Korean Street Food Tour in Seoul, South Korea!

In this video. Whoa, it's way sweeter than I expected. We're in the streets of Seoul, South Korea. These are hot with the chopsticks. This is our very first time in South Korea. Dude, I take my statement back. The strawberries was epic. And we're gonna try all the street food this country has to offer. We are in the Myeongdong area of Seoul, which is known to be a popular shopping area full of fashion brands, cosmetic stores, and restaurants. It's a pretty touristy area, and while we are tourists staying within walking distance of this area, we found ourselves passing through often. And on this Sunday, we stumbled across this street food market. We couldn't pass up on all of these smells and colors and decided to start off with dessert. There's a whole bunch of street food still set up right now. It's a Sunday evening, so there's a lot happening. There's a lot of shops, but we decided to go with a candied fruit snack. This is a kind of iconic snack in China. That's the first time I've had it, but they also have it here. There's strawberries, oranges, and grapes on here. It's this hard sugar candy that's kind of coated on there. They boil it up and then dip the fruit in there, and it's nice. Since I'm a strawberry person and you're an orange person, do you want me to get the first thing there? No. Dude, that's so good. It's making sweet fruit even sweeter, but also a little more fun, right? Oh, we're biting now. Does that kind of work? That's awesome. That's way too big to be a grape. That is 100% a grape. Dude, that's like a small apple. Oh, God. It's lukewarm. That's a little funny. I see the appeal. It's a little bit like a candied apple for children. I think I would prefer this fruit stick without the candiedness on top of it. Well then, more for me. The strawberry's the best, right? Dude, I take my statement back. The strawberry's just epic. Yeah. We should have gotten all strawberry, but I wanted to try variety. We quickly noticed that there were not a lot of public trash cans in Seoul, which is probably a result of the pay-as-you-throw system, a method to encourage people to start recycling and reduce trash. Even our apartment provided us with these bags for sorting out different plastic, paper, and burnable products. However, here at the market, the system is just give your trash back to the stall that you bought it from. Korean corndogs. We're definitely gonna get one of those later. There were signs at each stall, and after we finished our food, we would just return our trash and be on our way to the next stall. So it is a Sunday, and there's this whole street food market going on, which is awesome, and I don't know if it's just on a Sunday. Judging by the amount of people, it might very well be, but then it's also our first day, so this amount of people might be everyday thing. We're not sure. Man, just look at that street, man. Doesn't that look like movie-esque epic in there? I don't know. It just seems very fun, like a lot of things to enjoy, the food, the music, the culture. I don't know. Very nice so far. All right, another thing we really wanna try is, of course, a Korean corndog. Hello. Is this the ham potato one? Yeah, can I have one of those? Ham and potato. You're doing mustard. Oh, no. Try a little bit of both. Little bit on each side. I don't know if I need it. So, Korean corndog is another thing that's super famous in Korea, and funnily, the first corndog of my life was in the US, but it might have been a Korean one. So, there are a ton of these street food stands all around, and they offer a lot of these. The different versions, some have just dough around it. This one is with ham and cheese filled, and then the dough around it, and then these chunks. That thing is heavy. Sausage in there, haven't gotten it yet. So, second bite. So, ham and potato, I thought it was gonna be filled with ham and potato, but I think there's a standard sausage inside, and then the- The potato's on the outside. Yeah, and the ham is the sausage, I would assume, right? So, pork sausage, and then potatoes, it's the little chunks that are on the batter on the outside. It's good, it tastes really doughy. The sausage to dough ratio is really in favor of the dough, as you can see here. Potato chunks on the outside make it a little crispier, and the inside is very softer dough. So, overall, pretty nice, but I think I understand why they have sauces with it. Mustard and ketchup, and I think you really need them with this, because overall, it's a very dough-heavy corndog, but I like that they have this option as well. I think Phil's problem is he didn't end up getting a cheese one, and that's the best type of corndog, I feel like, when you have a nice cheese pull with it. Those are my favorite, but I do like the ones with potatoes on it, so it gives it a little heartier flavor. Wanna try? Careful, stick. Tastes like a corndog. And with that overly descriptive food review by yours truly, tastes like a corndog, we continued through the market to see what other snacks and treats were on the streets, passing many stalls with the classic gimbap, and many more selling various meat on sticks, there were some great-looking deep-fried dough that brought me back to the South Carolina State Fair, the fried coconut shrimp smelled so good, and there were even some s'more variations. I was beginning to think I hadn't actually left South Carolina when I saw some pork barbecue, too. Yo, I don't know what's going on here, but yes, we know him. There were so many options to choose from, but we kept passing stands and selling these good-looking loaded bread slices, so naturally, we had to try it. Kamsahamnida. All right, another street food item here we noticed in Seoul is this bread egg thing. So it's normally just like an egg on bread, and it's cooked there, but this one comes with cheese. This was 2,500 won. We just wanted to give it a try. I mean, there's a lot of street vendors out, and everything looks so good, but I only have so much room in my stomach, so we'll give it a try. Might be hot. Whoa. It's way sweeter than I expected. Really? Mm. Oh, wow. Looks very gooey, eggy. Yeah, one more bite. Oh, wow. That's a lot of egg. Mm-hmm. Nice. Dude, the bread is so sweet. I really expected like a French baguette or something, like a little more salty, but this nice sweetness is pretty good. I like it. Not too shabby. Yeah, sweet like buttery bread, but also the ratio of egg is awesome. So much egg, so a little healthier than I expected. Yeah, it's nice. Good protein. You get your protein gains in here. By the way, guys, if you like these kind of travel videos or food videos in general, maybe consider subscribing to our channel because we do these videos every week. Now, we're leaving South Korea soon and going to a country that I had on my bucket list for a very long time. If you want to further support us, you can do that on patreon.com, slash, Jan and Phil, where we make additional monthly videos for certain tiers. Shout out to our soulmate tier patrons, Lauren Jarrett, Roger Lupke, Robin, Parker Dobke. A big thank you to you all. So a couple of things that we noticed about this restaurant culture. A, if you walk around strolling the streets and looking at the menus, very often there are no prices on the dishes. It often just says we have this, this and this, but you don't know how much it is. So that's a bit of a problem. Another thing though, which is good, if you're in there, there's absolutely no tax on any of the dishes, not in any of the restaurants or street food stores. So they don't add tax afterwards or a service charge. None of that bullshit. So that's very nice. And then there's also no tipping culture here. So you really only pay what you see finally on the menu, the actual price for your dishes. And in some restaurants, they even give you cold tea or water complimentary, like a carafe on the table, like a little pitcher, and you drink that. So I like the honesty, the straightforwardness. The only thing that I wish was that they would show their prices before I go in, you know? There's some that do have it, obviously. Some do that, but a lot of them also do not. As it got darker, the streets became busier. And after sharing some street food, we decided to pop into this recommended restaurant to sit down and enjoy a Korean meal. So for dinner, we came out again to the Maendong District and we went up one floor and we're right on this little walking street here to the sides, to a little cozy, pretty authentic looking restaurant. And I want to try some special dishes. This first one I think is pretty iconic. It's gimbap. And gimbap, it looks for the Western eye, it looks a lot like sushi, but it's not. These are not nori leaves, but gim leaves, which is also a seaweed wrapper. And then it's rice in there and often vegetables or fish, but this one has ham and vegetables and the rice and everything is cooked. So it's not like sushi where it's the raw fish. So let me just try one. Okay. So it's cold as well. It's very crunchy. I think the rice is stronger flavored. It definitely looks like it's been seasoned, like with some soy sauce and seasoning. But the ratio of carrots and stuff in there gives it a lot of crunch when you bite into it. It's overall still very refreshing. I cannot suppress the urge though to dip it into some soy sauce, which we don't have currently. And the overall is also pretty thick and heavy. This is kind of like a meal by itself. Yeah. And we've seen this at every street food, like a lot of street vendors, a lot of like small shops have this and it looks good. So we went to the small place and the menu is not big at all. This is it. This is like a majority of the menu right here. So it's not very selective, which I like. They pick a few dishes and they specialize in it. What I love about a lot of the small restaurants we've been to here in Korea is they offer water. You can have water or tea. They sometimes bring a little craft of tea. We get some radishes. We get some pickled veggies here and then soup. But I got an iconic dish here. I got bibimbap, which is probably one of the most popular Korean dishes in the US. One of the biggest exports. Yeah. This is one of the ones we know, very familiar with. So it's rice that we have an egg on there. We have some sauce. We have mushrooms, it looks like. We have some radishes. We have some bean sprouts, carrots. It looks like this is spinach or some type of veggies and then seaweed right there. Let's get some egg porn in here. Oh yeah, look at that. All this looks awesome and you just kind of mix it all together. At least I just mix it all together until you get this beautiful, beautiful rice bowl. But I think the presentation is the prettiest part, you know? Because if they just gave it to you like this, it would taste good, but the other way it looks pretty. It's a nice warm bowl of rice with veggies. Hmm. What not to love? Also the egg does a nice gooeyness to spread over it. I really like this. This is one of my favorite dishes. And the next dish we have is udon. And I think it's just the Korean version of udon, right? It's the soup here or ramen style soup. The thick noodles in there, udon noodles. You can see carrots, you can see cilantro, you can see spring onions. And then I think these are fish cakes, but I'm not 100% sure. Yeah, and again, the, I think gim leaves, not nori leaves, gim leaves. Just seaweed on these thick noodles. These are hard with chopsticks. If you're not very used to it. Bring your head to the bowl or bring the bowl to you. Mm, hot. Dude, I love it. I like thicker noodles. I like it. It's very herbal. You taste the carrots, you taste the seasoning, like a good vegetable soup. Every time I eat these like heavy noodle soups, it's like a heartier, warm version of a simple noodle dish with some veggies, and it's pretty good. Suck it in. So as somebody who grew up in Germany, I think Korean food is not very known. It's more like Chinese food and then Japanese food came in. Korean food is slowly making their way. And then you hear of Korean barbecue, which is usually very expensive in other countries. Here, it's actually a little bit more affordable. But the normal Korean restaurants, I think I've only been to one in my life in Berlin. So hearing of something like Bibimbap, very, very late, very, very new still to me. And it's just a good mix. Like I feel like rice bowls are such an amazing thing in any country. And this is just the Korean version of it. It's a rice bowl with all kinds of vegetables that gives it together this flavor. Dude, this thing, the color is amazing. It's overall this like orange color if you mix it up. And it tastes so herbal and so nice. And look how sticky all of this is, man. Yeah, I like a lot of the freshness of the ingredients. It's also nice. I also like the spice. I like when there's spice in my food. And I think a decent amount of Korean food has a good spice in it. Look at this thing. It's a radish. That's a big radish. Pickled. Always these things on the side. That also radish? I like the square one better. I like the Bibimbap. The Udon is okay. But man, I think from this takeaway, this Gimbap, this is my favorite. I don't think I've ever had that before. Mmm, Gimbap. Solid meal. It's a little cold outside. Having a nice warm soup is perfect. Okay, that was pretty awesome. That was a lot of food. This should be it for our street food video here from Seoul in South Korea. A lot of good food. I really like it. Some very unusual and new things for me. And yeah, I'm leaving with a very good feeling about all the food here. Yes, and if you wanna see more, go check out our first impressions video where we have Korean barbecue. As always, thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye. They wanna eat something. Yeah, hey!