Egg & Flour

Egg yolk at the pasta bench

Egg yolk goes into the dough before service at Egg & Flour in Yongsan, Seoul, where chefs Daehyun Yoon and Heeun Kim, a husband-and-wife team, run the kitchen. The restaurant works from the plainest premise in fresh pasta, egg and flour, then lets the bench push the dough toward the local appetite: galbi in ragù, black pepper caught in the ridges of reginetti, seafood sauces built for capellini and cuttlefish ink. Yoon calls the yolk-enriched dough a luxurious variation, one that keeps the essence of the raw ingredient while reaching a deeper flavour and a golden colour through traditional Italian technique. Their stated brief is accessibility: pasta should never be intimidating. That matters here because the place is not sold as ceremony. It is a pasta room with a working vocabulary: dough enriched with yolk, noodles cut for sauce, gnocchi pan-fried for contrast, a menu narrow enough that each shape has to earn its place.

Ridged reginetti and inked capellini

The technique is direct, but not casual. Egg & Flour opened in 2019 in Haebangchon, and the kitchen’s reputation rests on handmade pasta rather than imported theatre. The cuttlefish ink dough uses ink, egg yolk and flour, a combination that gives the capellini its dark color and spring. That noodle has carried seafood sauces with a deep brine, including versions built around uni butter and Sicilian anchovy butter. The Galbi Ragu and Black Pepper Reginetti asks the pasta shape to do its job: the curled ridges catch the fatty Korean beef sauce, while pepper and chili keep the dish from softening into sweetness. Roasted Potato Gnocchi moves differently. The kitchen shapes it into cylinders, then pan-fries the pieces so the exterior takes on crispness before the center gives way. The menu also makes room for a Homemade Caprese Platter, Truffle and Mushroom Tagliatelle, and Red Shrimp and Squid Ink Capellini, with shrimp-head shell sauces rich enough that guests compare them to biting into a prawn cracker. It is an à la carte program, not a procession, with wine kept close to the pasta rather than placed above it.

The room above Haebangchon

The room sits above the street, with the main dining hall on the second floor and a private space below. Glass and terrace seating pull the eye toward Itaewon, Namsan Mountain and the Haebangchon slope, especially as the light drops and the city begins to reflect back into the windows. Inside, the register stays relaxed: mood lighting, jazz, conversation at a level that lets the pass keep its rhythm. The building does not announce much from outside. The work does. Plates move from the bench to the room with the confidence of a kitchen built around a few decisions repeated cleanly: enrich the dough, choose the shape, let the sauce cling where it should. Egg & Flour holds a Bib Gourmand, first earned in 2020, and the forkful tells the story.