Korea's food culture doesn't live in restaurants alone. It lives in the hands of masters who have spent decades perfecting a single ferment, in the temples where meals are acts of meditation, in the tidal flats where the sea gives up its harvest twice a day. At Kim'C Market, we have spent years building relationships with these people — the kind that take time, trust, and repeated return visits to earn. The Culinary Odyssey to Korea is what those relationships made possible: an eight-day journey through the food soul of Korea, opening doors that don't open for most visitors.
This is the story of that journey — the one we ran in April 2026, and will run again before the year is out. It begins, as all honest food journeys through Korea should, before the city wakes up.
April 25, 2026 · 7:00 AM — The Plaza Seoul
The lobby of The Plaza Seoul looks out onto Deoksugung Palace and Seoul City Hall. On a clear April morning, with the light still low and the streets not yet busy, it's the kind of view that makes arriving somewhere feel like it means something.
We gathered at seven. Three guests this first morning — two chefs and one devoted Korean food enthusiast, all of them Americans who don't just eat Korean food but make it at home. These are people who source doenjang, who have their own kimchi crocks in their kitchens, who come to Korea not to be introduced to a cuisine but to go deeper into one they already love.
Ryan Kim, the founder of Kim'C Market, made the introductions — and from that first morning to the last, he was the one leading every room, translating not just language but context, explaining why a particular vendor mattered, why a specific ferment took forty years to make, why the door we were about to walk through wasn't one most visitors ever get to open. Within the hour, we were in a van heading for the river.
8:00 AM — Noryangjin: Breakfast at the Source
We chose to begin the Odyssey at a fish market for a reason that goes beyond spectacle. Korea is a country that takes seasonal eating seriously — more seriously, perhaps, than almost anywhere else.
The idea that what you eat should match where you are in the year isn't a lifestyle trend here; it's a baseline assumption woven into the culture, the language, even the way menus are written. A fish market in late April tells you exactly what season you're in, more honestly than any restaurant menu can. That felt like the right way to start.
Noryangjin Fish Market sits along the Han River near Noryangjin Station, and its origins trace back to the early twentieth century when fishermen and traders began gathering at this stretch of the riverbank to sell their catch directly. What grew from those informal transactions is now the largest wholesale seafood market in the Seoul metropolitan area — a sprawling, two-floor complex where the pre-dawn hours belong to the trade.
Before sunrise, it is chefs, restaurant buyers, and wholesale vendors who move through the wet concrete floors with practiced speed, calling out bids over tanks of live fish and piled shellfish. By mid-morning, the market opens to everyone else.
We arrived at eight, when the wholesale auction had finished but the energy hadn't. The tanks were still full. Spring was well represented: flatfish, mullet, cuttlefish, sea squirt — the season laid out in front of us, live and glistening.
Everyone pulled out their phones before their wallets. The fluorescent light bouncing off moving water, vendors calling out across the aisles, the smell of salt and cold sea — it's a lot to take in all at once, and it's supposed to be.
Moving through the stalls, each person reached for what called to them — the freshest catch of the season, chosen on instinct. Fermented skate — hongeo — aged to an ammonia intensity that divides people immediately and permanently. Silver hairtail from Jeju, grilled until the skin crisped. Thinly sliced flatfish and mullet for the raw fish. Sea squirt, briny and electric. King crab, steamed and then finished as fried rice. A fiery maeuntang to close.
One guest approached the hongeo with careful curiosity. Another reached for it again before the first piece was finished. The table filled in a way that felt both spontaneous and inevitable — people who know what they want, in a place that has exactly that. Everyone wrapped bites in perilla leaves with ssamjang and garlic, and chopsticks kept finding their way back to the kimchi between mouthfuls. For a table of first-timers, it didn't look like one.
The next market was hours away. You wouldn't have known it.
12:00 PM — Gyeongdong: The Market That Covers Everything
Gyeongdong Market is the largest traditional market by area in Seoul, and it operates on a scale that takes time to understand. Formed after the Korean War as farmers and traders from Gyeonggi and Gangwon provinces arrived by train at Cheongnyangni Station — carrying produce, medicinal herbs, mountain vegetables, and dried goods — it grew into something that now covers everything from fresh fruit to ginseng root to live octopus to antique kitchenware.
The name means simply "the market on the east side of Seoul."
The market divides roughly along Gosanja-ro road. To the east: Gyeongdong proper, with its produce stalls, dried goods, and the particular clamor of a working market that hasn't softened for anyone. To the west: Seoul Yangnyeongsi, the traditional herbal medicine district, where the air shifts the moment you cross the road — dense and woody, part forest floor, part apothecary.
Hanyak clinics operate side by side with stalls selling roots, bark, and things most visitors can't name. The district's history in this neighborhood runs back 600 years, to a Joseon-era institution called the Bojewon that treated the sick and fed the poor on this very ground.
Walk through it on a weekday morning and you'll pass elderly men carrying paper bags of dried herbs, clinics with handwritten treatment menus in the window, vendors who have occupied the same pavement for decades. It moves at its own pace, and that pace is not the rest of Seoul's.
This is also a market that has quietly reinvented itself without losing what it is. Younger generations have been finding their way here — drawn partly by Starbucks Gyeongdong 1960, built into the shell of a 1960s cinema with its original single-screen structure intact, and partly by a market that turns out to be far more alive than its age might suggest.
On any given afternoon, you'll find grandmothers haggling over dried mushrooms a few steps from university students eating in the basement food court. The contradictions sit easily together, the way they tend to in Seoul.
Before the free time began, we stopped at the Seoul Yangnyeongsi Museum of Korean Medicine. One of the afternoon's unexpected highlights was trying on the traditional uinyeo costume — the uniform worn by Korea's royal female physicians during the Joseon Dynasty. A small moment, but the kind that stays.
Then the guests were given time to explore on their own — no guide, no schedule, no planned stops. Just the instruction to go as deep into the market as curiosity would take them. They scattered.
Somewhere in the stalls, without any prompting, they found beondegi — silkworm pupae, steamed and served in small paper cups, a snack that has been a fixture of Korean markets and street corners for generations. They tried it. This is exactly the kind of thing that happens when no one is watching and the market is right there.
They came back with their hands full — dried jujubes, roasted peanuts, a Hallabong orange from Jeju, gangjeong, jeolpyeon rice cakes. The kind of market haul that happens when someone stops sightseeing and starts actually shopping: instinctive, joyful, a little excessive. Exactly right.
5:30 PM — Gwangjang: Where the Day Ends in Oil and Rice Wine
By late afternoon we made our way to Gwangjang Market — Korea's oldest continuously operating permanent market, established in 1905 by Korean merchants who pooled their capital to resist Japanese economic encroachment during the late Joseon period.
The name carries its own layered history: originally meaning "wide and long," it was renamed after the market relocated, the new characters meaning "to gather and preserve broadly." Unlike other markets of the era, it was built entirely on Korean capital, run by Koreans for Koreans, at a moment when that distinction mattered enormously. That history of resistance and persistence feels present even now.
The entrance to Gwangjang's food corridor announces itself before you reach it. The first thing you see is a long queue of people waiting for freshly fried chapssal kkwabaegi — twisted rice doughnuts, hot from the oil, chewy inside and crisp at the edges.
The smell of frying dough mixes with the frying oil of bindaetteok further in. It is the smell of Gwangjang, and there is no mistaking it.
We made our way to Bak-ga-ne, one of Gwangjang's most established bindaetteok stalls — recommended by food scholar Prof. Moon Jeong-hoon, whose knowledge of Korean food culture runs deep enough that when he points somewhere and says go there, you go.
The bindaetteok here is what you come for, but the house specialty that sets Bak-ga-ne apart is their samhap — a trio of bindaetteok, braised pork head meat, and brined oysters. The word samhap traditionally refers to the classic Jeolla combination of fermented skate, pork belly, and aged kimchi, but the owner reworked the concept into something entirely their own. It shouldn't work as well as it does.
Beyond the bindaetteok, Gwangjang delivers the full range of what a Korean market table can be — nakji tangnangi, the live octopus dish, arriving alongside yukhoe raw beef; tteokbokki; and more besides.
And then makgeolli — the traditional Korean rice wine, unfiltered, milky, lightly effervescent, served in brass bowls. We had seventeen varieties waiting for us that evening, guided by Prof. Moon himself. But that story deserves its own telling — and it's coming in the next post.
What a Day Like This Is For
Most food tours treat markets as atmosphere — a colorful stop before the real experience begins. For Kim'C Market, they are the foundation.
Korea's markets are where the seasons are most legible. A spring morning at Noryangjin tells you more about what Korean cooking is doing right now than any cookbook can. At Gyeongdong, the medicinal roots and bark tell you how the culture has answered the seasons for centuries — but so does the produce vendor who has sourced the same mountain vegetables from the same Gangwon farmer for thirty years, and the dried seafood stall where nothing comes with a label because none is needed.
These are people who have built their entire lives around knowing what is good and where it comes from. The stalls at Gwangjang have been frying the same pancake, pouring the same rice wine, feeding the same city through occupation, war, and transformation. These are not background. They are the source.
We know these places because we keep coming back. And we come back because we believe it matters — that the people who bring Korean food to your table have stood in the places where that food begins.
The Culinary Odyssey is what that history makes possible — doors that don't open for most visitors, to the people who actually make Korean food what it is.
The Culinary Odyssey continues from here. From Seoul's markets, the journey moves south — to a kimchi master's kitchen in Namyangju, a 1,400-year-old temple in the mountains of Jeollanam-do, and a woman whose fermented sauces Eric Ripert and Daniel Boulud once traveled hours to taste.
The next Odyssey departs later this year. The full program is at kimcmarket.com.
FAQ
What is Kim'C Market's Culinary Odyssey to Korea?
The Culinary Odyssey to Korea is a private, small-group journey built on years of direct relationships with Korea's most respected food masters — many of whom supply Kim'C Market directly. Over eight days, participants visit Master Ki Soon-do at her jangdokdae, cook with Venerable Jeong Kwan at her mountain hermitage, make kimchi with Master Lee Ha-yeon, and sit with ceramic masters and a fifth-generation tea grower. These are doors that don't open for most visitors. The program runs twice a year.
Is this tour only for chefs or food professionals?
No. What matters is a genuine interest in Korean food culture. The guests on this particular journey were Americans who make kimchi at home, source Korean fermented ingredients, and came to Korea not to be introduced to a cuisine but to go deeper into one they already love. Chefs, home cooks, and serious food enthusiasts are equally welcome.
What is hongeo, and why did you serve it at a fish market breakfast?
Hongeo is fermented skate, a traditional food from the Jeolla region of Korea. The fermentation process produces a pronounced ammonia intensity that divides people sharply — even among Koreans. We didn't plan it as a test, but it turned into one. One guest approached it cautiously. Another became an immediate convert. It's exactly the kind of thing a fish market morning is for.
What is the samhap at Bak-ga-ne?
Samhap refers to a traditional Korean practice of eating three complementary ingredients together — most famously the Jeolla combination of fermented skate, pork belly, and aged kimchi. The owner of Bak-ga-ne reinterpreted the concept as bindaetteok, braised pork head meat, and brined oysters. It's a combination unique to this stall, and one of the better arguments for not skipping Gwangjang's food corridor.
Who are the masters featured in the Culinary Odyssey?
Venerable Jeong Kwan (temple cuisine), Master Ki Soon-do (traditional fermented sauces, National Intangible Cultural Heritage No. 35), Master Lee Ha-yeon (kimchi), Prof. Moon Jeong-hoon (food scholar, Seoul National University), Master Lee Hyang-gu and Master Lee Eun-gu / Cheongpa (Icheon ceramics), and Joonyong Choi (5th generation tea grower, Bohyang Dawon). Several of these producers supply Kim'C Market directly.