This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
If you were to get directions to Hyundai-ok, they might read something like this. Head down the central alley of Nambu Market, past the shops selling cheap clothes, wicker baskets and Tupperware; turn right at the cafe advertising both hot and cold coffee; then go left at the junction where two ladies chop onions, sitting right outside a restaurant serving blood sausage. Or you could just follow the sound of hammering.
When I arrive at the restaurant, two cooks stand at a metal counter enthusiastically pounding mounds of garlic with meat tenderisers, adding the pulp along with sliced leeks and chilli to steaming pans behind them. It’s barely 9am but already the main service is over — there are just a few customers inside as I take my place at the counter alongside guide Dan Grey, hard to miss in his bright red T-shirt. “Squid or no squid?” he asks. “That’s the only choice here.” Opting for ‘no squid’, I’m swiftly presented with a small metal pot containing a lightly steamed egg; a platter of kimchi, shrimp paste, seaweed and pickled turnip; and a large black ceramic bowl of broth, with beansprouts and rice bobbing beneath the surface.
Taking my cue from the two women happily slurping at a nearby table, I tuck in, first pouring the egg into the broth. It’s so rich in flavour it borders on meaty, and spicy enough that my nose starts to run after a few spoonfuls. “You can see why we call it haejang-guk — hangover soup,” says Dan. “The heat takes away the headache and the steam is like a sauna for the face.”
Open between 6am and 2am in Jeonju’s main market, Hyundai-ok has been reviving the locals with beansprout soup since 1979. It’s a formula that needs no tweaking, as the queues that form at 7am every weekend attest. The stalls in, and spilling out of, the market also show a solid commitment to tradition: there are ones devoted to pak choi, pig’s head soup and steamed snails, and workshops producing great slabs of pressed tofu and vats of sesame oil.
This is a city, though, that has no fear of tinkering with favourite recipes. Jeonju sits in the country’s rice bowl, surrounded by waterlogged paddy fields and enormous polytunnels, and has a long-held reputation for the quality of its produce. Dan, a Korean-American food expert and guide for the tour company Intrepid Travel, is on a mission to show me how the city likes to use that produce to shake things up a bit. “It’s the city that Koreans go to for food,” he tells me, “but it’s always been a bit rebellious, a bit individual. Whenever there’s an election, they always seem to vote a different way to the rest of country.”
A short walk from the main market, Gajok Hoegwan is a case in point. Like Hyundai-ok, the restaurant has a single dish down to a fine art: bibimbap. Essentially, it’s rice mixed with vegetables and has been eaten in some form in Korea for centuries — a way to use leftovers to create a cheap meal. Gajok Hoegwan, however, has elevated it to new levels. In its first-floor dining room, I find a table by windows covered with traditional paper screens, joining small groups of friends chatting over the clattering and clinking coming from the kitchen.
A tray of 12 side dishes appears first: garlic stems with mushrooms, dried turnip, pickled green plums, candied sweet potatoes and anchovies with gochujang (red chilli paste) among them. The main event arrives in a softly gleaming brass bowl: an artistic ensemble of rice, carrots, cucumber, spinach, fiddlehead greens, gochujang and sliced raw beef. The rice has been steamed in oxtail broth, the beef marinated with sesame, ginger and garlic, the gochujang made to a secret recipe. It’s certainly like no leftovers I’ve ever cobbled together. Delicately mixed with metal chopsticks, it’s a comforting, fiery blend where each perfectly balanced ingredient takes equal footing.
Opened in 1979 by chef Kim Nyun-im, Gajok Hoegwan is now run by her daughter Kim Yang-mi, a cheerful woman in jeans and Crocs who comes over to chat as I eat. The intricacy of the dish is explained when she tells me her mother was inspired by the unique place her city holds in the country’s history books. Jeonju was the hometown of the royal Joseon dynasty, who ruled the wider region between 1392 and 1910.
Kim Nyun-im took that culinary heritage and added her own stamp to the recipe, perfecting it over many years. “Bibimbap is a traditional food in this area, but this is Joseon style,” Kim Yang-mi explains, gesturing at the side dishes and brass bowls. “My mother wanted to reintroduce the culture into the cuisine — serve the right food in the right location.”
Many others have sought to reinvent the dish since Kim Nyun-im first started dabbling. If you wish to try bibimbap baguettes and bibimbap croquettes, which come in plastic wrappers ready to be heated in the microwave, you can stroll a few hundred metres southeast to Jeonju Hanok Village, a collection of 800 traditional buildings restored over the past 15 years. For bibimbap served in a waffle, you’ll have to head further east to a cafe on the sloping lanes of Jaman Mural Village, whose houses are daubed in artworks ranging from a woman sitting wistfully on a crescent moon to a dragon swishing an impressive tail.
None of these variations is likely to impress a Joseon emperor, but they certainly please the steady stream of local families and visitors who wander the streets of the hanok village, peering into its temples, shrines, shops and museums, each marked by distinctive clay roof tiles and wooden rafters. It’s immediately apparent how important food is to the city here: it’s everywhere. Friends chat under the branches of Korean pine trees, making their way through bags of water parsley dumplings. Children clutch their parents’ hands, holding long sticks of speared marshmallows in their other, sticky palms. Teenage girls sit on benches trying not to spill chicken on to the silk hanbok dresses they’ve rented for informal photo shoots around the lanes. There are traditional teahouses serving aromatic blends in ceremonies the Joseon would recognise, and modern cafes serving great bowls of shaved ice topped with matcha ice cream, brownie chunks, mint leaves and pine sprigs.
On the edge of the village, my final stop is in a nondescript building with none of the architectural flourishes of the hanok. Here, Choi In-duk and her sister Choi Jeon-won serve a new spin on another cherished Jeonju culinary tradition: a makgeolli session. The activity — involving low-strength makgeolli (a type of fermented rice wine of 6-9% ABV) accompanied by small dishes — is centred around the Samchun-dong District south west of the city and tends to see groups of friends moving from bar to bar, drinking generally low-quality makgeolli and eating generally low-quality snacks. At the sisters’ industrial-styled Yetchon Makgeolli restaurant, the experience is still squarely rooted in the convivial, but the quality is anything but low.
Sisters Choi In-duk and Choi Jeon-won serve a new spin on a cherished Jeonju culinary tradition at the Yetchon Makgeolli restaurant.
Photograph by Mark Parren Taylor
Tucking her black hair behind her ears, Choi In-duk raises a brass teapot of Yetchon’s own-make makgeolli and pours it into bowls, telling me, “If people come to Jeonju, they know they have to drink makgeolli. The water is very pure here, and that makes better quality.” The resulting drink is cloudy and uniquely creamy, with the slight tang of blue cheese. One kettle of makgeolli costs just 3,300 KRW (£1.85) and comes with enough dishes to keep a group of four going for quite some time: among them, chicken with wild sesame seeds, mussels in leek broth, braised pork, kimchi pancakes and soy-marinated crab. It’s less beer and snacks than a wine-paired feast. “I want to care for my guests,” Choi In-duk continues. “And the way I do that is with honest, high-quality food and honest, high-quality drinks.”
It could be a philosophy for Jeonju itself — and with a line-up of chefs ever ready to build on the tradition, no visitor is likely to leave feeling neglected.
Published in the South Korea guide, distributed with the November 2024 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).
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