Seoul 88 — Restaurant in Helsinki sub-region

Had a light dinner here, my 3rd time at this particular location. The previous times my friends picked this place, I don't know why, Helsinki is full of better places. I've always thought Seoul88 Kamppi food is kind of bland to be Korean, but I happened to be inside the Kamppi mall, and decided against my better judgement to eat here. Service is always luke warm at best, but the view is nice and the restaurant is located conveniently at a rather peaceful spot. Again, I had the issue of mediocre meals, both dishes had some chopped kale which looked and tasted like kale, the chicken tasted like chicken with a little salt, and the fish was fish-tasting (there's absolutely nothing else to add about the taste, honestly), but this time one of the dishes also tasted off... A little foul. A little expired even. Since the color and smell was OK, I thought it might've just been in my head. But, the follwing evening and the next day I had a stomach ache, and couldn't really eat anything. As some background trivia, I never suffer stomach aches and have generally an iron stomach, so this is highly unusual. I could not pinpoint this restaurant as the sole reason for my aches except I didn't have anything unusual the whole day, aside from this one meal. So I'm sorry, but it has to be it. I'm still not convinced the food WAS spoiled, but I've given this place free passes three times now, and won't be returning, not solo or...

I ordered the kimchi chige and I found it extremely salty. I couldn’t finish it because of the saltiness but I guess overall the flavor was okay. This dish was not really the biggest problem tho. We also ordered a dessert that we expected to be homemade korean rice cakes in chocolate sauce and peanuts. What came to our table made us really confused. Being chinese myself I don’t have a difficult time recognizing chinese glutinous rice balls and that is exactly what we got, or more exactly we got rice balls covered in sprinkles? And no chocolate sauce or peanuts. But with cucumber and tomatoes as garnish? We asked if it should be chocolate sauce and he said they removed it because they thought it was too sweet. We later got the sauce anyways but I still feel like it was a scam. 6.9€ for some rice balls that they claim were HOMEMADE korean rice cake that they put a lot of effort on, when we asked about their orgin. But we went to the chinese shop 2 min from there and found 10 glutinous rice balls for 2.9€. I have eaten chinese rice balls my entire life, I know them. Plus the owner was chinese so I highly suspect he just bought frozen riceballs from the store.

Overall the food was fine but honestly the dessert was really a flop, so much that the food wasn’t as nice anymore. You can’t even say the dessert was adapted to Finnish taste cause it is really as far from korean cuisine...

The first time I went during lunch hours, I got a meal with a reasonable price and polite service, and the environment was peaceful.

The second time I arrived during a dinner time, the atmosphere was more rushed and not so polite. I ordered a tofu, kimchi & rice cake-stew, for all these reasons. The meal tasted pretty average, not really Korean, but I was super hungry so I continued to eat it as I thought preparing a new meal would take way too long. If anyone would have asked me during the meal if I was enjoying it, I would have asked where are the rice cakes that were meant to be in the stew. No one came to check on me during the meal, while other tables got chatted with.

As I was paying, I got 1 euro and some cents off for the missing rice cakes, which was nice, but honestly, it felt like a minuscule gesture at that point. I ended up paying 22,31 € with the drink, and leaving not satisfied. No apologies were made, seemed like this kind of mistake has happened before too, based on the reaction of the workers.

Unfortunately, I won’t be returning anytime soon. If you must, I would suggest to visit here during lunch hours to save your heard-earned money, and not to focus on the menu items, that might not be as described on the...