Korea House Has Been Longwood’s Korean Table Since 1982

Before Orlando had a Korean dining scene, it had Korea House. The restaurant first opened in Longwood in 1982 — among the very first Korean restaurants in Florida — and, as longtime Orlando food critic Scott Joseph has written, it stood as the region’s sole purveyor of Seoul food for years after. More than four decades on, it is still serving at 1155 West State Road 434, Suite 123, in a location it has held for over twenty years, a few blocks from the original 977 West State Road 434 address. Joseph calls it an Orlando Classic. The regulars filling the booths on a weeknight would call that an understatement.

The Tabletop Ritual

Korea House is built around the grill. A set of tables carry tabletop barbecue grills where diners cook marinated meats themselves — beef and pork bulgogi, galbi — while the kitchen sends out the supporting cast: dolsot bibimbap arriving still sizzling in its hot stone bowl, haemul pajeon, the seafood pancake that tables order to share, Korean fried chicken, and the procession of banchan that turns a meal into a spread. The restaurant’s own description promises authentic Korean dishes and a well-stocked bar — soju included in spirit if not in this sentence — and the room delivers the unhurried, family-run feel that has kept it booked across two generations of Seminole County diners.

The Room and the Ritual

Part of Korea House’s hold on its regulars is how little the experience asks of you and how much it gives back. The dining room is spacious and unpretentious — wood booths, grill tables vented for barbecue, a soju bar for the table that is celebrating something. Service runs at the pace of a place that has seated the same families for decades: banchan land early and are refreshed without ceremony, grills are managed as much by the staff’s quiet interventions as by the diners, and a first-timer who looks lost at the tongs will be rescued kindly and without comment. The menu supports both modes of Korean dining — the communal, cook-it-together barbecue feast and the solo comfort order, a stone pot of bibimbap eaten at a booth on a lunch break. Prices have stayed in the moderate band that keeps the room democratic: office groups at noon, multigenerational families at night, and a steady trade of Korean-American diners whose presence in a dining room remains the most reliable review any Korean restaurant can earn.

Why It Matters Beyond Longwood

Central Florida’s Asian dining map now runs deep — Mills 50, Colonial Drive, a second Korea House location on East Colonial among them. All of it traces back, in part, to a Longwood storefront that proved in 1982 that this food belonged here. Korea House was the seventh restaurant Scott Joseph reviewed for the Orlando Sentinel’s magazine, at a time when reviewing a Korean restaurant in Seminole County was itself a statement. That it remains a first-choice answer — not a nostalgia act — is the rarer achievement. Restaurants this old usually survive on memory. Korea House survives on dinner.

How to Do It Well

Go with a group and commit to the grill: cooking at the table is the experience, and a mixed order of bulgogi and galbi with a seafood pancake for the middle of the table is the classic first visit. The restaurant serves lunch and dinner Wednesday through Monday — plan around the Tuesday pause — and the stone-pot bibimbap is the solo diner’s best friend. Korea House anchors the international stretch of our Longwood dining roundup and is pinned on the Orlando Top Spots Map. Forty-plus years, two addresses, one corridor: some institutions are buildings. This one is a table with a fire in the middle of it.

Filed under Korea House · Korean · Longwood · Restaurants · SR 434

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