There are very few things I like doing more while traveling than visiting food markets. I have a particular soft spot for fish markets but any large market will do. There’s no better way, I think, than this to get the feel of a place’s energy or to begin to understand its dynamics. What do people eat? Where do they buy it? How much does it cost? What is the culture of buying and selling? What do they not eat? These are important questions if you want to begin to understand a place, and you cannot answer them simply by eating in restaurants. And, of course, if you’re staying in a place for more than a few days and have access to a kitchen, then there’s no better way of feeding yourself. The bonus in Seoul is that pretty much every large market has a plethora of food options and usually at least one kind of food that they’re particularly known for. Such is the case with Cheongnyangni Market. It’s both a sprawling market where you can buy fruits, vegetables, grains, seafood and meat of a dizzying variety and it is home to a well-regarded food “alley”: Tongdak Alley. We visited the market with a group of students a couple of weeks ago, ate lunch there and did a bit of shopping as well.
I’m dividing this post into two sections, following the disorganized flow of our visit to the market. We arrived with a view to eating lunch first and so set out right away in search of the Tongdak or chicken alley. (Tongdak refers to whole fried chicken but in practice many of the restaurants actually serve regulation cut-up fried chicken.) While figuring out the lay of the land and where to eat we walked up and down that section of the market and so the first gallery below features the shops there and then the fried chicken meal itself. The second gallery of images is of the larger market proper. After our meal we wandered haphazardly through much of the market, buying vegetables, seafood, meat and banchan. I took pictures as we walked and then again as we walked back from the market to the subway station. During this time the market had gone from quiet and just rousing itself at the time of our arrival to completely bustling and bursting with life. But please take note that this is very much a haphazard chronicle of our meandering through the market, not any kind of comprehensive look at it.
Eating
Naver Maps—the map app of choice for the discerning visitor to Seoul—showed Tongdak Alley on the map but it still took a bit of walking around for us to be sure that we were there. This because we had been expecting that it would look something like Namdaemun Market’s Kalguksu Alley or Hairtail Alley: i.e a discrete section of the market featuring nothing but fried chicken vendors. Well, it’s a discrete section of the market alright but the chicken restaurants share that section with all kinds of other restaurants as well as with seafood and vegetable vendors. After walking around for a bit we looked for a restaurant that seemed large enough to be able to seat our group of 10 together and went in to Donkyung Tondak.
As with all the chicken restaurants, the frying operation is located outside and the tables are all inside. The inside turned out to be even larger than it had seemed from the outside and only a part of it was occupied when we got there. By the time we left, a little after 1, it had begun to fill up—as had the rest of the market.
The menu is very limited. There are only four things on it: plain fried chicken; fried chicken coated in a spicy-sweet sauce; fried chicken feet; and fried chicken gizzards. Rather than make decisions we got one each of all of them. And all I can tell you is that all were excellent. For most of the students this was their first time eating chicken feet and gizzards but we left nothing uneaten. Preferences varied but I think most people had the plain fried chicken—eaten dipped in either the salt or the spicy sauce provided on the table or both—at the top. In case you’re wondering, the other stuff mixed in with the fried chicken is fried tteok or ricecakes and fried sweet potatoes.
Portions were large and prices were also reasonable. We paid a total of 62,000 won (with a few soft drinks added on) or just about $45. That’s for 10 people and none of us were hungry.
Take a look at the alley and what we ate in the gallery below and then scroll down for a look at the rest of the market.
Shopping
As I said, we wandered somewhat haphazardly through the market after lunch, buying a few things as we went. The market is divided into a number of large covered arcades or halls. The market’s organization is not terribly tight either. By which I mean that there aren’t discrete sections for vegetables and fruit and seafood and so on. There are areas where there are more of one of kind of thing than others but things are pretty mixed. I was not expecting as large a seafood presence as there was at the market. As we had plans to go to the big seafood market the next day, we restricted ourselves to buying only a mess of very fresh, shucked local oysters for not very much money. The options were a “small” tray for 7000 won or a large tray for 12,000 won but they gave us the large for 10,000 won anyway. That’s just a bit more than $9 for quite a lot (as you’ll see in the pics below).
Vegetable and fruit shopping was a little more frustrating as the vendors have everything laid out in set amounts and you’re expected to buy in those amounts. I couldn’t just buy 2-3 tomatoes, for example; I would have had to buy 15-20 of them. And so on for most fruits and vegetables. This normally wouldn’t have been an issue given our 5-week stay in the city but the kitchen in our apartment is not very well equipped (or large) and it just isn’t feasible for us to shop or cook for more than a day or two at a time. We did manage to convince one vendor to sell us just one large knob of ginger, and not a bushel of it. The butchers, luckily, don’t work on that principle and we were able to buy small amounts of beef to add to seaweed soup; and we also bought what turned out to be some excellent seaweed for that soup. Some banchan from one of the larger vendors rounded out our shopping (I believe the students bought some too to take back to their hostel’s communal kitchen).
For a look at the sprawling and increasingly crowded market, take a peek at the slideshow below. Scroll down to see what’s coming next.
As I said, we visited the big Noryangjin seafood market the next day. But I don’t think I’m going to have the time in the next week to resize that many pictures for a report, so that one will have to wait. Instead on the weekend I’ll have a quicker report on another casual restaurant meal in Seoul. Before that on Thursday I’ll get in one more Bombay report.