This is a first-person YouTube travel vlog by Kara and Nate Buchanan documenting their last day in Seoul (uploaded by Nate Buchanan). They revisit a favorite restaurant serving a sizzling rice dish topped with fish eggs and multiple side dishes, then walk through a shopping market (named in-chunk as Num Daemon Market) before visiting the large Quang Jang food market. At the food market they sample several street foods—dumpling soup (hand-cut fresh noodles), a cold sweet rice drink, gimbap (compared to sushi/"PB&J" of Korea), and a thick, crispy savory Korean pancake—while commenting on flavors, textures, and the market atmosphere.
Chapters
It's day seven in South Korea, and unfortunately, it's our last day, which is so sad. We're gonna make the most of it, starting with lunch. We've come back to one of our favorite restaurants that we found in Seoul, and they have one of my favorite foods that we've eaten all, which does a lot. We've had a ton of good food. Last time we were here, I ordered this rice dish, and when it comes out, it's still sizzling.
Thank you.
You gotta stir it up before it burns.
This dish has white rice with veggies on top and some kind of red spicy sauce with fish eggs. I'm not positive what it's called in Korean because the menu is in Korean, but I.
Which is a popular dish in South Korea, but I know that also comes with eggs and beef a lot. And this one just comes with fish eggs. So maybe it's just this restaurant. I'm not really sure. But it's the best rice I've ever had. The parts that are cooked on the bowl are, like, kind of crunchy, and I just love that. And there's little bits of seaweed, cucumber. What else is in here? And it comes with a bunch of little side bowls. Some kind of soup, kimchi, spinach, sauteed with g. Octopus salad, crunchy seaweed with sesame seeds. That one's probably my favorite. And another kind of sprout salad. It's all delicious and I'm starving.
Come here and get the rest of the fish eggs. Don't regret it. So there's two more big things on our list today. Both of them are markets. One of them is like, stuff, and one of them is food. The stuff market is in walking distance. We're starting there.
There's Russian furry hats over there. We are at the Num Daemon Market.
We remembered. We remembered the name of the market because it kind of sounds like Matt Damon. They've been calling it the Matt Damon market.
There are lots of people. Lots of blinky signs in Korean.
This is looking like our kind of place.
Oh, look at that. We can either go 50 meters, 150 meters, 300 meters, or 500 meters. I vote the 500 meter. Wait.
This place was crowded when we got here, and it's getting immensely more crowded. I guess it's more of a night market than a daytime market. And all these vendors are starting to roll these carts out into the middle. So this place is going to like double and stop, and we're going to get ran over.
Tell me what you're Doing.
Just made our first purchase at the market. Two pairs of no show socks. Not just telling you this because I bought socks, but it is kind of important. So we're both traveling with all bird shoes right now. They're like these wool shoes, they're crazy comfortable, they pack down small. And we thought they were going to be the perfect travel shoe and they might be if I wear socks and the wool is supposed to like stick, stop your feet from stinking and that has not been the case. You can wash them, but I've already washed them and then as soon as I like wear them again for a day, they just start to stink. We've had a lot of people ask us about the all birds and how we are liking them. So I just thought I'd give you a little update. If you're here for the first time. Just wanting to watch the market. Sorry about the sock saga.
I got me some no show socks too with a smiley face. We are leaving the market now and heading to the food market where we're gonna try all the Korean foods that we haven't tried yet because we're leaving tomorrow.
And this is the Quang Jang market. It's huge with tons of food. Let's go eat some.
There is just something about Marcus that gets me so excited. Like seeing all the ingredients and they're just cooking it right there and it's all just so delicious. First impressions are it's massive. All of the stalls have like a little bench. You, you like sit there and eat it. There's even like little families sitting at these stalls having dinner. Everything looks so good. There's these huge bowls of noodles and soups that I've never seen before that could feed like five people. We're going to walk around a little bit, try to decide what we want. There's no way we can try everything. There's so much.
As we're walking by each one of these little stands, the majority of them have a little tank with the live octopus like sitting to the side. Side of their stands, I would assume for the tourists who want to like come through and eat it. But I'm really glad that we can say we've already done that experience and that's not what we're eating here tonight. If you want to watch us eat live octopus, we'll put a card up here or a link down below or something. Cuz we did that a few nights ago and it was.
We've spotted our first stall. We're starting big. We're having dog meat soup. Totally Joking. I would never, ever do that. But we definitely walked by a stall, and that was on the menu, and I was so grossed out. But we did find our first stall. It's dumpling soup, and the ladies are super nice.
We ordered the chopped noodle and dumplings soup. I don't know what's in the dumplings yet, but it has the little flaky seaweed things on top and sesame seeds, and it looks amazing.
Hot.
Oh, the broth is good. It's spicy. There's little pepper flakes in here. All right, I'm ready to get in. Oh, this dumpling's opening up. What do you think that is?
Dog?
Better not be dog.
They are so spicy and so good. I'm pretty sure it's chicken in there. I could be wrong. It's so spicy. I can't tell. One of the best things about this soup is after I ordered it, she started cutting the dough of the noodles and then cooked the noodles right in front of me. Like, it is so fresh. And this bowl is massive. Like, we're splitting this, but I'm gonna be full probably after half a bowl of sand soup. We need to save room for the rest of our dinner.
So our mouth is on fire from the delicious noodles. We've been seeing this stuff everywhere. I have no earthly idea what it is. It looks like rice and dirty water. But it's cold, so we decided to try.
It's actually really refreshing. I mean, the chunks of rice are coming at this trough, so I'm definitely drinking some rice.
It's not super sweet at all. Like, that's what makes it so refreshing.
But it's got enough sweetness to, like, be good. This is really addictive.
I think it might be sugar cane.
Cuz it's like almost water. Maybe.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Up next, we are trying gimbap. It kind of looks like sushi. And from what I understand, this is like South Korea's PB&J. If you compare it with the US it's like a quick lunch or like picnic food. And we've seen them everywhere.
So it tastes a lot like a veggie sushi roll. It has carrots and some kind of yellow root that we've had somewhere else. Not sure what it is with sesame seeds on the outside. And the sesame sauce, it really pulls it together instead of having soy sauce. I love sesame sauce.
Yum.
So our last stop is the this savory Korean pancake place. We had Korean pancakes the other night when we went to street food stalls. But this one looks totally different. It's, like, thicker and really crispy. All these ladies had these massive buckets of batter, and they're just plopping it on the fryer right in front of you. Super fresh. Looks amazing.
There's one side. Better.
It has so many vegetables in it. And it came with this onion sauce, like, kind of like a soy sauce.
I'm so sad. This is our last meal in South Korea. I really can't believe it. This is a nice, greasy filling. When it ended on.
