연화바루 — Restaurant in Gyeongju-si

Baru is a vegan restaurant in Gyeongju serving so called ‘temple food’. The food is among the best vegan food I ever had and I do not eat meat, which means that I frequently eat vegetarian food and have a bit of knowledge in that area. Vegan food is always under the suspicion of tasting a bit boring and actually my experience is that this judgement is not always entirely wrong. The food being served here however is anything but boring. For a mere 18.000 Won which is about 14 Euro you get an enormous amount and variety of different foods, I think it must have been 18 plates with different specialties. The ingredients are fresh. The combinations of the different flavours of the ingredients along with the different spices are very impressive and the food tastes really good. When you keep in mind that this is a small, rather cheap restaurant, I dare say it’s almost beyond comprehension. A very good example is the tempura, which they serve among the dishes. Tempura is a good indicator when trying to distinguish ordinary restaurants from very good restaurants, as it is always a challenge to create a tempura where the contents of the dough are cooked but still firm and the dough does not drip with oil. Here, they excel at the task of creating tempura almost as in Japan. My guess would be that in large cities in Germany, where I am from, you would have to pay three times as much here and the restaurant would be classified as ‘haute cuisine’. Only flaw I have to mention was the dessert, which was a water melon but tasted a bit too watery. But this is really a minor note for the sake of completeness.

The interior of the restaurant is traditional, which is very nice. Though be aware that traditional also means that there are no chairs instead you sit on the floor.

The restaurant is a not directly situated in the center of the city but you can easily go there by bus or taxi. Do not let this small inconvenience prevent you from going to Baru, I absolutely recommend...

This was the best vegan temple food I had in Korea. We had tried one in insadong in Seoul that was popular but this in terms of taste and freshness was better. The owner/host/server was also kind and generous and we chatted for a while in Korean. If you are in gyeongju and want to eat authentic freshly prepared temple food, this...

Best experience I had in Korea.

We had the course-menu and it was amazing. So many different flavours, and all of the dishes were not too spicy for our European taste buds.

The two ladies operating the place were super kind, especially after we said a few words in Korean. Highly...