Reply 1988 | England Wang Donkkaseu, Incheon — The Gyeongyangsik Dinner

The Sung family buys a car, and to mark it they go out for gyeongyangsik — Korea's 1980s idea of Western dining, where a pork cutlet arrives on an oval plate with soup first, classical music plays, and the whole thing is served as an occasion rather than a meal.

That restaurant is England Wang Donkkaseu in Jung-gu, Incheon, and it is still open and still looks like that. The dining room has not been redecorated into nostalgia; it simply never stopped. Soup, salad and a drink come with the cutlet, the portion is enormous — regulars will tell you one king cutlet feeds two, though the house asks one dish per person — and there is public parking nearby.

Closed Mondays. Lunch service runs to half three and evening from half four, and it is busy enough that the fish cutlet routinely sells out in the afternoon.

This is the most useful kind of surviving location, because the thing you came for is not a doorway to photograph. It is a table to sit at, and eating there is the entire point.

The show's argument was that 1988 was not a decade of monuments but of small ceremonies — a new car, a good dinner, everybody dressed slightly up. Order the king cutlet, wait for the soup to come first, and you are not visiting the scene. You are doing the thing the scene was about.

Cover photo: Bupyeong, Incheon, by hyolee2, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. City view, not the restaurant.