I went out to Yeonsinnae. I suppose I wander around in a permanent property-scouting frame of mind. Whenever I visit a neighborhood that supposedly has good food, there is always a new apartment complex going up, or a new alley that has appeared. Small business owners must read the property market faster than anyone else, purely as a survival skill. Anyway, when good restaurants start opening in a part of town I have never heard of, and not just one or two of them, I go and take a look, and there is always something there.

A place like this

Strong on sourdough, apparently.

The breads

The baguettes and the campagne both look good.

Only a couple of kinds of campagne left.

I got there a bit late, so a lot of the bread was gone. Maybe that is why it is called Soldout Bakery.

There are croissants too

And salt bread and ciabatta.

There are cakes and deli items as well.

They sell brioche too.

And even jambon-beurre.

Selling this many kinds of bread, wow.

Today’s picks

I just grabbed a few at random.

These days salt bread, ciabatta, croissants, campagne, baguettes and jambon-beurre seem to be becoming the baseline for a Korean neighborhood bakery. It is remarkable that one bakery sells this wide a range of genres and that this is now the standard. Korean palates seem to be getting very international.

A shop I photographed on my way past

This much now seems to be the most basic of basics. Thinking back, you once had to go all the way to Apgujeong to find a decent dessert shop. Now we live in an age where every neighborhood gets one of something.

Sweets Mine

A cake specialist that some people call the pride of Eunpyeong-gu.

These are the cakes they sell.

This place looked very good too, but I had somewhere else to be, and these days I rarely buy cakes, which are awkward to carry around. For now I will settle for having confirmed that there is a decent dessert shop here. Large-scale development is underway around Eunpyeong-gu, so I imagine places like this will do even better.

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