Our first night in Seoul, we were lodging at the exquisite Hotel Shilla, which sits on a bluff with fabulous views of the mountains and the modern city of Seoul. They have a number of exceptional restaurants in the hotel, and I should mention, perhaps the best breakfast buffet I have ever encountered in my life, with at least ten chefs preparing food separately, from the classic American scrambled eggs and bacon to marvelous dim sum and an assortment of other goodies.

At their Continental Restaurant, after a flight from Beijing, we had a brilliant French-inspired meal. My favorite courses were the lobster carpaccio with truffle yuzu cream, the pan-fried red mullet, and a sensational grilled ribeye of Australian-bred Wagyu beef (pictured left). We kept the wine choices simple, drinking several bottles of 1999 Dom Perignon, which showed very well, and what looked to be one of the best value reds on the wine list, the 2002 Shirazfrom Penfolds, the RWT. This wine showed lots of class, exhibiting super-intense black fruits intermixed with some smoke, graphite, and earth. It is a full-bodied, opulent, seamlessly constructed wine which I believe is aged mostly in French oak, and the wood seems less aggressive than in some of the cuvées from Penfolds that see a lot of American wood.

I highly recommend this restaurant. The wine list is very diverse, with an enormous number of reasonably priced selections despite the high taxes on wine in Korea.