How do you usually spend your nights after dinner when you travel?
I tend to go back to my hotel and sort through photos.
That’s why I always carry my iPad with me.
Especially on longer trips, I try to organize photos every single day.
Unless you want to be hit by an overwhelming flood of photos after the trip is over.
Sometimes I watch YouTube or Netflix as well.
That’s less about traveling, and more about my everyday nightly routine.
Still, what I enjoy more than that is stopping by a bar near my accommodation,
having a quiet drink, and chatting lightly with the bartender.
Through bartenders, you sometimes hear local stories,
and once in a while, a conversation with the person sitting next to you
can send the night in a completely unexpected direction.
On this Mokpo trip, I decided to look for a bar as well.
Pyeonghwa Gwangjang is a lively area,
so I figured there would be at least one place where I could have a casual drink alone.
What people often call a “Western bar” tends to exist
even in smaller cities, one or two at least.
That’s how I found this place - Milk & Honey.
The entry process here is a bit unusual.
You can’t open the door from outside at all, so you have to knock.
Then the owner comes to the door,
checks the guest through a small rectangular peephole,
and only then opens it.
It seems to borrow the logic of speakeasy bars,
which had to carefully choose their customers during the Prohibition era.
The interior is quite spacious.
There are ten seats at the bar,
and behind it, one large table that looks like it could seat about ten people.
There are no small two- or four-person tables.
The space is used generously.
I was lucky enough to sit at the bar on both visits,
but on weekends it gets crowded,
so there isn’t much room to chat with the bartender.
He runs the place alone.
When orders come in all at once, he gets understandably busy.
On my first visit, I had eaten meat for dinner.
So I asked for a cocktail with carbonation to help with digestion.
What he recommended was one of the house signature cocktails,
Keep Me Up Late.
It was a refreshing drink made with green grape soda, cucumber, and lime juice.
On another day, I said I wanted to start with something in the cooler style.
As my first drink, he recommended another signature cocktail,
Nice? Nice!
It was a cooler using lemon juice and basil,
with a bright and refreshing character.
By this point, I got curious about a classic cocktail.
Since recipes vary from bar to bar,
the Old Fashioned is a drink where the maker’s personality really shows.
He asked whether I wanted bourbon or rye as the base,
and when I chose bourbon, he used Buffalo Trace.
I’d heard it was a good value bottle.
I quietly watched the process of making the cocktail.
The way he handled the bottles - careful yet decisive -
and how he didn’t pour in pre-dissolved bitters all at once,
but instead added ice one cube at a time and stirred patiently.
Watching that,
I felt I could understand how he thinks about a single cocktail.
The whiskies on the back bar were solid as well.
There were no rare old bottles,
but almost every well-known name you’d expect was there.
Prices were reasonable too,
so after cocktails, I ended up having one or two whiskies as well.
When it came time to pay,
he would offer a complimentary drink each time.
One day, he said he’d give me something that suited Mokpo,
and poured a glass of Cutty Sark.
Another day, he said it was a hangover drink,
and served me a glass of “Garamandeun Bae.”
I took it as a playful service,
a joke from the bartender, and enjoyed it.
But I noticed that some guests didn’t quite respond to it,
and simply turned around and left.
In any case,
I ended up finding a bar in Mokpo that I never expected to encounter.
The cocktail skills are quite solid,
much better than I had anticipated.
Whisky prices are reasonable as well.
If I visit Mokpo again,
this is definitely a place I’d stop by after dinner.
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