Didn’t have time to checkout duty free in the airport and our flight is a bit too early for stores to be open.
Honestly, I have no idea what I’m looking for. Dinner at Jungshik had Dom. P P2 by the glass for $195 krw a glass… pretty reasonable.
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Ah,
I was thinking out 10 am flight was too early for stores to be open, but some stores open at 6-7am as well as one that is 24h
Will be there soon, just made a lunch reservation at A Flower Blossom on the Rice. Looks intriguing, and is in the right general area for where we’ll be at lunch time.
It’s a great place with more temple food inspired cooking. Last time i was there, they sold wine from Koreas only ‘natural’ winery, Lesdom, which is worth trying, but it’s lightyears away from the wines of Japan.
They have an extensive traditional liquour list, that however is worth getting lost in.
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Shinsegae Department Store, Centum City
Has 2 stores I could tell that had liquor. One that was for liquor and tobacco and one for wine and liquor. The one with tobacco products was small. The wine + liquor was larger and had the soju with the ginseng root in it. They do offer pickup at the airport meaning… you buy it at whatever Shinegae store and you can pick it up at the Incheon Airport.
They do ask more questions than other stores. They will ask you when your flights in/out are, show your ticket, as well as your passport. Most stores just scan the passport and that’s it. At Shinsegae they input your flight number and ask you to verify it.
Lotte Mall had 1200ml maekgeolli for 1390 krw… wth.
I hate to say it, but a lot of the highly rated foods that are popular because they are cheap… are “okay”.
We rather spend more. Don’t get me wrong I love the 1000-5000 krw street food, but they are not my favorite foods of the trip. Maybe the Siat Hotteok in Busan for 2000 lives up to the hype.
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I can not stress enough to shy away from Lotte Department stores and search for the real deal.
The Makgeolli sold in airports will be pasteurised to allow for travel. True Makgeolli sold in plastic bottles in convenience stores is ‘alive’ and has an expiration date.
Putting this link here for anyone coming soon searching for traditional alcohol. It’s a shop in Gangnam that hosts tastings and sells many different kinds of sool. |서울에서 안동소주를 만나볼 수 있는 곳 전통주 갤러리 : 네이버 블로그
As you’ve discovered, makgeolli is normally one of the cheapest drinks in Korea! And, as @MadsW mentioned, a good portion of makgeolli is sold pasteurized. Basically, assume that any makgeolli that’s on a shelf and not refrigerated is pasteurized, because the shelf life of unpasteurized makgeolli is 2-3 weeks, refrigerated. Also note that the majority of makgeolli is sweetened aspartame and I’ve always tried to avoid those. I’m less dogmatic about makgeolli containing wheat flour but generally find wheat-free ones more pleasant and flavorful.
My go-to recommendation for unpasteurized, aspartame-free, rice-only makgeolli for the uninitiated is Neurin Maeul which is pretty widely available at large grocery chains and also has a brew pub in Gangnam where you can taste their makgeolli at different stages of aging. It’s a bit out of ways from the tourist sites but if you really want to do a deep dive into makgeolli and taste as many as possible in one sitting, Matgeori in Seoul is a great place and the owner is super passionate about makgeolli. Not sure if the owner speaks good English but you can probably get by with Google Translate these days.
As for food in general - the fine dining scene in Korea has exploded in the last decade but I get the sense the bulk of the English language content on the internet about dining in Korea is generated by younger visitors who don’t have the spending power to explore the $$$-$$$$ level of restaurants on the regular and end up focusing on street food and casual dining which are more approachable. I enjoy nibbling on street food as a guilty pleasure too once in a while but wouldn’t be able to do it all the time (too much grease, salt, and sugar).
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Good tip and explanation! Hope others get to read it before arrival here.
And yes love my 순대 & 떡볶이 but no more than once a week.
All of this fascinated and inspired me to read more about makgeolli. The wikipedia discussion is actually pretty decent. Makes me wonder if anyone in the states is brewing craft makgeolli, since I suspect that is the only real way to enjoy something here that’s alive with a 14-day shelf life.
Yes! I’m a big fan of what Alice Jun is doing at Hana Makgeolli in Brooklyn. Not only are their makgeollis unpasteurized and unadulterated, they’re also undiluted (i.e., not cut with water) which is rare even in Korea.
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Just a heads up carry-on liquid limits to 1L per person after security.
So I was able to put 2 bottles in my checked bag and we each bought 1 bottle passed security. Tax free kiosks are relatively easy to navigate. Getting your refund on the other side of security go the employee window for Yen/USD. The digital kiosk only does Korean won refund. There is a good amount of stuff available in Incheon so no worries if you don’t pick anything up until you fly.
They also had Johnny Walker on “sale” as well as had plenty of Japanese whiskey.
I’ve sent friends youtube videos of how to make it and they made it following the videos. It’s very straight forward if you actually follow the steps.
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lol, brought back some Cognac infused with ginseng. My Korean friend is like “you trying to have a baby?”
Anything with ginseng he’s like “you want to boom boom?”
A quick report back on a day and a half in Seoul. We really enjoyed the neighborhoods with some remaining traditional style houses and architecture - Seochon Hanok and Bukchon Hanok - and did a food walking tour around Namdaemun, which isnt particularly interesting as an area, but we did have a string of very good casual food stops. My favorite was the wang mandu (large dumplings) at Gamekol Son, where you squeeze by the cramped dumpling making kitchen to get to the upstairs dining room. Also enjoyed the various little spots nearby for some really good housemade kimchi, bibimbap, clam and mussels with thick noodles soup, korean fried chicken and beer, kimchi pancake, then street stalls for glass noodles, egg bread, “potato tornado” (basically fair food for anyone from the states, a spiral fried potato, addictively good!), red bean donuts, honey seed and also golden sweet potato hotteok (thick pancakes on the griddle, we didn’t try the deep fried version). Not a bad bite, and somehow we managed to not be TOO stuffed! We had what I assume is a cheap mass market makgeolli with our kimchi pancake, Jangsoo 6, and really enjoyed it. Walked in an LP Bar I had read about called Saechon Blues, and it was super cute, but the wine/beer/spirits menu was not at all interesting to me (really nothing Korean, lots of cheap Aussie wines, a strange mix of decent American craft beer with things like Delerium Tremens mixed in, basic western spirits) and the staff didn’t really speak English, so we left : (
Next day we explored Gyeongbokgung Palace, which is stunning, and fun to see all the hordes of (mostly non-Korean Asian) visitors dressed up in traditional clothes posing for photos everywhere. Food and drink highlight of our short visit was lunch at A Flower Blossom on the Rice, a Michelin bib gourmand and green award winner down a cute little alley in Insadong. I loved it - it was giving me vibes of something like Zuni Cafe or the upstairs at Chez Panisse thirty years ago - a place on the forefront of focusing on local quality ingredients prepared in mostly traditional but slightly more elegant ways. It seems this is an outlier in Seoul thus far based on everything I read about it. On the drink front, we tried a sampler of rice wine, soju, and gin, plus a bottle of makgeolli. Most of what we tried was excellent, and the local Buja Gin was really fantastic, very complex herbal profile. I loved the Haechang raw makgeolli (they call it a “medicinal liquor”!?) from Haenam-gun, Jeollanum-do - great body to match the acidity, very tropical, veering a bit towards a complex raw sake flavor profile to my very novice palate. Also had a Jeju Omegi rice wine and an Ido Soju.
Goodness there is some traffic! We were docked in Incheon so had to go back and forth each day, and it was between 90minutes to 2hours each way (for something like 25miles).
And a bit of thread drift - we were in Jeju the day before and had a fantastic lunch at Sukseongdo which is among the more celebrated Jeju Black Pork restaurants. It exceeded the hype… the flavor and tenderness of the dry-aged pork was really special, cooked on the hot coal grill at our table. We did (I think!) the roughly 40 day aged bone-in ribeye and the 30 day pork shoulder (my wife wasn’t into going with the pork belly). The meat is just exceptional in every way, and then the variety of condiments takes it over the top - a wasabi and herb spread, an anchovy sauce, a gochujang-ish sauce, white kimchi, various pickled seaweeds and fern. Washed it down with the really nice local Hallasan sochu and a beer.
Heading to Busan tomorrow…
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Good to hear! The weather is unfortunately quite cold for the season these days…
Enjoy Busan!
While we were in our hotel and had the window open we heard a lot more cursing on the streets in Busan.
It made me and my wife laugh so hard that this guy was cursing so clearly and we were MANY stories high in our room. Sure, Busan is known for seafood but also jokbal and gukbap. You will find many gukbap places 24h so no need to time budget that during the day.
We left the day the yellow dust got extremely bad… with the doctors and now medical professors striking it was something that was on our minds.
Sidenote: I tried to not over eat too much… I can eat a lot… like I can accidentally eating 10,000 calories a day if I don’t pay attention…
I gained 10 lbs 
in Korea while walking 20k steps and going to the gym.
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