ALONG A HARD-TO-GET-TO PART OF MERALCO AVENUE, JUST BESIDE THE FLYOVER IS AN UNASSUMING KOREAN RESTAURANT CALLED YE DANG. It’s easy to miss, as this part of Meralco Avenue is a bit rough if you’re a pedestrian, and is a bit of a tight squeeze if you’re arriving by car. And yet the restaurant is always full. They say that the authenticity of a restaurant is measured by the number of nationals dining there. If this is the case, then Ye Dang is as authentic as it gets.
Kim Hyun Joo, or Mrs. Parkm opened Ye Dang almost five years ago after closing a successful Makati-based Korean restaurant that she owned and operated for 13 years.
“I learned how to run a restaurant from my mother,” she says. “She ran a very famous restaurant in Korea a long time ago. She’s retired now.”
Ye Dang means “Korean Culture House.” The restaurant serves traditional Korean fare, from rice bowls to soups to barbecues.
“My family didn’t like this location (at first),” Mrs. Park explains. “They said it was bad feng shui. Before me, there was a pizza house and another Korean restaurant here, both of them operating without success.”
Despite protests from friends and family, nothing could sway Mrs. Park from putting up a restaurant in what looked like a bad location. What swayed her, she said, was its mailing address. “This is number 88,” she says. “I like that.”
Unlike its predecessors, Ye Dang has never had a problem acquiring customers. When the regulars of her old restaurant—most of them Korean nationals—heard that Mrs. Park was opening a restaurant in Ortigas, they practically lined up outside, even before it opened. Ye Dang has always been full since.
To dine at Ye Dang is to engage in an immersion of sorts with Korean culture. The inside of the restaurant is decorated with traditional Korean accents such as heavy wooden furniture and classic Korean paintings. Most of the tables have hot plates for cooking Korean barbecue and exhaust pipes to catch the smoke. The restaurant has a policy of allowing only two or more orders of barbecue to be cooked at the table. Customers who order only one plate of barbecue will have their meat cooked in the kitchen.
