October 30th marked the 20th birthday of my girl Lisa! Smartest girl I know and one of my best friends ever :) Since she simply loves Korean food, we went to Ga Ya today for lunch, and we both ordered Bibim Bab - hence the title, Birthday Bibim Bab!

Stone Bowl (Dol sot) Bibim Bab

I got the stone bowl bibim bab, hoping to get the crunchy grains of rice stuck to the bottom of my bowl. To my dismay, my bowl probably wasn't heated enough because my rice did not become crunchy *sad* Lisa's did though! That's all that matters cause it was her day!


Lisa's present!

This is what I got her for her birthday present! A box full of little magnets that she can use on her fridge to build sentences about one of her favourite things, cats!

Happy Birthday Lisa!! LOVE YOU LONG TIME xoxox

Seems like Vince & I are starting up a trend.. we have to go out and eat every Friday after school for dinner before we head to work for the night! But that's a good thing for us.. we get to check out different restaurants & I get to post up more reviews! Hah :)

But first off, lets start with lunch before talking about dinner. Today Lisa and I decided to hit up Hub Mall here on campus and try out different foods that we have yet to try. You would think that in the two years I've been here already, I would have tried out most of the food there is to offer.. but that's a negative. There's a handful of places I have yet to try!

Today we headed over to La Pasta Trattoria, an Italian establishment inside the building. There are two levels to this little restaurant, in which the top floor serves beverages, sandwiches and panini's, while the bottom floor is responsible for making fresh pasta, salads, and delicious sauces to serve the pasta with.

In the downstairs portion, the walls are very white, making you feel like you almost aren't inside of a restaurant. Honestly, it gives me a bit of a eerie feeling. Like you're in a prison cafeteria or something, hahaa. I don't really know why I feel this way, but the guys that work down there are very friendly which offsets the feelings I get. The menu is written on a white board hanging on the wall, so maybe they change it up once in a while.

Downstairs sitting in the heated pans are about 4 different pasta choices, with 3 different sauce options on the side. You can choose whichever pasta you would like and pair it with any of the available sauces and see if your creation is good or not. Likely it will be, cause who can really mess up pasta and sauce?

Does this look appetizing to you? :)

I tried their baked pasta with alfredo sauce, served with a side of caesar salad. The total came out to $7 I believe? I also had a coupon for a free drink, so this place is very affordable as the portions are big and will definitely fill you up. My only complaints really would be the consistency of the salad dressing. The dressing was like water, so liquidy that it wouldn't stick to anything! It basically just pooled underneath my vegetables, and got mixed into my pasta which decided to absorb it all up! Not too happy, but the baked pasta was much better. The pasta is quite soft - likely because it is freshly made and baked, making the cooking time much longer than what you would cook pasta for to make it al dente. The pasta was cooked with tomato sauce and cheese, and what I believe was little bits of beef here and there. The beef was hardly noticeable, and in it's ground form so it was hard to tell whether or not it was meat. The server gave me a heaping spoonful of alfredo sauce, which was perfect to cover up my pasta and make it a good lunch in the end. I will be back in the future just to try out their other pastas - I want to see what the non-baked pasta is like!

Now that lunch is out of the way, let's talk dinner. So once again Vince & I found ourselves wondering what exactly we should get for dinner, and we settled on our closeby Ga Ya restaurant. It's good & nearby, so why not?

Being a fan of soup noodles, I ordered the Jjam Pong to warm up my tummy & Vince picked the kim bap on my recommendation.


Jjam Pong at Ga Ya :)

The Jjam Pong was good as usual, loaded with seafood and vegetables! I always order this soup mild, and go from there to adjust the soup to my liking. I do prefer the Jjam Pong at Lee House to the one here at Ga Ya, because the noodles here do not have the elasticity of the noodles used at Lee House. The ones here are softer, but the difference obviously isn't enough for me to stop ordering this dish!


Korean Sushi!

When the kim bap arrived, it was so cute and neatly arranged. Kim bap is basically the korean version of sushi, in which the rice encases bulgogi beef, egg, carrots, cucumbers, and picked radish. It can be eaten alone or served with different banchan dishes, but I find that by itself, it's already sufficiently flavoured. This dish is very affordable and filling - the one pictured above is $6 I believe. Go check it out, I love it!

La Pasta Trattoria
9008 112 St.
Edmonton AB

Ga Ya Korean Restaurant
11147 87 Avenue NW
Edmonton AB

Lisa and I have lunch breaks together every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. The Asian in her LOVES to eat, but she has a preference for Korean food! I love eating with this girl cause she's just like me!

She's been craving Korean lately, actually, she craves it frequently, haha. To make her happy, we headed over to one of the Korean restaurants nearby Campus, called GaYa. I'm quite familiar with this place since I've been here a couple times, whether for lunch or dinner with friends, and it's always nice to visit because it's a cute, cozy family run restaurant.

In the past they had a small selection of items to choose from, maybe 10 different dishes. But in the recent months they have added various traditional dishes to the menu, and it's nice to see that they're trying to expand the amount of variety and change things up for their loyal customers.

bibim bab!

Lisa ordered the bibim bab for lunch, which is a rice bowl topped with cucumbers, carrots, shiitake mushrooms, beanspouts and a friend egg, sprinkled with a generous amount of sesame seeds on top, and finished with strips of dried seaweed. For you carnivores out there, usually this would also come with beef, but Lisa is a vegetarian so she gets it without the meat. To this dish you can add hot sauce prior to stirring it all up! It tastes great here at Ga Ya, but I'm more partial to dol sot bibim bab which is served in a sizzling hot stone bowl. I love eating the crunchy rice that gets stuck to the bottom of the bowl - really changes up the texture & keeps the dish nice & hot from beginning to end!


jap chae bab

I ordered the jap chae bab for lunch - which is basically the regular jap chae noodles served with a side of rice. I don't know how Koreans do it, eating so many carbs in one sitting, but I definitely felt the side effects of eating it all after... I didn't eat for the next six hours cuz I was so full! Jap chae here is vegetarian, loaded with vegetables such as lettuce, carrots, onions, spinach, and wood ear fungus, giving each bite a slightly different texture. But at this restaurant, the dish has a very strong sesame oil flavour to it, which I'm not very fond of. The noodles were, however, not clumped together which is nice when trying to pick up smaller bundles of the noodles to eat.

Overall, this place is a great restaurant, and the service is always great! The food comes out promptly, and the waitress (shes actually the manager...!) is very friendly and is always ready to bring you whatever you need, be it more kimchi, or water to wash down the delicious, spicy food!

GaYa Korean Restaurant
11147 87 Avenue
Edmonton AB

Last Thursday, I desperately needed the motivation to help me study for MCAT, so Andrew & I met up once again at the library to study.. only this time, David wasn't around to surpervise us ;) While studying, Andrew's amazing eyesight caught glimpse of this book:

Let's Find Pokemon!


Can you find them? Hahaha

So cute & fun, and it brought back childhood memories trying to find the pokemon in the midst of all the colour on the page!

For dinner, we met up with Crystal and headed over to one of my favourite Korean joints, Lee House. With the heat wave hitting the city, it was impossible to order my favourite jjam pong without feeling like an absolute fool! Therefore, we agreed to order some other classic Korean foods - jap chae, gam poong ki, kal bi and something different, mul nam yeong.


Banchan side dishes on left, followed by jap chae and gam poong ki

Traditionally, Korean restaurants and typical Korean families serve small side dishes with their meals to accompany the food, or to be paired with rice. On this particular night, Lee House chose to serve kimchi radish, kimchi cabbage, and a seaweed salad. All three were great, and I love that they were bottomless! The jap chae at Lee House is my favourite in our city, because it has a unique flavour to it. It's almost like they use a lot of ground black pepper in it to give the noodles some heat, and the noodles never get dry, sticky and clumped together like the jap chae found at other restaurants. Definitely a keeper! Gam poong ki (technically kung pao chicken) is also very unique to lee house. The chicken here is formed into a ball and deep fried before being tossed in the sauce. It's the perfect combination of sweet, salty and sour - but if you ever order this dish, make sure to have a couple people with you because the portion is quite big!


Kal bi - BBQ Short Ribs

Kal bi, otherwise known as BBQ beef short ribs is another favourite of mine when it comes to Korean food. The beef is nice and tender, and I'm a big fan of the tendon/connective tissue that is found right around the bone (I know it might sound gross, but hey, I'm Asian :P). The ones at Lee house are good, but in my opinion definitely not worth the price! After cutting up the pieces according to the number of bones, we counted a total of 8 pieces for $17.00 - I'd rather buy my own and fire up the barbeque at home!


Mul Nam Yeong

And last of all, we ordered Mul nam yeong from Lee House's summer menu (available from June - August). This dish was basically buckwheat noodles served with pickled radish, egg, and beef slices in an ice cold beef broth. This was PERFECT for the summer heat! It wasn't spicy at all, but rather refreshing and cleansing to the palate. The buckwheat noodles remained nice and chewy since they were sitting in a cold broth, preventing them from being cooked any further. Yummy!


Lemonade, HK Style milk tea, lemon tea

To finish off the night, we picked up some drinks from Tasty Choice on the way home. Great night!


Andrew with his stack of chairs @ Tasty Choice!