South Korea 2022: Namdaemun Market & Ikseondong Hanok Village

day 8

Just a random note but bless Korea for having many easy to find washrooms right in the subway system because we’ve had to look for them many times now and if you know you can easily find one in the station… love that. Our first stop was yet another market but we were looking for hotteok because we weren’t able to get them last time.

NAMDAEMUN MARKET

This place had to be popular for hotteok because before they even opened, there was already a line. And they were just a small stall/cart at the end of a street… though walking down the street to get there, there were lots of other shops & stalls selling other foods and lots of shops selling tons of hats or shoes - things like that. Honestly we only came here for one thing and one thing only (lol)

Like I said earlier, there was a line even before they opened. Some people bought like bags full of them - I was assuming maybe they were feeding a group of people? Or maybe they just liked it THAT much, they needed to eat 10 of them… I wish I took a photo of the inside (I swear I did but I can’t find it) just to show you what was inside of each… but we hot one savory and one sweet.
The outside skin is golden brown and crunchy but the layer just beneath is soft and chewy. The savory one was filled with glass noodles and a bunch of vegetables like carrots and green onion. They were shallow frying them fresh (of course) right at the stall, so when you bite into one be careful of the steam that’ll come out. The sweet one was a sugary syrup on the inside and it was filled with a mixture of nuts - got to be extra careful of this one, especially with the molten sugar. As you can expect, this one was really sweet but offset a bit by the “pancake-y” outside layer and the nuts gave it a crunchy bite. This one was also tasty!
My mom’s favourite was definitely the savory one, she liked the noodles and the flavour - I think she’s just used to things like this being savory. Honestly, I think all our favourites was the savory one but my sister and I also enjoyed the sweet one… but just slightly behind the savory one. They were pretty cheap too I think both were just about or under $6. You can definitely full yourself up from just eating 2 - a cheap eats for sure. I do recommend you get one of each to try, then it’ll also be like your main meal and then a dessert (lol). Giving these a 9/10.

We walked around a bit after eating. I think this place (I cant remember honestly) was home to a big building of kitchenware. There were like floors and floors of plates, cups, utensils, etc. There were shelves and shelves of them too, I was scared that one wrong turn and I was going to knock a bunch of them over. If you’re in the market for this kind of stuff and are willing to lug it back to your country without it breaking - this is the place!

IKSEONDONG HANOK VILLAGE

All over TikTok you have so many creators talk about Ikseondong Hanok Village because there are so many restaurants and cafés everywhere! And it’s kind of a maze in there - you make a couple turns and you don’t even know where you were and some lead to dead ends (lol). There are also small shops selling clothing and accessories in between too. It’s quite a unique little area to explore.

The hotteok from this morning was only a small snack, we only got those 2 to share between all 3 of us because we were going to look for somewhere to eat here. There was this really popular hotpot/shabu shabu place within the village area but when we got there, there already was a line of people! Plus, it had one of those waiting queue machines that you needed to input your phone number in… another reminder to try to get a SIM card for the phone number in Korea. We were walking around and around trying to find a place all of us were interested in and didn’t have that waiting list system and we saw this one French place. Ok, you’re probably thinking why are you in Korea eating French food? But don’t you get tired of a certain cuisine if you eat it 24/7? No? Ok maybe that just us. But their menu looked good and when we walked in to ask for a seat of 3, they said ok but it would be a few minutes wait and that we did.

We ordered 3 different dishes and a side of garlic bread. Right off the bat I can tell you with 100% stay far, far, far away from the “garlic bread”. The first picture I provided - you see that thing on the top left corner? Yeah, they called THAT garlic bread (note - a couple of us already took a few so that wasn’t the amount but yes that’s what it looked like). I’m not sure if garlic bread truly is a French specialty, I’ll give them that but really?? Guys please, that is NOT garlic bread. I think there was a total of 5 tiny little crusty-ass slices and that was like $5… (lol). So again stay away. PLUS, I swear the people in the kitchen were French… no I couldn’t hear them speaking French but they… looked like it? Anyway… moving on

The first dish is a seafood spaghetti with white wine sauce. It had mussels, shrimp, clams, and scallops. This dish right here? SO, SO good. The noodles were perfectly cooked. The seafood was perfect too - not gummy or rubbery, had a nice bite and crunch for the shrimp. The sweetness of the seafood - you know the brine - and the slight bitterness from wine, when they were cooked together made the most delicious sauce for the pasta. It was so, so delicious. Oh my god. A definite 10/10 for the pasta dish.

The next dish we got was a stewed beef dish (there’s an actual name for it but I can’t remember). It was cooked with carrots & onions, it had mash potatoes in the middle and had crispy sweet potatoes & lotus root. This one was definitely a hearty dish with the chunks of beef and the mash potatoes. It was a bit sweet - now that I’m thinking about it, are these dishes usually cooked with like… red wine? And then it gives you that sort of sweet flavour? Maybe. I’ll give this dish a 7/10? It was good but I’m usually more of a purely savory beef kind of person.

The last dish we got was a mushroom risotto. It was nice and creamy. The grains still had a bite to them but it wasn’t like undercooked. Mushrooms are just so good - they give this delicious umami flavour that nothing else really gives. A tiny bit of greens on top helped cut the heaviness of the dish. My only wish and I think would have really pushed this higher was if it was hotter… for some reason it came out slightly above room temperature. So with that, I give this an 8/10.

At this point, we haven’t had any coffee yet… so the next stop as you can guess - a café! There were so many that we saw on TikTok… Even as we were walking down the streets, we saw a lot of bakeries and cafés. But we decided to stop at the one with the famous train tracks - Nakwon.

This place had a cute little conveyer belt of desserts - though I don’t know if it was actually for use. It looked more for show or aesthetics. I ordered an iced caffe latte, my mom got the americano, and my sister ordered - I think it was some chestnut praline, I can’t remember. We also got a tiramisu as a dessert. The tiramisu wasn’t that great honestly, I suggest you skip on it. It seemed more like a cake that was inspired to be like tiramisu. What I mean by that is like the cakey layers didn’t taste like lady fingers, the espresso flavour (that the lady fingers SHOULD HAVE been dipped in) was non-existent. And the mascarpone kind of tasted like cream cheese and it wasn’t velvety smooth… so all around it wasn’t the best.

My caffe latte was decent. It wasn’t sweet which I’ve been enjoying so far but the coffee flavour wasn’t strong like all the other lattes I’ve tasted here so far. Yes, I know lattes are mostly milk but you’d at least expect your coffee to have… a coffee essence to it? The americano though was pretty tasty - that one had a strong flavour. My sisters drink, I only really had a sip of it but it was quite sweet and the drink wasn’t hot enough… I feel like this place was purely for aesthetic purposes - they might have better food and drink options? But the one’s we picked weren’t our favourite for sure.

As I said, this place is full of cafés and bakeries everywhere. You could totally spend a whole day here café hopping if you wanted. Some had very cool interiors and like gardens inside - Toronto could NEVER.

I can’t remember what we had for dinner and I don’t have any photos of it… Before we went home though, I kept seeing the same ice-cream shop serving up this soy ice-cream. I decided to get one. It wasn’t the smoothest ice-cream as you can see but it was still creamy and it had a slight nuttiness that comes from soy - pretty tasty!

At this point, we had been walking all day today, so we were pretty exhausted and ready to head to bed. So, stay tunned for the next post!

-Thomas