Seoul is such a fun eating and drinking city. The food is great, the coffee is amazing, and the prices are good. And yet inevitably, there are some holes in Seoul’s repertoire.

Here are five that come to mind right away:

1. Good bubble tea. We used to have Wanpo and Addictea, two excellent Taiwanese boba shops in the Hongdae plus area (i.e., Hongdae, Yeonnam, Yeonhui, Hapjeong, Mangwon, Seogyo). Addictea shuttered a couple of years ago, and Wanpo’s hours are down to something approaching nothing. Hey Tea is still around, but their menu is oddly restricted and their prices for delivery, eye watering. Plus their portions are so small! Other than that, there aren’t any high quality Taiwanese style tea-first boba shops. Apologies to Gongcha and the handful of Chinese chains that have landed here. I’m looking for a real brewed tea base and no shortcuts when it comes to items like hot taro.

2. Real Cobb salad.
That staple of American salad culture is so hard to find here. There are plenty of menu items called Cobb salad. But the vast vast majority is not actually Cobb salad. Cobb salad may as well be patented; its ingredients are set and classically aligned. Greens (usually romaine), with tomatoes, eggs, chicken, blue cheese, avocado, onions, bacon, and (usually) a vinaigrette. Mind you, you can find all the ingredients here, and without difficulty. But somehow the Cobbs in Seoul always find a way to sneak in ricotta, the most ubiquitous salad cheese in Korea, or random ingredients that don’t go, like carrots, corn, or kidney beans. Or they’ll omit something critical like blue cheese or avocado. It’s maddening! One of the better non-Cobbs is found at Cafe Mamas. But it omits eggs, onions, and blue cheese, and adds olives. Whyyy???

3. Grandma’s Chocolate chip cookies.
Another American classic is way hard to find in Seoul. It used to be that both chocolate chip cookies and bagels were hard to find. But then Korea went on a bagel tear and now a decent bagel is seemingly everywhere. The chocolate chip cookie that is chewy, chocolate-y, buttery, and the ultimate comfort food dessert for the American-hearted? That remains missing from the landscape. The funny thing about this one is that there used to be a solid CC cookie at the Korean Tartine, which is the local partner version of the San Francisco-based bakery-cafe company. I used to buy that cookie all the time for my cookie-loving husband. But after years they deleted it from their menu. When I asked at one of their outlets, they told me it was for lack of demand. Doh! I really ought to have bought more while it lasted. Now I’m stuck ordering Jacques Torres from New York via Zicgoo (but not during the hot summer months), or making my own. I’m not a bad baker of chocolate chip cookies, but it’s a lot of work because I use the Jacques Torres recipe which I picked up from the New York Times years and years ago. Maybe I’ll try an easier one next time, like the classic Better Homes Cookbook recipe.

4. Genuine Pho.
Sadly, most of the pho in Korea is missing a lot of ingredients. Half of Koreans do not eat cilantro, and it kinda goes downhill from there. Lemongrass, cloves, cardamom, star anise, anyone? The deletions or muted transpositions vary, but virtually all of the pho I’ve had (and I have had maybe two dozen different bowls) has been lacking the heady punch that the best phos I have had in Hanoi, East San Jose, and Seattle have had. What’s weird about this is that there are so many Vietnamese people living in Korea that President Lee Jae Myung went to Vietnam and declared it Korea’s in-law country. (What a great expression, by the way.) I need to find out where they get their pho, or just learn how to make my own. Because the versions I have had just taste like galbi-tang with a little fish sauce in it.

5. New York rye.
This one is an interesting one. There’s rye bread in Korea. There’s the kind that Koreans know as rye bread, which I would consider brown bread a la Outback Steakhouse, or some sort of whole grain bread that isn’t rye as I know it. There’s also the dense, small form rye that my Danish former nanny diligently looked for and found in Seoul, much to her delight, and the German version that my neighbor found at a nearby German bakery. But there’s nothing remotely close to the seeded New York rye bread that I crave from time to time. It’s such a tease. There’s great pastrami and plenty of Swiss cheese in Seoul. I even found Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard on Coupang. But the bread that hot pastrami requires? It requires another Zicgoo-facilitated purchase.