I was just sitting down to write a review of District III Korean restaurant Arirang (follow link for contact details and user feedback) when something occurred to me: I don't know anything about Korean food. Okay, sure, I've eaten a fair bit of Korean over the years, including some during a very brief stopover in Seoul. I even have a cheap 'n cheerful Korean restaurant within 100 meters of my front door, and patronize it quite a bit, since just I love the stuff to death. But this is exactly the problem: my attitude towards Korean food is like that great old joke about pizza and sex - even when it's bad it's still pretty good.

Moreover, unlike my local, which has a relatively limited selection of Korean favorites, Arirang seems to have literally hundreds of menu items. And it is when you are faced with page upon page of no-doubt renowned national dishes you've never even heard of that you realize your opinion isn't worth a bowl of fern bracken with beef and soybean sauce, which, by the way, is what's pictured fourth from top. So I'll just cut the bracken, show you some more hot Korean food porn pics, and add a few humble observations at the end.

So where were we? Oh, right: fern bracken with beef and soybean sauce. This was a highlight, because it was delicious, and because when we asked our (Hungarian) waiter if it was delicious, he scrunched his face into a ball, and said, oh, no - it's terrible. It cost Ft 4,000, which seemed like a lot until I realized I had no idea what a fair price for fern bracken is, because until then I had no idea what fern bracken was.

Other than this, we actually ended up ordering a rather conservative section of items à la carte, having first spent a fair bit of time trying to settle on one of the several set menus offered. Among them were spicy tofu stew with rice (Ft 2,600), veggie bibimbab (Ft 2,000) as well as several rounds of different sorts of bulgogi (marinated meat), which, oddly, they had us cook on a portable griddle put on top of our table, rather than the built-in Korean grills it was outfitted with.

Naturally, there were some tasty banchan (side dishes), including the icky whole mini-fish pictured above. Like many Korean restaurants I've been to, there was a private room that people kept slinking in and out of, though this was the only one I've seen with a big patriotic 19th-Century Hungarian group portrait above the door.

Also, there is a pleasant little courtyard, or at least a little courtyard that should be pleasant if it's not raining cats and dogs, which, by the way, they don't seem to serve here.

A couple more slightly oddball elements. One, there are notices posted on the wall, and in the menu, attesting to the powers that certain Korean foods have in fighting SARS and bird flu. I can't confirm that this is true, but I will say that I've been blissfully free of SARS and all types of flu since my visit.

Finally, the place still has lots of design elements left over from its time as the former Rózsahegyi Kávéház, including a big pastry window where you can buy Marlenka cakes, the traditional Armenian honey dessert made in the Czech Republic, which they also serve after your meal. Though I perhaps shouldn't say this is oddball, because I am hardly an expert on how Armenian desserts made in the Czech Republic should taste when served by Koreans in Hungary.