Friends of ours only shop here. The wife’s mother moved from Korea to the Chicago suburbs two years ago when their baby was born.
This move brought a new friend into our life, she’s the sweetest and smallest woman we’ve ever met. This new friend can take over and transform a kitchen in no time at all. So when she tells us about Joong Boo Market and the food area, it was an easy decision to go!
Joong Boo Market, has locations in Glenview + Chicago, it’s not only a beautiful market, but it is also a great place to eat!

Outdoor dining isn’t so bad when the food is this good!

With indoor dining closed and the midwest’s miserable cold, we ate in the car, only ergonomics was lost! The lovely broth of udon hot pot was so warm and comforting that we forgot about the cold outside or the fact that it’s pitch black outside at 5PM. Food does that. It’s an oasis to the hardships of life. 

Mondoo, Hot Pots and Andong Braised Chicken

We ordered two dishes and two starters that provided us with dinner and lunch for the next day! For starters, we are addicted to dumplings. So of the two restaurants in the snack corner, we had to get mandoo. We had a giddy smiles under our masks as we watched the pork + kimchi dumplings steam.

The first thing we did in the car was eat those like we hadn’t eaten in weeks. We did pause to savor each bite, but we ate with glorious intention!
Next up! Andong braised chicken! The phrase fall of the bone gets used a lot, but this was it! Lushly soaking in this beautiful sauce with the tastiest vegetables, it reminded Marc of the Finnish stews that he ate as a kid. The kind that had been slow-cooked all day that melted in your mouth with so much flavor. 

In the states, they have sides of fries. Here, we got sides of kimchi. That made us so happy! There was a lovely little fish thrown in there too! It’s things like that make us so happy! Simple, small things, like how much we love dishes like noodles + broth. Broth that is so loaded, so good, (ask our friends at NaKorn, we could go on and on about sauces and broths). When eating Asian food the broth and sauces blow us away, they are by far our favorite part!

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