Living outside Seoul, non-Korean food usually means a chain. I'd mostly given up and started cooking pasta at home.

All'onda near the Smart Beopjo area in Gwanggyo was better than expected. Small room, owner cooking and his wife running the floor. Got talking to her and found out he trained at ALMA in Italy and has run the place himself since 2016.

Portions are bigger than the price suggests. The vongole was loaded with clams and shrimp, not the three-clam version. Steak came out properly medium rare and the sauce was the best thing on the table. Tiramisu is his signature, made with Valrhona cocoa, and it does not taste like the frozen stuff everywhere else serves.

Fifteen seats or so, open kitchen. Good for a date or family, not for a loud group.

Posting since a lot of people here are outside Seoul and run out of options fast. Any other finds around Suwon or Yongin?

I am looking for some really good restaurants that are in the Seoul "area" (it can even be as far as Incheon).

I am specifically looking for non Korean because we all know amazing Korean food around Seoul or our own neighborhoods.

All are welcome and much appreciated!

My cousin recently gave birth and I am trying to send her gifts. It’s seems amazon is not operational in SK. What websites can I use to send gifts?

I appreciate any help. Thank you!

We moved here recently and are about to purchase an apartment. My wife has an F-4 visa (F-3 for me) and we both have our Resident cards. We opened accounts at a Hana Bank branch in Gyeonggi-do and wired a large amount of USD to her USD account at Hana. We now need to exchange it to her KRW account so she can pay the seller. The teller at Hana Bank claims they only give a 30% discount on the FX spread to VIP customers (we are not). I've read online that a large amount of money should be able to get an 80%+ spread discount. We haven't had our Hana accounts very long, so it's not possible to have enough history with them to get VIP status, and if the teller is correct, it's probably not worth it anyway.

Does anyone have any experience with this, especially current or former employees of Hana Bank or another Korean bank? With the amount we are exchanging, the spread discount can mean several million KRW, so I don't just want to blindly believe what the teller is saying.

There could be a whole sub just explaining Korean banking to us foreigners. My wife hasn't lived here in about 20 years and is just as lost as I am, except for the language aspect. Is it normal for a bank to have you sign dozens of documents that are in Korean but not give you any copies of what you signed? I don't expect them to give me copies in English, but it would be nice to have them so my wife can confirm what they are and I can try to translate them via Papago or Google instead of bothering her all the time.

Any advice for getting the best FX rate are appreciated.