Restaurant: Go! Go! Curry!, H-Mart, Cambridge, MA (BONUS: How To Order Food in This Type of "Food Court")

The H-Mart in Central Square is open! I've been anxiously awaiting this place since it was first announced in Boston Korea (local Korean language newspaper) approximately forever ago. :)

I'm a few days late on this, their grand opening was technically on Wednesday.

Curry!

My husband and I were pretty excited about the food court, based on our experiences in other H-mart food courts (I've been to about 6 different H-marts, so far, and all have had excellent food.) but unfortunately, this one only has two options. We ended up both getting food from Go! Go! Curry!, as they were out of Ramen at Sapporo Ramen by 6:30PM, when we got there.

First things first: the food court here has a different system than most American food courts. Instead of having two separate stand-alone restaurants, there is one line in which you stand to order, and you pick up your food from whichever restaurant you picked. When you order at the centralized cashier, you are given a number on your order receipt. When your order is ready, your number will pop up on a small screen (the small black part to the right of the menu in my Go! Go! Curry! pic above).

This is a pretty standard system in Korean department store food courts, but not that common in the US. I saw a lot of people confused about how the ordering works, as there were no instructions and the centralized cashier was very difficult to see.

Go! Go! Curry! is a chain restaurant that serves tonkatsu and chicken katsu (fried pork fillets breaded in panko) and curry over rice. The menu here was a little confusing. They have a few choices of combinations, all centered around curry and rice. Each combination is customizable with add-ons, and most of their items come in a variety of sizes, "walk", "single", "double", and "triple". The names of the items make more sense, but are still confusing, when you realize that the restaurant is named after the jersey number of a Japanese baseball player. Go go is five-five, in Japanese.

Sausage curry with egg added-on

We ended up trying the sausage curry in the "single" size, and the Home Run combo which only comes in one size. The Home Run had tonkatsu, fried shrimp, egg, and sausage over curry rice.

Home Run!

 Both items were pretty tasty. The curry was flavorful and ever so slightly spicy. The rice was very high quality and chewy. The tonkatsu was better than average. The sausages were super juicy and delicious. The portion sizes were a little smaller than expected.

The major negative to this place is that it was ridiculously crowded, though it's to be expected in H-mart. This lead to two major consequences: (1) The lines took a really long time, which defeats the purpose of "fast food" and (2) by the time we were done eating, around 7:30PM, both Sapporo and Go! Go! Curry! were sold out of their main foods, and the only thing that was left was the sushi at Sapporo. When this happened, I counted at least 20 people still in line.

Sold out already!!

I would definitely eat the curry here again. It was pretty good. But prepare to face crazy crowds and potentially not be able to eat the thing you were craving!


Go! Go! Curry!
581 Massachusetts Ave
Cambridge, MA 02139
Price: $
Taste: 4.5/5
Service: 4/5
Value: 4/5
HHR Rating: Pretty good but so crowded!