eating my way through Seoul

Two weeks in Seoul, South Korea, and we spent most of it eating.  

We stayed in Gangnam, the plastic surgery capital of the world, in a hotel that was mainly for guests recovering from their various cosmetic surgery procedures. While our bandage-covered neighbours embarked on their journey towards perfect beauty, we went on a culinary adventure to eat all the Korean food we can't get in Ottawa.

Stew in Gangnam

With the thirteen hour time zone difference, we were pretty jet lagged when we arrived. We tried to sleep but awoke at 4AM, ravenous with hunger. But where would we get something to eat?

It turns out that Gangnam is pretty bumping at 4AM and lots of restaurants were open, including the stew restaurant across the street from our hotel. Hordes of young people were pouring out of night clubs at that point, filling the restaurants in search for a bite to eat and maybe more soju and beer to drink to keep the "night" going, often  to kill some time until the Seoul metro trains were running again so they could stumble home to sleep, while others made their way to church.  

Bindaettuk from Kwangjang Market

Kwangjoon Market was busy, crowded with people sitting on stools at the street food stands eating mandu (dumplings) and ttukbeoki (spicy rice cakes). We couldn't get a spot anywhere, and instead we grabbed some bindaettuk (mungbean pancakes) and kimbap to go, and enjoyed them with a refreshing drink of sikhye (rice drink) next to the much calmer Cheonggyecheon stream.

Lotte Department Store Food Court

If only we could get dishes like bibim naengmyun (mixed spicy cold noodles) at department store food courts in Ottawa

Sae Bohm Tteukguk (sp?)

 

Found this place while my partner was in search of tteukguk (rice cake soup). It's his favourite Korean dish. It's one of my favourites too, actually. The menu for this place had pages and pages of different kinds of tteukguk. Also, makgeolli (traditional Korean rice liquor)!

Mini fish buns at Hammersmith Coffee

We liked to start our day checking out different coffee shops and nibbling on the little cakes that they serve there. Korea has tons of coffee shop on every corner - Koreans really like their coffee! My family likes to buy these fish bun things at the Korean grocery store in Canada and this coffee shop franchise serves miniature versions of them.

Kwanghamun Seokgalbi restaurant (sp?) at Coex Mall

Tasty dishes, and a popular lunch spot for the workers near by.  This restaurant was located above the Starfield Library, which was one of the most spectacular libraries I've ever seen.

I also saw an office worker in a suit riding around on a longboard during his lunch hour, which was kind of cool.

Chodae Restaurant (Gyeonggi-do)

This was an amazing restaurant that my aunt recommended. It's located outside of Seoul on the Han River, nestled in a beautiful garden. The restaurant offers an inspiring riverside view while you dine on the set menu of many, many, many courses (I lost count of how many), featuring playful yet elegant modern takes on traditional Korean dishes. All for, like, 30 Canadian dollars, which is an unbelievably reasonable price.

There's also a nice cafe next door in the garden where you can enjoy some ice cream or milk tea.

Hongdae District

Hongdae is an artsy hip neighbourhood in Seoul where the university students hang out. It's a pretty bumping place, with clubs and bars and karaoke bars and clothing stores. There were entertainers singing on the street and food stands everywhere. I bought a kebab of fruit dipped in liquid sugar syrup from one of the snack stands and made a total utter delicious mess of myself. I dripped/exploded syrup all over my face, hair, shirt and even my spouse. It was totally worth it.

In Hongdae, we stumbled upon a makgeolli salon hidden in an alley off a side street. It featured a biggest selection of makgeolli we've seen since we arrived in Seoul, including some really eccentric fruit flavours.  We asked the server for his favourite recommendation and drank the whole bottle with an anju plate of bulgogi jeon (pancakes).

Myeongdong Kyoja

Some fifty years ago, my grandmother used to meet up with her friends at a restaurant in Myeongdong to eat kalguksu (knife-cut noodle soup). Today, that restaurant is now a popular Michelin Guide-listed hotspot with long lines out the door during meal times. Luckily, the lines moved quickly so I could eat at this famous spot and re-trace my grandmother's old life in the home country.  Besides their noodle soup and mandu, they're also famous for their super-garlicky kimchi, which I couldn't get enough of. Also, they had robot busboys! It was totally worth the wait in line.

Budae Jjigae

My first time trying budae jjigae (army stew). This became popular after the Korean War, thanks to the influence of the US military based in South Korea. It's basically instant ramen with a bunch of weird random stuff thrown into it, like canned sausages, processed cheese and baked beans. This was my first time trying budae jjigae because we never had this kind of stuff growing up. The budae jjigae place across the street from our hotel cured its own bacon for the stew, which was delicious, especially when accompanied a bottle of soju.

Kyo Bakery

This was our favourite bakery to start our day with. The coffee was good and they always had an assortment of yummy creative pastries, like bulgogi pie, buns with cream cheese and corn filling, red bean buns... I wanted to try them all!

Chan In Dak Galbi 

This was an amazing restaurant that specialized in this dish that we called "Korean paella" - it probably has some other name but I'd never had anything like this before. You order your chicken and accompaniments (including cheese!) and it all comes cooked in a pan that gets dropped in front of you. It came with an abundance of lettuce too, so you could eat it as lettuce wraps.  Before I came to Seoul, I've never had so much processed cheese with my Korean food before, because obviously it's not "traditional" - but I've really come around on this and think that cheese works in Korean cuisine... as long as you're not lactose intolerant.

Bonsuwon Galbi (Suwon)

This was actually not in Seoul, but the nearby city of Suwon, where much of my family is from. Suwon is famous for a number of things, including the Hwaseong Fortress that is an UNESCO heritage site, but Koreans are also known to go to Suwon for galbi. And Bonsuwon is the place to go for galbi that you can have cooked on the grill at your table. There was a long wait to get a table and it was a bit pricey for Korean standards, but again, totally worth it.  As usual, we ordered too much and came away completely full from the feast.

Bukchangdong Soondubu

Whenever I go to Koreatown in Toronto, I always eat at Bukchangdong Soondubu for its famous soft tofu stew. It's so hip and popular that it even appeared on Kim's Convenience. Anyway, I was excited to finally have Bukchangdong Soondubu in South Korea!

Jin Jin Sura

This was another fine dining restaurant in Gangnam offering a set menu of many many courses of Korean dishes. It seems like it's a popular place in Seoul for Koreans to go for 상견례, the formal introduction of the prospective bride's family and the groom's family before the wedding. I guess my spouse and I could have pretended we were about to get married.

Korean fried chicken

It had to be done, right? You can't go to Korea without getting chi-mek (fried chicken & beer). As usual, we ordered way too much and it was delicious

Korean baseball game food

We caught a baseball game at Jamsil Stadium, and maaaaaan do I wish we can get these kinds of baseball snacks in Canada. More chicken and beer, dumplings, milk tea, tteokbukki, Korean pizza with corn, bulgogi, and pepperoni. The baseball game was really fun. The cheerleaders danced in perfect K-pop choreography, everyone was singing all the time, and I think the team we were cheering even won.

Ssam kyup sal

I like to call this Korean bacon, but my spouse says it's misleading because it doesn't actually taste anything like bacon. Anyway, this is thinly sliced pork that you barbecue on a grill, dip in sesame oil and gochukaru and wrap in a lettuce. So delicious. I think I'm going to have to have a ssamkyupsal party at home in my backyard this summer...

Now that our trip is over, I know I'm going to miss the plentiful Korean food during our trip. I'm not going to miss the delivery guys on motorcycle riding on the sidewalks though. 

Island hopping around the Korean coast

In the middle of our stay in South Korea, we decided to leave the bustling city of Seoul for a few days in the gorgeous seaside city of Tongyeong, located on the southern coast of the Korean pensinsula.   Tongyeong only has a population of maybe 140,000 which is tiny compared to Seoul’s ~10 million, but despite its small size, Tongyeong still has a gazillion restaurants everywhere that serve its local specialty of chungmu kimbap, honey bread, and of course seafood. Seafood pretty much runs this whole place, especially this dish called meongge which I still haven’t figure out how it is properly translated (sea squirt?). It’s too bad I’m not more of a seafood enthusiast.

Tongyeong is also the historic site of Admiral Yi Sun-Shin, one of the most beloved figures in Korean history. He's the guy that developed the famous turtle ship, an armoured ship that aided Koreans against invaders.

We woke up to the sound of the neighbour's rooster loudly announcing the coming of dawn.  We took a taxi down one of the harbours, where for the price of about five Canadian dollars, you can hop from island to island on a little ferry. For some of the island stops, the ferry doesn’t even fully dock to board or unload passengers. Passengers simply hop off the boat on to land and the ferry keeps moving, barely pausing at all.

We got off at Yeondaedo, a small island with a little traditional fishing village built around the mountain.  There are some five hundred islands off the coast near Tongyeong, where the ocean is a brilliant hue of turquoise, like the Caribbean, except nobody really hangs out on the beach in their bikinis here – fishermen spend their days haul in their catch for the day while the little old halmunis lay out seaweed to dry on the docks.  Archeologists have discovered evidence of human habitation on the island of Yeondaedo tracing back to prehistoric times. People have clearly been enjoying the waters here for millennia. 

Today though, it seemed to a day of rest for the village. We were hoping to grab a bite to eat, but the restaurants (all seafood) were all closed, except for a coffee shop that only served coffee. We hoped we would have better luck elsewhere and set off on a little hike. 

We made our way to a suspension bridge that connected Yeondaedo to Manjido, another island close by, where our hiking trail led us to a boardwalk that wrapped around another mountain along the beach. 

We eventually came upon another village there, where there were a few more restaurants, all closed except one place that had a table of guests enjoying their meal. It turns out that the restaurant wasn’t actually open; the husband and wife busily attending to the guests explained to us that they were just feeding their guests who were staying at their inn  (called “pensions” in Korea) attached to the restaurant. But they were kind to us and let us eat there too. Everything on the menu was seafood, all invertebrate mollusks of some kind or another. I asked ajumma if she would make me plain ramen and she did.

Afterwards we found another coffee shop nearby that served iced coffee and patbingsu – shaved ice with red beans, which we enjoyed while looking out at the village harbour and listening to the music that the coffee shop owner played, all old English songs like Simon and Garfunkel or “Delilah”  that I remembered because the Korean adults in my childhood used to sing those songs at karaoke. It all made me feel like I was in a little time warp. I daydreamed about what it would be like to live here in this quiet idyllic village, maybe running a coffee shop for a few hours a day and serving instant ramen. I probably wouldn’t do well myself since I’m not a huge fan of seafood or running a small business. But it still sounds nice.

My spouse was the only white person we’ve seen pretty much since we’ve arrived in Tongyeong. Small children keep coming up to him to say hi.  Me, I’m excited about the random cats I keep meeting, napping in the shade of the trees or hanging around people hoping that they’ll drop some food. The crows here sound different, like they’re speaking Korean, or maybe just calling out my husband’s name.

Eventually the ferry came back for us and we hopped on to get back to Tongyeong. We took the cable car up Mireuk Mountain, where we got a breathtaking panoramic view all around the coast. We could even catch a faint glimpse of Japan in the distance. I also discovered that there was a luge course on the mountain, so of course I had to try it. I could never pass up the option to ride down a mountain fast.

In the evening, we went on a sunset cruise on a yacht. It was the fanciest yacht I have ever been on, not that I’ve been on a lot of yachts, since I usually prefer human-powered activities on the water, like kayaking or paddleboarding. But this yacht had four bedrooms (that we didn’t use of course) and two bathrooms and a glorious deck with all sorts of comfortable spots where you could lounge and watch the sun set. The yacht staff played old Korean ballads from the 70s and offered sparkling wine and shrimp ramen, which was my second ramen of the day but still delicious. It was such a blissfully peaceful experience.

I thought about how I used to keep up a travel log when I was younger and mainly stopped because I was traveling too much, mostly for work and couldn’t keep up, and then I wasn’t traveling at all. But I like having records of the places I’ve been and things I’ve seen and I find that unless I write them down, the memories of these places all become muddled up. Maybe I’ll start writing in my travel log again, not regularly but whenever I do make it out somewhere special that I want to try to remember.

After the sun sank below the mountains, the yacht staff anchored the yacht next to a few other yachts and set off a merry storm of fireworks, while blasting cheery upbeat music full of surprisingly expletives in English. After the fireworks ended, and we hailed a cab to go back home, I was tired and ready to head back, but at the same time I was sorry to see my magical day end.