I don’t know about you, but sometimes in Korea, I forget to look up. Case-in-point: MONGLIT (pronounced Mong-Lee) on the fourth floor, next to the Daehan CGV in Seomyeon, near Judie’s Taehwa. I blame the cold winter weather that we’ve had till recently. In the colder months, we would emerge from the metro, heads down, to plow ahead to go to our pre-decided spots. Now that the weather has gotten nice, I can afford to expose my neck and face. Now it’s like Christmas morning; so many treasures (bars) above the second floor!

Monglit is pretty amazing. It’s one of those places that makes you feel like you’ve left Korea and landed in… well, I don’t know. Somewhere AMAZING. Cozy grottoes with pillow-seating on the floor line the outside walls, made all the more intimate with string curtains blocking the entrance. There’s a nice looking bar in the middle of the place too, if you prefer to sit on stools. The music playing is appropriate for the atmosphere. Jazzy piano and Brazilian music played during the hour-and-a-half that we were there. Amazingly, not one K-pop hit crept into the playlist.

Doing a quick count, they have over 50 wines on the list, including a good list of French, Spanish, Chilean, Californian and South African wines. They also have the little diagrams in the menu showing where the wine stands on the dry/sweet spectrum, which, knowing nothing about wine, I greatly appreciated. We ordered the cheapest bottle on the menu, which was a French red sweet wine that was 35,000, and was quite delicious. There were tons of other wines on the list that went well over the 100k mark.

There is also ‘regular’ bar stuff on the menu. Cocktails are around 7k, and bottled beer starts at 4k. There is a food section (anju) of the menu too. It’s all in hangeul, so if you can’t read it, you might be out of luck. They didn’t force us to get any food, which was nice. Just in case, though, we were prepared to order a “potato basket” for 10,000 won.

The service exceeded my expectations too. The waiter was a frickin surgeon with the corkscrew, which I’ve found is a rarity in Korea. He had the bottle open in about 7 seconds. The owner was a sweet lady as well. She must be familiar with Busan Awesome, since she took one look at me and brought out a tortilla pizza as service (ahar-har). Seriously, though: nice people; good service; great atmosphere.

Directions: Seomyeon metro exit 2. Go down three blocks and turn left at the Paris Baguette and Judie’s Taehwa. Monglit is one building past the CGV theater on your right. Fourth floor. They open at 6pm, and I’m not sure when they close.

tortilla pizza! WoOO!

The bar

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