I’ll stay in Seoul to close out the week but instead of a restaurant report I have for you a look at the city’s premier fish market: the massive Noryangjin Fisheries Wholesale Market. I made two visits to the market. The first was on a weekend early on our trip, with the family and a large group of students; and then towards the end I took a smaller group of students there as well for a birthday-related outing on a weeknight. As it happens, both visits involved eating as well—a major feature of the market is the large number of seafood restaurants where you can have things you buy fresh at the market cooked up for you. However to keep things manageable, I am focussing in this first report only on the market as market. I’ll post my report on the two meals—one a lunch, the other a dinner—next weekend.

As you’ll see in the slideshow below, the Noryangjin fish market is a very different proposition than the Sassoon Dock fish market in Bombay. Indeed, it’s almost the exact antithesis to it. Where the Sassoon Dock market is outdoors, right on the dock where the fishing boats come in, Noryangjin is an indoor market, located not by the sea but along the Han river. The Sassoon Dock market is aromatic, Noryangjin doesn’t smell particularly of fish. This is partly because a large part of what is on offer at the market—to both wholesale and retail customers—is live fish and seafood in tanks.

The market is also clearly organized. Not only are there different sections for different kinds of things on offer, the vendors’ stalls are formal and marked and numbered. The vendors too are dressed as though to emphasize the orderliness of the market, in colour-coded smocks. The strongest similarity is in the sales pitch the vendors will make to you as you pass their stalls or pause to look at things—but in this too Noryangjin is more restrained than Sassoon Dock. There is no English signage on the fish and the vendors have differing levels of fluency in English (though most have more English than I have Korean); but if you really want to buy anything prices are clearly marked. And odds are good that if you’re at a fish market like this as a customer you won’t be too intimidated by displays of things you don’t recognize.

The Noryangjin market is, I believe, Korea’s largest fish market—though we did visit another in Busan a few weeks later that was quite large as well. It was first established in 1927 in a different location (though some sources note 1934 as the date the market was originally built). It moved to the current location in 1971 and then to a new, more organized building in 2011. It’s both a wholesale market and a retail market, though I expect business from the former dominates the latter. As to whether fish and shellfish from Noryangjin end up at the other markets in the city (such as Cheongnyangni or Namdaemun) or whether Noryangjin’s wholesale custom is primarily to supermarkets and restaurants, I don’t know. But if you want to buy fish or shellfish in Seoul this is very much the best place to come. It’s also a tourist attraction in its own right, as you might expect, especially as the second floor of the market is lined with seafood restaurants. The market is also tourist-friendly in other ways.

As you enter on the first floor and walk around, you’ll see tanks filled with crabs and octopus and shellfish of all kinds—though I don’t believe I noticed lobster—as well as tanks filled with live fish of various kinds. There is also recently dispatched fish on offer but the cleaning is not done in the haphazard manner of Sassoon Dock market and guts and blood and gills/shells are nowhere to be seen. The floors are wet but that’s from being constantly hosed down. I’m not saying that, were you blindfolded, you wouldn’t know you were in a fish market; but I am saying that the aromas are not likely to offend the sensibilities of all but the most squeamish (but hold that thought till next weekend). And there’s also frozen seafood on offer in a smaller section. Some of the live fish vendors even have prepped sashimi on offer.

There are no restaurants on the first floor. If you’re interested in eating or seeing more of the market you take a central escalator up to the second floor. Here there are again a lot of fish and shellfish vendors, most of it live in tanks. The second floor is also where you can find dry goods—such as knives—being sold as well as the dried and fermented fish/seafood section. I regret to inform that on the first outing we did not go to the dried/fermented section and then when I came back a few weeks later I found that section was closed on a Monday night. The market proper is otherwise open 24/7, though I am not sure if all the restaurants are. The restaurants are at one end and then along another wall of the second floor. You can have things you’ve bought at the vendors cooked up at a restaurant—the restaurants all have runners hanging around the vendors and it is likely that a place you buy something from will have a relationship with a particular restaurant. Or you can also just order off the menu at a restaurant. We did some of each on the two visits, but more on that next weekend.

If you’re purchasing things at the market to take home, as we did on the first visit, one of the things to know is that prices are pretty standard from vendor to vendor. I’m not sure if locals bargain at all but once you’re marked as a foreigner you can pretty much give up any hope of negotiating any prices. I will say though that prices seem pretty decent: on our way out we bought some shrimp, some scallops and some shucked oysters. If the kitchen in the apartment we were in for the five weeks had been better equipped, I would have come back more often to buy fish as well, but alas.

By the way, the building the market is in has six floors. We only visited the first and second and I didn’t notice any easy way of getting further up from within the second floor of the market. I’m not sure what else there is up there. If you know, please write in below.

Launch the slideshow below for a haphazard walkthrough of the market. Scroll down for some thoughts on my experience of it and to see what’s coming next.

No one who has been reading my blog for a while will be surprised to read that I love going to fish markets when I travel. And so it’s not a revelation that I enjoyed visiting Noryangjin Market. I will say though that while it was interesting to see everything that was on offer, the experience as a whole didn’t have the energy of the Sassoon Dock fish market—or even the fish markets in Goa (in Assolna or Margao) or Delhi (in Chittaranjan Park) or Hong Kong. I’m not saying that I prefer more aromatic or seemingly less sanitary markets, just that this felt more sterile in comparison. Of course, I’ll be back anyway when I’m next in Seoul. If you do go, I would highly recommend going during the day on a weekend. The market had even less energy on the Monday night visit.

Alright, my next food-related report will not be from our recent travels. On Tuesday I’ll have a report on our first restaurant meal after returning to Minnesota. No prizes for guessing where we went. I’ll be back to Seoul and Delhi later in the week.