Pop! Pop! Pop! Urban Pop!
Does Urban Pop remind you of something? Nope, it’s not that K-pop girlband who’s jumping up and down in their flashy helmets. Urban Pop is the latest café that pops up in the fast-growing culinary forest in Malang. What makes them different from other café is their proclaim to be the first k-pop themed café in town. The Display team decided to visit this unique culinary spot which located at Jl. Danau Maninjau Sawojajat Malang, since we’re a huge fan of Kpop ourselves. Please be careful on your way to Urban Pop and slow down your speed, since you might have missed this little lovely café. We asked the owner of their recommended dishes, and she chose Korean Chicken Wings and Cheesy Vanilla for dessert. Of course they’re not enought to satisfy our appetite, so we order more food such as Kimbab with Sweet n’ Chilli Squid, Original Ramyun, Creamy Ramyun, Super Hot Fried Ramyun and Potato Pompom. Mango, Cookies and Cream, and Banana Blemiché are our beverage selection. Let’s get down to the business then!
First up is Creamy Ramyun, Korean Chicken Wings and Potato Pompom. Creamy ramyun is noodles cooked in milk, cheese, and seasoning broth which is out of this world delicious! It is served with few chicken pops, shredded seaweed, and a little spicy kick that explodes in our mouths. The korean chicken wings is a tad bit sweet and you can’t really taste the gochujang (red pepper paste) that’s usually used in this dish, but overall it’s good and don’t worry to get your hands dirty while eating these wings because they serve it with plastic gloves! The potato pompom was nicely fried, it wasn’t too dry unlike those frozen tatter tots and served with both tomato and chilli sauce on the side.
Next up is Original ramyun, Kimbap with Sweet n Chilli Squid and Super Hot Fried Ramyun. The original ramyun had the taste that you can expect from the usual Korean ramyun which has refreshing spicy and salty red broth and it’s also sprinkled with seaweed and fish cakes (chikuwa). Korean food isn’t complete without rice, so we ate kimbap which means rice rolls. The usual kimbap has fillings in it like carrot, cucumber, beef patties, or tuna mayo and similar to maki sushi, but Urban Pop’s kimbap was different. They wrapped the rice in roasted seaweed (nori) then served the sweet n chilli sauce separately. The squid itself was cooked perfectly, not too chewy and not undercooked and the sauce tasted like Sriracha sauce or Bangkok sauce. We wish we had more rice rolls, it was too little to fulfill our big appetite hahahaha… Now it’s the real deal, the super hot fried ramyun lived up to its name. Yes, it is SUPER HOT! Unlike its comrades, this fried ramyun has no broth (it’s fried, duh), which makes the spiciness elevated tenfold. You won’t feel it at first, but once it reached down your throat then Boom, you wish you didn’t have it. But strange thing happened, it was addictive. So we couldn’t help but licking our plates clean.
After the spicy parades, we shifted to our beverage to cool down the burn that happened in our mouths. The cookies and cream blemiché is very yummy, it had the perfect match and consistency between the oreo cookies and milk (which some of the cafés out there are to stingy to give out oreos). The mango one is refreshing too, the sourness and fragrantness of the mango didn’t overpower the milk and the color was perfectly fine (not bright weird orange). The banana blemiché used real bananas- not essence, so it made us go Ba-na-nas! You can also ask for additional toppings like pearls, ice cream, whipped, cream, and choco crunch to accompany your blemiché which comes with extra price too. To fix our sweet tooth, we had Cheesy Vanilla dessert. It was the combination of vanilla ice cream, abundant amount of grated cheddar cheese, kraffle, and honey star cereal.
Overall, it was a great culinary experience at Urban Pop. The waiter/waitresses were helpful and friendly, the food came out at a pretty fast phase. You got your K-pop fix by watching Kpop music videos that were played on screen, and seeing Urban Pop’s collection of Kpop CDs, photobooks, and collectibles. We must say we also liked how they decorate their space with modern tribal paints and there’s also paintings of Hallyu stars with their inspirational quotes hanging by the wall. The sofas were comfy with little pillows there, and you can also spot swing-like functioning chairs which was a pretty brilliant idea for interior. We truly recommended Urban Pop for you who want to try a new experience and get a little taste of Korea. 식샤를 합시다!!
Ambience: good, not too crowded or loud
Music: Kpop
Food: Great
Beverage: Perfect
Price: 5k-22k (food and dessert) – 5k-18k (beverage)
Smoking room: N/A
AC: No AC- fan only
Hospitality and Service: Great
Operational Hours: 12 PM – 10 PM (no day off)
