Gwangjang Market: sitting in a row with strangers in the Food Alley

Sixty-two metres from Exit 8

From Exit 8 of Jongno 5-ga Station (Line 1) to the East Gate of Gwangjang Market, the map route is 62 m, about 1 minute (TMAP pedestrian route calculation).

From Exit 8 of Jongno 5-ga Station on Line 1, the map route to the market’s East Gate is 62 metres, about a minute. Visit Seoul gives the same figure. Climb the exit stairs, look up, and the roof over the market entrance is already there. You could walk from Euljiro 4-ga Station on Lines 2 and 5 as well, but for her friend Lulu decides to write down just one thing: Exit 8. Find on map

She writes the hours first. According to Visit Seoul, the market opens Monday to Saturday, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and closes on Sundays. The Food Alley is open every day from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m., all year round. The vintage arcade on the second floor keeps 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and also closes on Sundays. Copying the three lines into her notebook, Lulu stops. The Food Alley is the one that stays open into the night. The market-wide listing runs to 6 p.m. and the second-floor vintage arcade to 7 p.m.; other shops vary from shop to shop.

The market is big. A citizen reporter’s piece on Seoul City’s “Seoul in My Hand” site says that, as of 2024, Gwangjang Market had 5,628 shops. Inside the East Gate the covered passage splits into several directions. Lulu follows the way most people are walking.

Where three gates meet

Korea Tourism Organization data: the busiest part of Gwangjang Market is the food market that formed where the East Gate, North Gate 2 and South Gate 1 meet, drawing everyone from students to the middle-aged and the elderly.

Korea Tourism Organization data says the busiest part of Gwangjang Market is the food market that grew up where the East Gate, North Gate 2 and South Gate 1 meet, a place for every age, from students to grandparents. The stream of people Lulu followed stops there too. The stalls gather where the lanes cross, under a roof. Find on map

The citizen reporter writes that past the yukhoe alley, where long queues fill a narrow passage, and the fish and side-dish shops, you reach the jeon alley at the heart of the market. The signature dish is bindaetteok, the mung bean pancake, and the story goes that it began with refugees from Hwanghae Province who came south during the Korean War and fried pancakes to sell. Every time a pancake flips on the griddle, the oil hisses.

Jongno-gu Office lists mung bean pancakes, gimbap and tteokbokki, sundae and head meat, yukhoe, meatballs, bibimbap and kalguksu among the food you can eat sitting together at the stalls. The bite-sized gimbap was long known as “mayak (drug) gimbap,” the reporter notes, until it was renamed “kkoma (little) gimbap” in response to public feeling that the word “drug” should not sound friendly to children.

A table that is really a row

Jongno-gu Office: mung bean pancakes, gimbap and tteokbokki, sundae and head meat, yukhoe, meatballs, assorted raw fish, bibimbap, spicy fish stew and kalguksu can be eaten sitting together at the stalls.

At the stall where Lulu sits, the seating is not a table but a row. The cooking happens in the middle, and customers sit side by side on long benches around it. Lulu finds a space between two strangers. The person on her left and the person on her right don’t know each other either, just like her. Nobody would feel odd sitting here alone, Lulu thinks. Her friend could sit alone too. Find on map

Before ordering, Lulu reads the menu board. At the end of 2023, Seoul City said it would introduce, with Jongno-gu, the merchants’ association and the food-stall association, a “portion labelling” rule that puts the quantity next to the price on menus. In May 2026 it announced intensive checks on hygiene and price display with Jongno-gu, with mystery shoppers, foreigners among them, watching for overcharging and unfair treatment of foreign visitors; in the same announcement, Jongno-gu said it would begin a real-name system for the market’s stalls from June.

Lulu adds a line for her friend: “Before ordering, check the price and the portion on the menu together.” Then she raises her camera. She photographs the griddle and the plates, not the faces of the people beside her or of the cooks. In a space this tight, she decides, the lens stops at the food.

The other half, beyond the Food Alley

Jongno-gu Office: the vintage shops on the market’s second floor pack narrow lanes with distinctive clothes.

Getting up from the stall, Lulu looks for the stairs. Jongno-gu Office says the vintage shops on the market’s second floor pack narrow lanes with distinctive clothes, and Visit Seoul suggests the hanbok stores and vintage shops upstairs for anyone interested in clothing. In the passage Lulu climbs to, clothes rails run along both walls right up to the ceiling. Find on map

The Gwangjang Market website says part of the market was destroyed in the Korean War and came back to life as refugees traded daily necessities and military goods, and that this was the beginning of Korea’s imported second-hand clothing market. The pancake story downstairs, too, is said to start with refugees. Lulu writes the two stories side by side in her notebook: one from the market’s own history, one handed down.

Out of the vintage lanes and a little further on are the hanbok and fabric lanes. The website describes rows of shops selling hanbok, pyebaek wedding gifts and burial garments for life’s rites, as well as children’s hanbok for first-birthday parties, norigae ornaments and rubber shoes. Bolts of fabric are packed tight on the shelves. Visit Seoul lists the market as a whole until 6 p.m. and the second-floor vintage arcade until 7 p.m., both closed on Sundays; hours at the hanbok and fabric shops vary from shop to shop.

According to the market’s history page, in 1905, when Japan’s currency reorganisation shook the footing of Korean merchants, they founded the Gwangjang Company that July. Unlike other markets run by Japanese owners, the Dongdaemun Market it operated kept going as a Korean market on Korean capital, on the site of the Baeogae market, one of the three great markets of late-Joseon Seoul, and from the 1960s it came to be called Gwangjang Market. The website says the name carries the meaning “to gather widely and keep.”

On her way out, Lulu answers the question on the first line of her notebook. Besides the Food Alley there are the vintage lanes upstairs and the hanbok and fabric lanes. The market-wide listing runs to 6 p.m. and the second-floor vintage arcade to 7 p.m.; hours at the hanbok and fabric shops vary from shop to shop. The scene her friend saw in videos was half the market.

Her note to her friend is three lines long. Come on Saturday afternoon and see the second-floor vintage lanes and the hanbok lanes first. The vintage arcade is closed on Sundays, and hours at the hanbok and fabric shops vary by shop. When it gets dark, head back to the food market where the three gates meet and sit in a row next to strangers. Before ordering, check the price and the portion together. “Jongno & Dongdaemun” ends here.

(※ This article includes staged images created with AI.)