Restaurant: Fish Market & Seafood Dinner in Korea
Cuisine: Korean/Seafood
Last visited: April 7, 2010
Location: Seoul, Korea
Address: Fish Market
Price Range: Varies – Market price
1: Poor 2: OK 3: Good 4: Very good 5: Excellent 6: Tres Excellent!!
Food: n/a
Service: n/a
Ambiance: 6
Overall: 5
Additional comments:
- Seafood only
- Relatively inexpensive fresh seafood
- Very fresh
- Take home, or eat at restaurant in market
- Tons of options
- Prices vary daily
- Self selection
- Me eating LIVE octopus video
**Recommendations: Live octopus, sashimi
Welcome to the fish market in Korea! This is definitely a must try when you’re in Korea…but only if you’re into seafood. If you’re not it’s still an nice place to visit because it’s still considered a tourist attraction.
Familiar to locals and to tourists this is the place to get the freshest seafood. VERY fresh.
You select what you want and the prices vary from vendor to vendor. You can bargain so test out a couple vendors to get the best deal. I was with locals so I was lucky to have them do all the communicating. Prices also depend on market prices and what’s available that day…but you can ALWAYS bargain here.
This is the fisherman hacking away at the fish we ordered. He beat it with his stick while it was flopping around on the floor.
He got it!
I got to hold the stick…it was pretty horrid after seeing it whacked on the floor…and knowing that was my sashimi.
How much fresher can you get?! He’s cutting the sashimi immediately…that was the same fish I was holding.
THIS is what I came to try! The famous LIVE octopus…a delicacy in Korea! A MUST TRY if you’re in the fish market. Try only if you dare…the thing is pretty scary.
Okay…so it’s not kind of scary…it’s really scary. The ocotpus suctions onto her hands and just hold on and the tentacles just start flinging around like mad…it looks like giant spider. It’s fast too!
Even upside down it still moves like crazy…the tentacles almost want to reach out to you. We bought a slightly smaller version of him because it was only 3 of us eating. They vary in size.
After you pick all the seafood you bring it into one of the restaurants located inside the fish market. You can bring it home to cook yourself or have it there. We ate at this one.
It was super busy and it was already 9pm or so. The restaurants are all really casual with plastic tablecloths. Besides paying for the seafood you purchased at the market you have to pay a service charge at the restaurant. This includes preparation of the food you bought.
They also service rice, noodles, wine and other things you can purchase at the restaurant to serve with or along side your seafood.
On the table:
The traditional Korean condiments for our seafood. A sweet and spicy soy bean paste sauce and some lettuce, chillies and garlic. Also some wasabi for the sahsimi.
I think this was a fermented prune wine? It was very sweet and very strong.
BBQ Prawns - 3/6
- It was necessarily the best tasting prawns ever, but it was fresh and cheap
**Sashimi – 4/6
- I’m not even sure what kind of fish this was. My friends did the ordering and I don’t understand Korean.
- This was the same fish I was holding in the picture above…can’t get any fresher than this!
- Besides eating it alone or with wasabi it’s common to use the sashimi and make lettuce wraps with them. This is common in Korea – lettuce almost serves as a condiment.
- I topped it off with that fermented soybean chili sauce. Love that stuff! It’s very salty and more sweet than it is spicy.
**Live Octopus - 3/6
- This was the whole reason I wanted to visit the fish market! I had to try the super traditional Korean delicacy – LIVE octopus!
- They cut up the tentacles but the octopus doesn’t die. The nerves are still alive so when they serve it the octopus more or less squirms and crawls off your plate. We had to collect them with our chopsticks and toss them back on the plate. They eventually slow down after like 20 minutes or even longer sometimes.
- It’s definitely acquired. It actually doesn’t have much flavour, but it sure has texture.
- It’s super slimy and chewy and the tentacles stick to your tongue, lips, chopsticks and basically anything it can grasp on to.
- Before you eat it you can dip it in this salty sauce…it’s almost pure salt with a little soy so a little goes a long way.
- It’s important to chew the crap out of them because the tentacles stick like crazy and people have died from it…rare case, but it’s happened before.
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