Oseyo
“For a restaurant named for the Korean Phrase “Please come in”, Oseyo is going to have to change a lot to earn my patronage once more.”
At L-E, we try our best to find restaurants that we believe offer potential for valuable memories to be made. The promise of a meal is often times simply an excuse for longtime friends and family to get together, catch-up, and then leave with their bellies full and hearts warm from reconnecting. However, that satisfying feeling is wholly dependent on good food and service that does not distract from, but rather facilitates, the social gathering. Unfortunately, Oseyo no longer fulfills that necessary and imperative prerequisite.
I have visited Oseyo on two occasions: the first was several years ago before L-E was even a formulated idea, and the second was what (un)inspired me to write this article.
In the first few years after opening, Oseyo was a fun and hip addition of Korean fusion to the Centreville, VA food scene. It served as an emulation of the low-key South Korean eateries - complete with self-serving plastic bottles of water for each table, bright neon signage, and a packed house where you had to call out for the waitress to come and take your order. At that time, its menu was new and exciting as it featured several Western-inspired Korean dishes like a spicy ramen carbonara. Since then, management has changed its menu to remove that entree, along with many of the other popular dishes that made a visit to Oseyo unique to any of the innumerable Korean restaurants in the Northern Virginia area.
On my latest visit there, the restaurant was deserted at 6pm on a Saturday night - a stark change to the last time I visited. The service was lackluster and the staff was inattentive to our needs, even though we were the only ones there that day. I was already disappointed with the removal of some of my favorite choices, but opted to try the Korean Black Ramen, which turned out to just be cup noodles with black bean sauce - a somewhat sacrilegious version of the delicious jjajangmyeon. The once savory and spicy Korean chicken bites had been downgraded to what felt like an ironic knock-off of the Americanized take of “General Tso’s Chicken.” The bites were chewy, rather than crispy from the double-fried process that Korean wings are known for, and the sauce was reminiscent of Chinese sweet and sour rather than any kind of soy or gochujang profile. Perhaps the one redeeming quality of our visit was the carbonara tteokbokki. While still a bit too creamy for my taste and not enough of the actual dough, it scratched the itch I had for the kind of mish-mash college-style meals that Oseyo had grown a reputation for.
All in all, there is not much else to mention in terms of Oseyo. The restaurant seems to be undergoing a teenager’s identity crisis, while simultaneously throwing out its baby with the bathwater. For a restaurant named for the Korean phrase “Please come in”, Oseyo is going to have to change a lot to earn my patronage once more. At its current price point, there are much better places to go to with higher quality service and cuisine. The one selling point it had was its specialized fusion dishes, which have since been done away with or are now poorly executed. It’s my personal recommendation to steer clear of Oseyo for the foreseeable future, although I do hope things turn back to the kind of exciting and lively atmosphere it once successfully shared with the DMV.
Fun fact: During and after Korea’s civil war, many of its citizens subsisted off of American rations, which included processed American cheese. South Koreans now incorporate cheese into local dishes like noodle soup and kimchi stir-fried rice. They say the cheese helps to take away the heat from traditionally spicy dishes. U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows that annual imports of American made cheese are now worth nearly half a billion dollars.
Food Quality: 5.0/10
Meal Value: 4.0/10
Dining Experience 6.5/10
Overall: 5.17/10
