea, coffee, and boozables share space with bistro favorites and an on-site cafe. Sandwiches and pastas will suit for a meal, the dessert case will fill up any remaining space in your stomach after, or you can combine the two in one of their brunch specials.

The sandwiches are pretty heafty fellows, and Slow Garden deserves some respect for pulling out high quality ingredients. Sweet-salty Jamon ham imported from Spain lends a luxuriuos touch to their ham sandwich, as does the creaminess of fresh herb cream cheese. The sandwiches might come with just a tad too much condiment, particularly of the cheesy, creamy variety, and the bread could use a little more heft (or five more minutes in the oven) but there’s no argument that the end result is still a good meal, and substantively more high-end than what you’ll get most places.

The sides, however, are uniformly wonderful. Superlative! Citrusy, bright olives sit alongside marvelously crisp rosemary potatoes, and a sweet and vinegary Japanese-style cucumber pickle rounds out the flavors. Fatman hopes SG will learn to capitalize on their strenghts and offer these alone as part of a sampler platter, or, better yet, allow customers to buy the olives and pickles to take home and enjoy at leisure. The ham and other sandwich stuffings are available, at some truly exhorbitant prices per 100 grams, but hey, where else are you going to find imported Jamon?

Pastas are a safe, reasonable way to go for a meal. Not extraordinary, but still competant. It’s actually a fine measure of how far Italian food (and foreign food in general) has come that we can feel dissapointed in this. The flavors are all fine, but the sauce could have used a bit more balance and definitely a little more meaty UMPH! to round it all out. Then again, ten years ago we were all eating spaghetti with ketchup on it, so who are we to complain? An olive oil and olives pasta the week before was a bit better and brighter, but the kitchen’s hand was a little to liberal with the pepper flakes. Better than the pasta were the bread rolls ~ tender, and with a decided whole-wheat quality and a few herbs and seeds made chewing fun.

Now, most people make the treck to Slow Garden for one of their brunch sets, primarily belgian waffles and french toast. We’ll be back to cover them both soon, but we can say that they’re both very good. Waffles in particular had an airy, flufy quality that helps them stand out against the many inferior cake and cookie-esque excuses that seem to have flooded the market. Unfortunately, they suffer here from the same temptation to overload them with ice cream and fruit and just about any other topping imaginable, resulting in a mess of flavors and soggy crumbs. Go for the most basic version.
Better even than the breakfast/brunch bunch though are their cupcakes. Cupcakes have been a bit of a fad over the past two years, almost but never quite taking off. There’s a reason for this: Most of the cupcakes in Seoul are awful. Essentially, they are muffins topped with whipped sugar. Dreck ~ pure, awful, sugared dreck. Your five year old cousin who devours pop rocks and 별사탕 would refuse them outright.

Slow Garden’s cupcakes aren’t perfect. They’re still more muffin than mini-cake, a little too dense and dry. But the frosting, oh! At last! Real, honest-to-God buttercream. This rich frosting makes all the difference. Fatman officially pronounces Slow Garden the best cupcakes in Seoul.

Expect brunch or lunch or any other meal to set you back a pretty penny. Hot drinks clock in around 6,000 won per, and booze will be even more. The cheapest pastas and brunches start around 10,000 won and go way, way, up from there. You’ll easily drop 20,000 per person, once you’ve had something to fill your belly and wet your whistle. Still, grap a cupcake for 4,500 won and call it good.

The original Slow Garden is at the top of Samcheongdong Street, on the left hand side right before the park. A second location is now open on the main road of Seongbuk-dong (Hanseong University Station, line 4) on the left hand side, a few hundred meters before Song’s Kitchen.