Last weekend I posted a look at my visits to Seoul’s famous Noryangjin Fish Market, complete with an excessive slideshow of images. Noryangjin is a massive fish market, yes, but it is not just a fish market. The market also contains a large number of seafood restaurants on the second floor where you can have things you bought at the market cooked up to your specifications or where you can order off a menu as at a regular restaurant. I ate at the market on both visits, accompanied on each occasion by groups of my students. Here now is a report on those two meals, one a weekend lunch in February and the other a weekend dinner in March. As you’ll see, the experiences were not identical. And you’ll be glad to know that together they add up to another excessive slideshow of images. You’re welcome.

As I noted in last week’s report, the weekend is a far better time to visit the Noryangjin fish market than a weeknight. This is true both if you are buying fish and if you are looking to eat there. It’s certainly true if all you are doing is visiting. This is because the market is far more lively on the weekends. Whether you’re looking to buy fish/seafood to take home or to have it cooked in the market, or whether you just want to see the market, weeknights will have less action all around. Or at least so I am extrapolating from one visit on a Sunday morning and one visit on a Monday evening.

On the Sunday morning the market was full, with every vendor in full cry. We walked around the ground floor slowly, seeing everything that was on offer and making notes of things we would buy to take away after lunch. We then made our way up to the second floor which also has a large number of fish and shellfish vendors (it’s also where the dry goods and marinated seafood sections of the market is). On the second floor we bought live fish from one vendor to be turned into hwe (the Korean analog of Japanese sashimi) and shellfish from another. All of this was taken to Choong Nam, a very large restaurant on the second floor, by a runner who was hovering near the vendors. Most of the vendors have relationships with particular restaurants. We told the restaurant how we wanted things prepared and then sat down in a private room and ate it.

It isn’t quite that simple, of course. First you have to buy the fish. And even if you want to eat hwe, it doesn’t have to be made from live fish. Most of the vendors sell recently prepared hwe platters as well. If, like us, you’re bent on buying live fish, you first have to know what the fish in the tanks are. Most vendors have enough English to assist you but you can also find guides online that tell you the Korean names of fish. We, of course, had the good fortune of having a native Korean speaker in our group. For our hwe platter we selected a flounder, a rockfish/snapper and a (portion of a) yellowtail.

After agreement was reached on the price, the live fish were pulled out of the tanks and summarily dispatched via sharp blows to the head. The flounder and rockfish were quickly cleaned, gutted and sliced up. The yellowtail we were only taking a little over a third of. Our portion was removed and sliced up and the rest was reserved—presumably to be made into one of those prepared platters of hwe. The vendor also very kindly added a large piece of salmon into the hwe platter as “service”: a common practice in Korean markets whereby if you buy enough things vendors throw in something extra.

Now if you’re buying live fish and have already reached an understanding with the representative of the restaurant you’re going to be eating it at, you don’t need to stand around and watch the unpleasantness. But there’s also something to be said for not ducking it and also for watching a craftsperson at work. At any rate, most of us chose to watch the dispatching and processing of the three live fish. The flounder and rockfish were quick; the yellowtail took a little longer. The fish jerks around for quite a while after it is killed. This might give you a bit of a turn—as it initially did me—as it seems as though it is being cut up while still alive, but that’s not really the case: it’s due to spinal and stretch reflexes that continue for a while after the fish is killed.

Anyway, the killing of the fish aside, it was an interesting experience for the students to see them being sliced and arrayed, quickly and expertly, into platters of hwe. These went to the restaurant with us. We also asked for the carcasses of the flounder and rockfish to be sent along so they could be turned into maeuntang (spicy fish bone soup/stew) at the end of the meal. We also purchased some shellfish from another vendor adjacent to the live fish vendor. We got some Korean scallops and a lot of clams; I also could not resist getting a few penis fish to try. This is actually a species of sea worm but I think you’ll agree that penis fish is a more accurate name.

At the restaurant the platters of hwe were first to be served. The restaurant provided lettuce, ssamjang and various other dipping sauces for eating it with. As we were making it all disappear, the steamed shellfish and penis fish arrived. The latter had also been lightly steamed and cut into strips. We were told to dip them into soy sauce and chow down. They were not universally popular: the texture is quite rubbery and the flavour is extremely briny with more than a little iodine in the mix. I quite liked them but I don’t know that I’d want to eat a whole lot of them either. The shellfish and the hwe, however, were universally popular. The star of the meal, however, was the maeuntang, a large pot of which was set down on a burner on the table. Richly fishy, herbal and spicy, it went down a treat with some steamed rice.

At the end of the meal you pay the restaurant a per head price for your seats and whatever their posted charges are for making what you purchased in the way that you asked for it to be made. Of course, you don’t have to do this. You can bypass the market purchasing step altogether and just treat the restaurant as a regular restaurant and order off their menu. This is mostly what we did on my second visit to the market.

As noted earlier, the market was far less busy on a Monday evening. I didn’t have my personal Korean speaker with me but couldn’t resist buying some things from the market to take to a restaurant anyway. No live fish on this occasion: I only purchased a mess of razor clams, more Korean scallops and some large shrimp. This was all on the ground floor of the market and a restaurant rep who’d glommed onto us at the first purchase stop accompanied us to all the others and then took us up to the restaurant.

The restaurant turned out to be named Dragon Palace and was quite a bit smaller than Choong Nam. Unlike at Choong Nam their rates for preparation of market purchases are listed in English on the wall so it was easier to navigate than Choong Nam would have been on my own. We asked for the razor clams to be steamed; the restaurant recommended getting half of them done as a stir-fry. We got the scallops steamed and the shrimp salt-grilled. From their menu we ordered a platter of hwe and a large pot of haemultang or spicy seafood stew. The hwe and the shellfish arrived first and the haemultang was set on a burner after that. We enjoyed the shellfish we’d bought—particularly the recommended stir-fried razor clams (which seemed a very Chinese dish)—but frankly, it would have been enough to just get the hwe and the haemultang off the menu. The haemultang was chockfull of all kinds of shellfish anyway.

Alright, for a visual representation of everything described above, make your way through the slideshow below. Scroll down to see what’s coming next.

I haven’t mentioned price here because it’s going to be very specific to what you choose to do. If you choose to buy live fish and/or shellfish from the market a lot is going to depend on the prices you negotiate or get. The restaurants have their preparation rates marked and they’re generally reasonable. The more live things you get, the more expensive your meal will get—especially if crab or other large crustaceans are involved. You can, however, as I note, have a very good experience just treating the restaurants as regular restaurants.

Alright, that’s Noryangjin Fish Market in the rear view mirror (though we will certainly return on our next visit to Seoul). I do have another fish market report to come from Busan but I’ll wait a couple of weeks to post that. Next week’s Seoul restaurant reports will include another of our fine dining meals and a Korean barbecue meal. Before that though I’ll have a Twin Cities Thai report on Tuesday.