KatsuMe, London Ontario: Korean Food That Made a 30-Minute Detour Worth Every Minute

Hi, I'm Ino.

After dinner at the Bavarian Inn in Frankenmuth, we crossed the border into Canada and drove east through Ontario toward Niagara Falls. Long-distance road trips have a particular kind of fatigue that builds slowly — not the sudden exhaustion of a short night, but a cumulative heaviness in the shoulders and lower back that accumulates over hours of sitting behind a wheel. Somewhere on the 401, with Niagara still a couple of hours away, that fatigue had arrived.

What I wanted was hot Korean food. Not a gas station sandwich. Not a drive-through. Something with actual heat in the broth and actual chew in the rice cakes. I opened the map app and started searching.

That's when I noticed a city called London on the route.

London, Ontario

London, Ontario is not a small town. It has a population of about 422,000 — Canada's 11th largest metropolitan area — and sits at the confluence of the Thames River and North Thames River in southwestern Ontario, roughly 200 kilometers from both Toronto and Detroit. The name is not a coincidence. In 1793, Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe named both the city and its river after their English counterparts when he designated the site as his preferred location for the capital of Upper Canada. The capital eventually went to York — now Toronto — but the name stayed. London kept its Thames, its Piccadilly Street, and its Covent Garden Market, and became instead the largest city in southwestern Ontario.

It is also, as a footnote worth knowing, the birthplace of Ryan Gosling.

I had no particular plans to explore the city. What I needed was a restaurant, a table, and about an hour. The map showed a Korean restaurant about 30 minutes off the highway. One review stopped me: "Better than tteokbokki I had in Korea." That kind of claim, made with that kind of confidence, is either delusional or true. I turned off at the exit.

KatsuMe

KatsuMe describes itself as "Katsu + Korean" — the sign says it plainly, and the menu follows through. It sits in a low commercial building in a part of London that doesn't look like much from the outside. There's no dedicated parking lot. We circled the side streets until we found a spot, walked back in the evening air, and pushed open the door.

KatsuMe on a side street in London, Ontario — the sign is direct, and so is the food.

Inside

The interior is clean and casual — closer to a fast-casual setup than a traditional Korean restaurant. No dark wood, no low lighting, no attempt at a particular atmosphere beyond being functional and friendly. A K-pop music video was playing on a screen mounted on the wall. The staff spoke to each other in Korean. A hand-drawn whiteboard near the entrance listed specials in cheerful marker.

We were the only Koreans in the room. Every other table was occupied by local Canadians — couples, small groups, a family — all working through their food with varying degrees of confidence with chopsticks.

The specials board near the entrance — hand-drawn, bilingual, and cheerful.

We ordered three things: tteokbokki, donkatsu, and jjamppong. The review that pulled us off the highway had been about the tteokbokki. We ordered the other two because we were hungry and because the drive still had two hours left in it.

Tteokbokki

It arrived first. The sauce was the color of a deep brick red — not the bright orange of a pre-made mix, but the darker, more complex color of something that has been reducing for a while. It coated the rice cakes completely, thick enough that it didn't pool at the bottom of the bowl so much as cling to everything inside it.

The rice cakes were the cylindrical type — chewy and dense, with a slight resistance before they give way. The fish cake pieces had absorbed the sauce and contributed their own background richness to it. The cabbage had softened but kept some texture. The heat built gradually, starting mild and arriving somewhere genuinely spicy a few seconds after each bite — the kind of heat that has sweetness underneath it, which is how Korean spice works at its best.

The review was right. This was not a compromise version of tteokbokki made for a market that doesn't know the original. The sauce tasted like someone had made it from scratch and tasted it repeatedly until it was correct.

The tteokbokki — thick sauce, the right kind of heat, and rice cakes that hold their chew. The review was accurate.

Donkatsu

The donkatsu at KatsuMe is the Korean version rather than the Japanese one — a distinction that matters. Japanese tonkatsu uses thick, bone-in pork loin with coarse panko, producing a substantial, freestanding cutlet. Korean donkatsu typically uses thinner, tenderized pork pounded wide and flat, coated in finer breadcrumbs, and served with a brown demi-glace sauce that is sweet and savory rather than the sharper tonkatsu sauce of the Japanese style.

This was firmly the Korean version. The cutlet was wide enough to cover most of the plate, the coating was fine and uniform, and the brown sauce covered it generously. The meat under the coating was tender and mild — its job is mostly to carry the sauce, and it did that well. Between bites of tteokbokki and donkatsu, the sweetness of one and the heat of the other traded off in a way that made both taste better than they would have alone. The shredded cabbage and yellow pickled radish on the side were not decorative.

The donkatsu — Korean style, wide and thin, under brown sauce. Eat it alongside the tteokbokki and the two improve each other.

Jjamppong

Jjamppong is a Korean-Chinese noodle soup — spicy seafood broth with noodles, vegetables, and whatever seafood the kitchen has decided to add. The version at KatsuMe came with mussels, shrimp, and cabbage in a broth that was darker and heavier than the typical light seafood version. It had the quality of something built on meat stock rather than just seafood stock — a round, lasting warmth that sits in the chest rather than just the mouth.

A bowl of hot broth at the end of a long driving day does a specific thing that no other food quite replicates. The heat moves down the throat and spreads outward, and whatever had been locked up in the shoulders and back over eight hours of driving starts to release. This is not a medical claim. It is just what happened.

The jjamppong — mussels, shrimp, and a broth that does what a hot Korean soup is supposed to do at the end of a long day.

The Room, and One Frame on the Wall

After finishing all three dishes — which between the two of us left very little on any plate — I looked around more carefully at the room. The other tables were all occupied by local Canadians, none of whom appeared to be struggling with the food. A table nearby had ordered tteokbokki and was drinking water steadily but eating steadily too. Their plates were being cleared when we left.

Korean food has moved well beyond the communities that brought it to North America. Tteokbokki, bibimbap, Korean fried chicken — these are now standard items in cities across Canada and the United States, ordered by people who didn't grow up with them and who have decided they prefer them to the alternatives. KatsuMe in London, Ontario is a data point in that story: a Korean-run restaurant, in a mid-sized Canadian city 200 kilometers from Toronto, where on a Tuesday evening every table was full and most of the customers were not Korean.

On the way out, a framed print on the wall stopped me. Dark background, the restaurant's name riffed into a movie title: "Katsu me if you can." It's a small thing. But it's the kind of detail that tells you something about the people running a place — that they're paying attention, that they have a sense of humor about what they do, and that they're enjoying it.

"Katsu me if you can" — a small detail on the way out that tells you something about the people running the place.

Ino's Practical Tips

Getting there
KatsuMe is in London, Ontario, accessible from Highway 401. London sits about 200 km from both Toronto and Detroit, and about 190 km west of Niagara Falls — making it a natural midpoint stop if you're driving between Michigan and Niagara. From the 401, you'll need to drive into the city proper; allow about 15 to 20 minutes from the highway depending on where you exit.

Parking
There is no dedicated lot. Street parking is available on the surrounding side streets. Check the posted signs carefully — London has time-restricted and paid zones in parts of the downtown area. Arriving before the evening rush (before 6 pm) generally makes parking easier to find.

Tip: If you're on a road trip to Niagara Falls, budget at least 90 minutes total for the detour — about 30 minutes each way from the 401, plus time to eat. It's worth the calculation before you commit. The meal itself takes about 45 minutes to an hour if the restaurant is busy.

What to order
The tteokbokki is the reason to come. Order it regardless of whatever else you get. If you want something to balance the heat, the donkatsu with its brown sauce works well alongside it — the sweetness of the sauce counters the spice effectively. The jjamppong is the right call if you want something hot and substantial in a bowl.

Tip: If you're not accustomed to Korean-style spice levels, the tteokbokki here is genuinely spicy — not decoratively spicy. Order the donkatsu at the same time and alternate bites. The sweetness of the katsu sauce manages the heat well and makes the whole meal more balanced.

Wrapping Up

We arrived in Niagara that night much later than planned. The detour to London added almost two hours to the drive. It was worth it without qualification.

The best stops on a long road trip are rarely the ones you planned. They're the ones where someone's review catches your eye on a map app at the right moment, and you decide the extra hour is worth spending. KatsuMe in London, Ontario was that kind of stop — a Korean restaurant in a city named after London, England, on a river named after the Thames, where on a Tuesday night the tteokbokki was better than the review promised.