Peninsula Italian restaurant
Lotte Hotel, 1 Songong-dong | Jung-gu, Seoul 100-070
South Korea

Overview

We ate a second time in the Peninsula restaurant at Lotte Hotel. This was mostly because by this time, we’d eaten quite a lot of Korean food and – even though it was good – we were just ready for a change and needed something nearby. It’s hard to get closer than a restaurant within the hotel you’re staying in, so we decided to choose amongst the options offered in-house.  The Lotte hotel has Korean, Japanese & Italian restaurants, a French buffet (which didn’t look very French to me – unless dim sum has been reinvented as French cuisine) and a British pub.  We decided on the Italian restaurant for a second time, as our first experience there had been decent.

Creamy pumkin soup

The meal started again with their excellent bread, with olive oil and balsamic for dipping.  This time, instead of pizza, I opted for a soup (creamy pumpkin) which was recommended to me by my companion who’d taken it last time, followed by an Australian sirloin steak. We chose a bottle of New Zealand Cloudy Bay Pinot Noir, 2007 to accompany the meal.  This was mainly out of curiosity – Cloudy Bay is well known for its sauvignon blanc and several other white wines, as is the Marlborough region of New Zealand in general. Increasingly though, pinot is being produced in Marlborough, so we decided to try it.

Australian sirloin steak

My pumpkin soup was fantastic – really very creamy and with an excellent sweet (but not too sweet!) pumkin flavour. It made me wish I’d tried it the previous time we ate here. The second course was an Australian sirloin steak, which was fantastic – perfectly cooked, slightly charred on the outside to give it lots of flavour, nice and pink on the inside retaining all its moisture and tenderness. Really an excellent piece of meat. I like the Korean habit of writing on the menu the origin of the main parts of every dish, as it helps the diner to make informed choices about what you’re about to order.

Cost and conlusion:  the bill was 295,000 Korean won (about £145) for three starters, two main courses and the bottle of Pinot Noir. Not cheap, but considering the good quality of the meat, the wine and the excellent preparation of every dish, I consider that to be good value for money. If I’m ever back in this hotel, I would certainly eat this meal again.