남매네왕갈치: Cutlassfish restaurant in Seogwipo Olle Market
This restaurant review is on a fish restaurant we visited during our trip to Jeju Island/South Korea in October 2023.
I wish I could tell you how to pronounce 남매네왕갈치 or what it means in English but I don’t know 🥲. I struggled to even find this restaurant on Google maps (I had to use Naver maps) for this review, so just copy and paste the characters into Naver Maps if you are interested in checking it out.
We stumbled upon this restaurant (남매네왕갈치) on our first morning in Jeju Island. We were staying in the southern part of Jeju Island called Seogwipo and they have a popular marketplace called Seogwipo Maeil Olle Market.
We went to the Seogwipo Maeil Olle Market at around 10am hoping to have our first meal of the day (I like to eat breakfast). Unfortunately, many of the stalls inside the marketplace were not open yet but I was hangry so we looked around for a place we could eat.
While walking around, we saw these banners that promoted a fish combo meal featuring cutlass fish, a dish our Korean friend recommended we try during our time in Jeju. So, we decided to try it!
Recommended: Read more about my Korea trip in my travel recap post to see my 3-day itinerary for Jeju Island.
The vibe
We followed the banners downstairs and found the restaurant in the basement floor. Because it is in the basement, there was no natural light coming in so it’s hard to tell what time it is down there and the lighting is kind of dingy.
The restaurant was empty except for 1 large table (they were eating a large grilled fish) but they were about to wrap up and leave. The space itself is quite big and there are a lot of large tables. The table we sat at seemed huge for just 2 people.
Food review
We order the special combo we saw advertised outside. The combo includes a grilled cutlass fish, grilled mackerel, sea urchin soup, rice and side dishes for $15 per person.
Prices have been converted from 1000:1 KRW to CAD and rounded to the nearest dollar.
Grilled cutlass fish + Grilled mackerel
I was quite happy to see the main dish arrive as it smelled really good 😋.
The mackerel is grilled and placed underneath 2 pieces of grilled cutlass fish. Both fishes had this shiny skin on and there was quite a bit of meat. The fish meat was juicy and had that yummy fish oil taste oozing out of it – a high protein breakfast that tasted great with rice.
I did find the cutlass fish more challenging to eat as there are a lot of tiny bones in it (my gums were hurting after). I am not the most skilled at using chopsticks but I have eaten lots of fish with chopsticks before and didn’t find as many small thin bones as this one. The mackerel was sliced in half to make it a bit easier to avoid the fish bones.
Sea urchin soup
In the banner outside there is a photo of the sea urchin soup and you can actually see little orange blobs of uni in the soup. However, when the soup arrived at our table, there was no evidence of uni in the soup (nothing orange or yellow).
I wondered if maybe it was all mixed in/boiled and disappeared into the broth, but really it just tasted like a regular seaweed soup to me except that they also mixed in a lot of conches.
I think as a general assumption, we probably got scammed on the uni soup part. I am assuming there is no uni in here.
The sides were plentiful, as with many Korean restaurants. I liked their sticky anchovy side dish the most.
Final thoughts
Loewe’s rating: ⭐️⭐️
I think I can give this place anywhere from 2-3 stars. I removed 1 star mostly because I didn’t like how the soup didn’t look like the photo advertised so it felt a bit scammy, but the fish was delicious.
I think if we took some time to look around and actually leave the market and check out nearby restaurants, we could have found better cutlass fish restaurants nearby.
We also weren’t sure at the time if the price for the combo was $15 for 2 people or $15 per person. When the bill came around, we saw it was $15 per person, which is not an expensive meal for us since we are used to Vancouver pricing, but I’m sure you can find cheaper and just as good options around if you are not inside the market.
Sincerely, Loewe