There’s a traditional market near Isu Station, and Namseongjip is a place that has been in business inside it for a very long time. It’s famous as a sundaeguk restaurant that puts no sundae in the soup. I wanted to do a proper sundaeguk tour, so I researched a list of good sundaeguk places, and it turns out that while every neighborhood has one or two of them, the number of genuinely great ones isn’t all that large. This is one of the few that has made it into that top tier, so I had high hopes.
It sits down an alley near the entrance to the market.
It’s very close to the station too, so it’s easy to find.
Side dishes
Pretty standard. I can’t remember ever running into a sundaeguk place with special side dishes.
Sundaeguk, special
The quality of the meat was excellent and the broth was piping hot and rich. The one shame is that, as advertised, there’s no sundae, so when you really crave sundae you have no choice but to look for another place.
What’s inside
It deserves its place among the great ones. It probably would have been even better with soju, but work has been busy lately so I’m not drinking, night or day.
After a good meal I picked up all sorts of groceries at the traditional market and headed home. Buying at the supermarket is convenient, but it’s hard to find fresh, tasty ingredients there at a low price, so if you want to enjoy what you eat it’s important to know in advance where the traditional markets are. Comments on the internet claim that traditional market prices are the same as supermarket prices, but I doubt those people have actually set foot in a market. Supermarkets stock plenty of cheap ingredients to keep their unit prices down and charge a premium for the good stuff, so simply averaging it all out and calling it the same makes no sense. The comment culture on the Korean internet isn’t very trustworthy, so to get decent information you have to rely on SNS, and people who don’t use SNS just end up at a disadvantage. It’s a bit of a shame, but it’s not something I can do anything about.