There are a lot of Russian grocery stores in Dongdaemun, and I went to one of them. The targets were carrot kimchi and herring salad. I went because Dr. Kim Si-deok said on YouTube that the herring salad is delicious, and it turns out they really do know their food.
The display at the Fortune restaurant
Fortune is a restaurant to begin with, and the restaurant side seems to be popular too. They had cakes out on display.
The restaurant menu
It is amazing that you can eat proper Russian food like this in Korea.
I moved on to the grocery store right in front.
The cake menu
Wow, I cannot believe they sell such a range of food…
Desserts
There really are a lot of kinds.
Side dishes and deli items
Side dishes like these, too…
The labels are not in Korean, though.
Sausages and so on
There is a lot of stuff here that looks fun.
There is horse meat, too…
I wonder what it tastes like…
A shot of the interior
Meats
Seeing that they sell things like this, a lot of Russian people must live in this neighborhood.
Canned goods
The entrance
You can see the restaurant across the street.
On the way back
A view of Dongdaemun.
Carrot salad
It is called a salad, but this is the thing people call carrot kimchi. The story goes that when Koreans moved to Russia back in the day, they had no napa cabbage to make kimchi with, so they made it with carrots, and now it is so popular that people in Russia eat it as an everyday food. Tasting it, it lands somewhere between carottes rapees and kimchi: sour, spicy and oily, and once you start you keep going back for more. Apparently the garlic and chili powder are what give it that flavor…
Cabbage salad
This is what they call sauerkraut, and this one was just okay.
Crab salad
Well, it was not bad.
The herring salad has cured herring and beets and the like stacked up in layers, and it looks lovely, but the taste was a familiar one, like carpaccio that has been cooked through with potato salad added, and I could see why people say it is good not just as a side dish with rice but as a drinking snack. You might wonder what kind of salad you could make out of herring, but Japan has something similar with sardines rather than herring, pickled in vinegar, so it tasted extremely familiar. This one is really good.
Everything about this place is great, except that the labels are not in Korean, so there is a certain amount of pointing and guessing involved. But if it tastes this good, I am happy.
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