Soha Salt Pond Ikseon-dong — Restaurant in Seoul

As a content creator, I often 👀 places I wanna visit cause they're "instagrammable"... but I don't always wanna try the food there, cause they serve things I don't like or cause comments are not good. And food is the most important part for me. I will never visit a place just for its look. ☝️ Before we left for Seoul, I saw a couple of reels about Soha Salt Pond (@sohasaltpond). I thought the place was cute 🥰 and I thought I wanted to try their square 🥐. I also thought the rest of the family would 💙 it. TBH, once I reached Seoul, I totally forgot about it but... it's pretty much the first place I saw when we reached Ikseon-dong. 👏 And even though we already had breakfast (twice! 😅), we couldn't resist and we went in. As I said, the place is beautiful... but it's not as comfortable as it looks: as often in Seoul, there's no service at the table, and the venue is rather small which makes moving between the tables difficult. The ✨ there are not the square 🥐s, but the salted breads (and I came to realize in the following hour that they're pretty much the stars of any bakery in the neighborhood! 😅). They're like milk buns with some salt in them and the venue offers all kinds of them (plain, caramel, corn, truffe, etc.). We tried a couple of them and they're so memorable that... I don't even remember the flavors. 😓 Honestly, they're random pastries and I'm not sure they're worth a detour. Now, they're well executed and their texture is perfect. 👍 Same with the 🥐s but there I can't judge the flavor cause we got the macha one and I'm not a big fan of macha. But my wife and son barely finished it and they didn't seem to particularly enjoy it. Each bread costs about KRW 4.5K (€3+), which is not cheap for Korea, at all. And for that price, I would expect way better. Not worth the hype. 👎

Quality & taste: 5/10 Quantities: 8/10 Atmosphere: 8/10 Originality: 9/10 Ratio price / quality: 4/10 Service: n/a How I felt...

Oct23: Enjoyed the cafe so much that I went twice! It’s a small aesthetic cafe.

The food and drinks are amazing! I loved the Sea Salt Cream Latte so much. The latte was wasn’t too sweet. The sea salt cream was so nice and savory. The cup rim for this order is lined with salt, reminds me of cocktails.

The salt bread was so good, especially when fresh. Salt taste is definitely prominent, plus light buttery texture. A must try!

You have to join the queue to order/wait for seats (it’s the same queue). The staff here do watch the queue to ensure nobody tries to skip ahead.

Mar25: I retuned as this was a 6/5 star place for me but the service is now terrible. I’ll think twice about returning now. I ordered the Sea Salt Einspanner, and it came in a paper cup not the glass cups that I remembered from last visit and online pictures?! I asked and they said they don’t have glass cups anymore but I later on realized other subsequent tables were being served the nice glass cups. Turns out they claimed they were still washing when I asked a 2nd time (after seeing all the other tables)

Appreciate if they could tell me upfront when I was ordering. I could have waited if it was just this short while, because really, who comes to a visually aesthetic cafe, orders the “pretty-looking drink” expecting a plain paper cup in a wooden box instead of the nice one seen in many photos… I did show photos when ordering and confirming my drink upon collection. Plus, required to order 1 drink per person to dine in.

I’m super disappointed because it’s a cafe I’ve been thinking of and had good impression for 1.5years since my last trip. I asked twice but the staff just brushed me off twice without any apologies. Changing it to a 1 ⭐️ for sure. 5 star food with 0...

Visited on a weekend afternoon and it was crowded. I was like the 4th in line and took a long time for the customers dining indoors to finish eating and leave. The service staff are not very friendly they just keep asking people to wait and they don't allow you to step into the shop if you are dining in. They only allow those takeaways to come in and pick the pastries and leave. I was quite worried because I saw there was only one of the pastries I wanted to try left and just as I expected, someone walked in and took it and it was gone right before my eyes. I think I waited about 20 minutes and finally there was a table and they allowed me into the shop to select the pastries. Since it was close to dinner time I didn't dare to select too many so I just went with a savoury, a sweet and a drink. I have to say in general the pastries are rather big I find the price quite reasonable and not expensive. Took a while for the drink to be prepared so I was just enjoying the interior decor of the cafe. Pastries were good, drink was average. Seems like they don't really clean the tables it was quite sticky when I got my seat. There wasn't enough staff to do cleaning it was all self service returning of the trays and stuff and they allow other customers in. The decor was very nice, the space in the cafe is quite limited and people were all talking very loud. Food was good but environment was not really that pleasant. I suggest doing takeaways to save time. Am a sweet tooth person but here the savoury pastries won me over. I think should give the savoury ones priority to try, especially the pollock roe or the green...