Extraordinary Attorney Woo | Kajaguruma, Suwon — The Gimbap Shop That Kept Its Sign

Woo Young-woo eats gimbap because you can see everything in it. Rice, spinach, carrot, egg, all of it visible in cross-section, nothing hidden inside. Her father runs a gimbap shop and that is not a small detail — it is a father who spent his daughter's whole childhood building her a food with no surprises in it.

The shop is real, in a manner of speaking. It is Kajaguruma, a small Japanese restaurant on a side street in Haenggung-dong, Suwon, and after the drama aired the owners left the "Woo Young-woo Gimbap" sign hanging where the production put it. It is still there. They do not actually serve gimbap.

What they serve is donburi. Salmon, pork steak, omurice, karaage, croquettes. The room seats very few people and there is almost always a wait, which is worth knowing before you build an afternoon around it. Go at an off hour and order something — the queue outside is made of fans, and the business is a working restaurant carrying an accidental landmark.

Haenggung-dong is the reason to make the trip regardless. The neighbourhood sits under Hwaseong Fortress and it is the single densest filming district in Gyeonggi-do: Lovely Runner, Our Beloved Summer, Twenty-Five Twenty-One and Semantic Error all shot within a few streets of here.

Stand across from the sign and look at how ordinary the doorway is. That is the whole trick of the show — an unremarkable shopfront in an unremarkable lane, holding up a story about a person the world kept telling was remarkable in the wrong way.

Cover photo: Hwaseong Haenggung, the neighbourhood landmark — by Adil, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Area view, not the restaurant.