Toronto | Koreatown & Kinton Ramen
By Naomi January 15, 2014 canada, eatons center, friends, kinton ramen, koreatown, shopping, toronto, travel
When my friends and I get together, a stop by Koreatown is almost assumed. The one in Toronto isn't as big as it is in other cities, but there's enough to keep us happy and satisfied for hours on end.
My friend Angie and I made a quick pit stop at a Hotteok place while waiting for our friend Crystal to arrive downtown. We realized halfway through our first bite that her cellphone had actually died, so we rapidly gobbled the rest of the pancake up so we could go find her.
Once we managed to track her down, we headed over to Joon's for their famous dakgalbi.
I met these two girls back in first year and they have been such a blessing to me not only as friends, but as sisters in Christ. I don't get to see them much, so I'm extra thankful for their company, friendship, and the conversations we are able to have with one another.
These girls have a crazy busy schedule though, so after our lunch date we all headed on home since they both had places to be, people to see! On the way to the subway station, I spotted this restaurant with a massive orange sign that said "buk chang dong soon tofu".
Naturally, I whipped out my phone and texted my friend Clara to see if she was up to head downtown with me the next day.
Soontofu? I am so down.
For those of you who may not know, soon tofu is a spicy Korean soup with tofu. It's also my absolute favorite type of Korean food and here they have soontofu with beef, soontofu with veggies, soontofu with seafood! You get the idea.
This place also lets you crack your own egg into the hot boiling soup when it comes (something I liked) and they made their rice in hot stone pots which they scooped out and then filled with water to create burnt rice soup which you can drink afterwards.
Not the most appetizing sounding thing but it was comforting.
I ended up getting soontofu with mandu and beef.
We decided to head on over to Eatons to walk off our lunch, but found ourselves at Chatime instead..
We ended up going from Koreatown --> Eatons --> Koreatown --> Yorkville --> Queen's Street --> Koreatown --> Eatons that day. Don't ask me why, but we definitely made use of our transit pass.
My cousins and my brother had gone to a raptors game that evening and it's tradition for us to meet up at Kinton Ramen afterwards, but once I found out that Clara had never been, I had to drag her over and make her try their ramen.
They had JUST opened their Koreatown branch so the place was still fairly empty since not many people knew about it. I definitely did a double take when I first walked by it unknowingly.
I was going there later with my family so I just grabbed a light tofu furai.
We ended up standing in front of this Christmas tree just talking and reminiscing about our crazy first year days and how far (or not far) we have come since then.
naomi