Busan Eats!

Truck o' Racism!

I figure I should start out with two posts that show what I'll be writing about. :) I eat out a lot in Korea because there's so much good food (also it's cheaper to eat out then cook), but possibly my favorite city to eat in is Busan. Their food is always really, really good, the people are friendly, the ocean is lovely, and it has a slower, more chilled atmosphere than Seoul, so I dig it.
Whenever I go there, I usually have the same eating itinerary. I usually go to this restaurant first:
If you can see it says, "The first and most delicious pork soup with rice restaurant in Korea". In Busan there's a really, really good food called "Pork Soup with Rice" (돼지 국밥) and I haven't found it anywhere else. This restaurant is in a district called Seomyeon and is located outside Subway Exit 7 by all the food carts...

I've been there 6 times, and never been disappointed. You order the soup, and you get this.

Not bad for 5 bucks, eh? From left to right, it's noodles, onions and garlic, scallions, kimchi, bean paste sauce, peppers, tiny shrimp, and soy sauce.

Eating this soup is a bit tricky, as you have to take the noodles, and the scallions and the tiny shrimp, and put them in the soup, but then you take the pork out, and mix it in the soy sauce and the bean paste soup and some of the scallions, shrimp, and garlic. So you eat the pork and the soup separately. The pork is simply in the soup to get softer and juicier. So your soup looks like this:
Your pork then looks like this:It's very good, and the owners are very friendly. Also, you get a free coffee afterwards! That always seals the deal for me. :)

I also always take the subway to an area called "Jagalchi" which is possibly the biggest fish market in Korea and is AWESOME, but I don't usually eat the fish, no, I go to an area across the street called "PFF Square" (Pusan Film Festival Square, where they have a movie festival every fall that's kind of a big deal internationally), and there's row after row of food carts that you can get cheap and delicious street food at that has, as of yet, knock on wood, not given me horrible food poisoning. :)

One of the specialties in Busan is their seafood pancake, as shown here:


It has scallions and pieces of squid in it, and is delicious. It's pictured here with some dumplings! You dip it in some soy sauce and it's awesome. It's really cheap in Busan but for some reason it's ridiculously expensive everywhere else in Korea.

I thought I'd be adventurous and try this noodle dish:

I didn't quite understand what the woman told me it was. It looked Vietnamese-y, so I thought it'd be good, but it was ridiculously bland, so I decided to drown it in sauce.
Nope. Still not good. Although it looks like Chap Chae (찹채, Korean clear cellophane noodles). Then I walked around for a bit as there's quite a lot of nice shops to see, and found zilch, but I decided I'd walk till I was hungry enough for dessert which was...
Pumpkin Porridge (호박 축)! It's always lovely. It's hot and sweet and has sweet rice cakes and sometimes raisins or dates in it. It's one of my favorites. The owner was quite nice and friendly too and I talked to her for a bit and she wanted me to keep talking so she gave me a free bowl of her other porridge.

Red Bean Porridge! (팥 축)! This admittedly isn't my favorite, but it was free and wasn't too bad. It has lots of chunks of rice cake in it, and I got to talk to the nice owner and hear about how she misses her daughter who moved far away. I really didn't get most of the conversation because the accent down south is a bit harder for me to understand and it has it's own dialect, so I smiled and nodded a lot and said the Korean phrase for "I'm sorry to hear that/Because you're in pain I feel bad" something like that...(유감 입니다/Yoo Gam Im Ni Da, in case you ever hear someone tell you something sad).

The worst part of going to Busan is being full. That means you can't eat any more delicious food. It kinda sucks.

Every time I go to Busan I go to my favorite place in all of Korea. It is a magical place where dreams come true, and you leave feeling tranquil and joyful as diabetes slowly sets in.

Yes my friends, this is "OPS". It's a French bakery in Haeundae Beach (with another that just opened near Gwangan Bridge!) that unlike Paris Baguette and Tous Le Jours (French bakeries that are a chain in Korea that serve pastries that the French would faint in horror if they knew were being marketed as authentically French) tastes authentic and real and just plain wonderful.

So yeah...I always eat too much here. Let's see what the damage was this time:
Firstly, their coffee is amazing. That there is a Caramel Macchiato and is lovely. The bun that's cut in half is a Hot Tuna Bun that had tuna and peas and onions in it and is lovely. To the side of it is a cheesy onion bun that was so-so (I have a high standard for this place by now) and then I got a mini pizza which they have only had twice in the six times I've been there (I've been to Busan six times and kinda always go to the same places to eat while still trying new places).

Then I realized after eating all of these in less then ten minutes (Yeah. It's kinda bad.) that I hadn't gotten anything sweet (Well, I got a Blueberry Bun for breakfast and some Croissants for the Nutella I had waiting for me at home...), so I then went back and bought more, and saw that they had a pastry they've only had ONCE before (they change their pastries every day and don't offer the same thing all the time. It's all on rotation.)
This. It's a light flaky bun with chilled creamy custard inside it that tastes like heaven. It's so, so, so very good. Love it.

Aaaaaaaaaand then three hours later I realized that even though I was ridiculously full, if I didn't eat something I'd be starving by the time I went to bed, so um...I kinda went back to PFF Square to get some more street food. This was the somewhat tasty result.

This is one of the food carts I ate at.
This is spicy rice cake (떡볶이) with sausage (순대) and fish cake (오댕). Everywhere else in Korea it's delicious but in Busan it's never quite right. There's just something off about the flavor.
I got some meat dumplings. They weren't too bad. The significance of this food cart is I was nice and chatty and so the lady gave me extra food. It was nice.

This sign kinda made me chuckle. It's a place to take your dog, and the bottom characters in red, green, and blue kinda translate to, "Long Live Mister Dog!". It was kinda cute and nonsensical.

So yep. If you go to Busan, be bold, yo. Just go out, try all the foods, don't be shy, and don't just go to a boring burger or kimbap joint because Busan offers some of the best foods you can't get anywhere else. Next time I go I'll try some fish and make some good recommendations thus. :)

And the Korean to teach now that's a companion piece to the last post is this: When you finish a meal, tell the waitress, owner, cook, whoever you see before you leave, "맛 있게 먹었어요"(Mash kay Moh Goss Oh Yoh". It means, "I ate deliciously", or, "The Food Was Deliciously". I say this when the food actually WAS good, and therefore it's deserving. :) Also it's nice to let them know how it was.

Stay tuned for the Cafeteria Food of Korea! :)