Why you should try Busan's street food

Some restaurants aren’t cut out for stardom. Busan made its grand debut in the Michelin Guide in February 2024, but Bongjane Silbijip was nowhere to be seen on the list. It’s perhaps no surprise. Its spring onion pancakes are fried on a spitting, sizzling streetside hotplate, while the walls of its seating area are covered in pen-drawn scrawls and peeling beer posters. But this little Haeundae kitchen has attracted a steady flow of in-the-know diners for 17 years and counting.

About those pancakes. With zero ceremony, chopped lengths of spring onion are tossed onto the oily, smoky hotplate, then covered in a sticky batter of flour and soybean paste. The bubbling mixture is flattened into a rough rectangular shape with a spatula and seasoned with salt. It then has an egg cracked over it, and finally gets plonked onto your table within seconds of leaving the stove. The resulting pancake is a charred, irresistible mess of salty carbs, crispy fried egg and tangy onion, to be eaten in whichever way you see fit.

“There are no rules with Busan food — just tuck in,” says my local guide, Genie Shin. She’s just been telling me about the vital role of scissors, provided on the table in many local restaurants to help cut a dish into chomp-sized chunks. If some East Asian cuisines are about delicacy of taste and presentation, Korean cooking is all simple utensils — chopsticks, spoons, scissors — and flavours that yell and clamour. Chilli, garlic, ginger, sesame oil and their many spicy cousins soon become your friends.

The decision to incorporate Busan into the Michelin Guide was due to the expertise of its restaurants but also, and in no small part, thanks to its coastal location. As South Korea’s largest port, the city has long been a conduit for outside culinary influences as much as for fresh seafood. The latter appears on menus citywide in many, often unusual, forms — one local speciality, naengchae jokbal, comprises braised pig’s trotters topped with salted jellyfish. But it tends to have one point of origin: the sprawling maritime bazaar that is Jagalchi Fish Market.

“It’s almost a neighbourhood in itself,” says Genie Shin the next day, taking me through its labyrinthine grid of lanes and buildings. It’s a 20-minute drive from Haeundae but seems a world away. Parasol-sheltered fish vendors line the pavements, and the scents on the air — of oceanic depths and iodine — are unmistakable. “The market really expanded after the Korean War, when refugees needed to make money,” Genie Shin continues, her eyes flitting from boxes of silvery mackerel to trays of pink shrimps. “It’s now the largest fish market in the country.”

Inside the central hall, the produce goes well beyond the norm. The criteria for sale seems to be anything that moves, breathes, slithers or swims. On stall after stall, pools of slug-like spoon worms and knobbly orange sea squirts wallow next to the more familiar likes of clams, squid and sea bream. The secret to visiting is to head to the floor above, where rows of seafood kitchens house chefs busy chopping and cooking. Customers sit at broad tables, and any order placed is supplied within seconds.

Genie Shin leads the way to kitchen number 40, her favourite — “I just like the way they cook” — run for the past seven years by chef Ja Lee-yeon and her two sons. Immediately, our plastic tablecloth is covered in little plates: kimchi, garlic, boiled seaweed, citrusy shiso leaves and a fiery red pepper paste. Ja Lee-yeon, wearing a long apron and hard-at-work expression, vanishes behind the kitchen counter. Minutes later, one of her sons appears with an eel-like grilled cutlassfish. “Operate first,” says Genie Shin, nimbly dissecting the warm flesh with chopsticks. She then tops a shiso leaf with every ingredient on the table and folds it up to create a fresh, fishy parcel full of spice and crunch, and dripping with the juices from within. “Then eat with your hands in one go.” The seared flakes of fish are firm to the bite, their flavour lifted by the spices around them.

A short walk away, in the melee of shoppers and snack-seekers around BIFF Square, a row of restaurants and street-food stalls is doing a roaring trade. Just as Busan itself is a mass of different influences, its best dishes pack in as many ingredients as possible. To underline this point, the biggest queues on the square are at the carts selling ssiat hotteok: sweet, seed-filled pancakes.

I linger at one. “Join the line there,” orders the rushed stallholder, rendering me powerless to do anything else. I watch the hotteok being prepared as I wait. Balls of dough and brown sugar are being fried on a hotplate of melting butter until they’re cooked to perfection. Then, they’re sliced open and stuffed with pumpkin seeds, almonds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds and peanuts. I eat one on the crowded street. The heat and sweetness of the dough, and the nutty punch of the filling, put it as close as you’ll get to the perfect Busan dessert. The city might now have a constellation of Michelin stars shimmering from on high, but many of its choicest treats are still at street level.