Saengseon-gui, Grilled Fish Street, Dongdaemun

To an outsider with no access to a Korean home, food here consists entirely of the street food and restaurants you can find. Most menus are in Korean, inaccessible to most foreign visitors and new arrivals, making exploring what is available all the more difficult. So, to the unexperienced, Korean food appears limited to the most common restaurant types: BBQ variations 삼겹살 (samgyeopsal, pork belly), 갈비 (galbi, marinated pork or beef ribs) or 오리 (Ori, duck); fried chicken; bibimbap; street side 떡볶이 (ttoekbokki, rice cakes in spicy sauce) and deep fried fare; and the occasional 국수 (guksu, noodles) or 만두 (mandu, dumplings) house. But most of the above isn’t even really considered a meal here, they’re simply snacks or ‘drinking food’. Something to eat while you hang out with friends and soju and beer.

A proper Korean ‘meal’ is a many dished affair. Rice, soup, some meat and a variety of banchan all appear essential, to my non-expert eye, for a dinner to be considered a meal. It can be a fancy plate tetris affair, essential to fit the multitude of dishes on the table, or a modest but no less enjoyable experience.

The latter is what I encountered recently when my nose led me down a dank back alley in the middle of Seoul. Dongdaemun is a mixed-up neighbourhood, famous as a bargain shopping destination, but also home to, and named for, the ancient “Great East Gate”, and contains a conspicuous Russian area, worth a visit if for novelty value, and borscht, only. This back alley, close to Dongdaemun market, is lined with eateries, one side is all grilled fish, the other serves a whole chicken soup dish called Dakhanmari. But forget about birds, that smoky char-grill smell is coming from the seafood side.

Each grilled fish eatery here is fronted with an outdoor charcoal grill, pick one that looks well tended. There is likely to be no English menu but ordering is easy. Just indicate the variety of fish you want and how many servings, then go inside the smokey room and sit down, or, be adventurous and take your pick by pointing at the Korean menu inside. The place I visited was busy, and not a place for lingering. Smoke from the grill wafts inside, and the decor is all laminated tables, paper napkins, hard chairs and bright lights. But the service is friendly and swift and the food, exceptional. A spread of banchan, four or five, steaming rice, 된장 (doengjang, fermented soybean paste, similar to miso) soup, and a plate full of grilled fish. Now THIS is a meal.

The servings of 삼치 (samchi, Japanese Spanish Mackerel) and 꽁치 (kongchi, Mackerel Pike) are generous. The salty fish is infused with smokiness from the charcoal grill and are tender and fatty. Salty smoky fish, spicy sour kimchi, sesame oiled beansprouts, firey perilla kimchi, somehow these strong flavours evaporate the usually mediocre neutrality of the rice, making it taste like nutty super rice. It is near impossible to eat this food quickly, the time and effort it takes to separate fish flesh from bone with thin Korean chopsticks forces you to savour each mouthful. If there was ever an example of beauty in simplicity, this is it. I left the restaurant on a high, maybe I’d inhaled too much smoke but I felt as though I’d just had a fish epiphany. It was as though this was the first time I had ever tasted charcoal grilled fish, like a virgin heroin high.

And then, as we paid I was shocked, I thought I heard the price wrong, my Korean being worse than bad. But no, this meal, almost my first proper legitimate Korean meal, this meal which caused my fish-iphany, cost only 12,000won. To put this in perspective, we later went to a cafe and two cups of tea cost more than the meal. I felt bad for paying so little for something so great, and I also worried about the origins of the fish, but the sheer deliciousness of the meal overwhelms all downsides.

My advice come dinner time: ignore the drinking food and at least once, follow your nose down a dank smoky alley and eat a proper meal, eat some grilled fish.

Saengseon-gui (생선 구이), Grilled Fish Alley, Dongdaemun.

Order:
Samchi (삼치; Japanese Spanish Mackerel)
Kongchi (꽁치; Mackerel Pike)

Cost: about 6,000won per serving of fish.
Total for two: 12,000won (~$10AU)

More photos of Dongdaemun on flickr