Soha Salt Pond

If you are a follower of cafe and bakery trends, you will notice one of the hottest items on everyone’s feed is salt bread. Known as Shio Pan in Japanese or Sogeum-ppang in Korean, I can’t tell if the latest craze started in Japan or Korea but the bread was originally developed in the Phillippines by the Spanish as a replacement for the French baguette

Another highly popular cafe in Ikseondong, Soha Salt Pond is famous for their salt bread as well as other equally delicious bakes. The cafe is distinctive in its decorations with a mini salt pond right at the entrance of the cafe

The order of entering the cafe is slightly confusing as you will have to purchase your bread from the side entrance where the main order counter and bread counter are located. Once you have made your order and purchase, you can proceed to the main sitting area and a staff will try to help you find a table if you are unable to get one yourself

The signature is definitely the salted bread but they also offer different varieties of the bread; plain salted bread or bread that comes with cream, peanut cream, truffle, caramel as well as other savoury ingredients

After placing your order, you can make your way to the main seating area where you get to walk past another open section of more mini salt pond decoration and a small water wheel which is really pretty for pictures. It was raining on the day I visited so I was balancing the umbrella and my phone trying to get decent pictures

The available sitting areas are actually quite small accommodating up to 20 to 30 people in a very tight arrangement. They decorated the interiors of the cafe to resemble a salt mill with gurney sacks and containers of fake salt around the cafe. I was sitting right next to the entrance so I took a photo of how the cafe looked from the inside with the left building the main kitchen and order area and the left side the main seating area

We ordered only the signature plain salted bread, cream salted bread and strawberry cream pastry. For drinks, I had the iced americano which is pretty decent. The bread was served warm and we were also given scissors to cut up the bread for sharing. The bread was fluffy and soft with a buttery flavour and a tinge of saltiness from the salt. The cream used was fresh and very light so it was perfectly paired with the savoury bread. The strawberry pastry used the same cream but on a light flakey pastry which reminded me slightly of a croissant

Overall, the breads and bakes were great here and I regretted not trying the green onion or other savoury flavours. The space is not the most comfortable as the area is really very tight and limited but the environment was nice to chill in if it is not too crowded

Address: 21-5 Supyo-ro 28-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, South Korea

Operating hours: 9 am to 9 pm