So the flights are booked and your Notes app is full of screenshots. I know the plan, because everyone who visits me arrives with a version of it: eat where they ate.
Let me save you an afternoon. K-drama filming locations and food do overlap in Seoul, but not as neatly as the listicles suggest. A lot of the addresses people chase have closed, changed owners, or were never restaurants at all — they were sets built somewhere else entirely and taken down when filming wrapped. The ones that survive are worth the subway ride for a much simpler reason. The food is good.
Below are six places I’d actually send a friend to, sorted by what you eat when you get there. I’ve included the subway line, what to order, and — where it applies — the honest note that the thing you saw on screen no longer exists.
Quick info before you go
All of the below are in Seoul and reachable on the metro. Budget roughly ₩8,000–20,000 ($6–15) per person for street food and market stalls, ₩15,000–30,000 ($11–22) for a sit-down meal with drinks. Most markets run late morning to late evening; alley bars run late night to sunrise. Many small places take cards, but carry ₩30,000 in cash for stalls. All details as of 2026 — small businesses in Seoul turn over fast, so check hours on the day.
1. Gwangjang Market, Jongno — the one that’s actually on TV
If you only have one food stop in you, make it this one. Gwangjang is the oldest covered market in Seoul and it turns up constantly in Korean film, drama and food documentaries, usually as shorthand for “real Seoul.” Camera crews go there for the same reason you should: it looks exactly like itself.
Sit at a counter and order bindaetteok (빈대떡), a thick mung bean pancake ground fresh and fried in a shallow pool of oil. It comes with a saucer of soy dipping sauce and raw onion. Then get mayak gimbap — the tiny “addictive” seaweed rolls, no filling beyond rice, carrot and pickled radish, dunked in mustard-soy. If you’re feeling brave, the yukhoe alley at the eastern end serves raw seasoned beef with a raw egg yolk on top.
The market gets shoulder-to-shoulder from about 6pm. Go at 11am on a weekday and the same ajumma who’d be shouting at you in the evening will explain her sauce.
Getting there: Jongno 5-ga Station, Line 1. Come out on the market side and follow the smell of frying oil.
2. Ikseon-dong — hanok alleys, modern plates
Ikseon-dong is a hundred-year-old block of tiny courtyard houses about fifteen minutes’ walk from Gwangjang, and it has become the default backdrop whenever a Korean production needs “charming old Seoul, but make it a date.” The alleys are barely wide enough for two people to pass.
What you eat here is not street food. The hanok have been converted into small restaurants doing modern Korean plates — braised short ribs, gochujang pastas, tteokbokki with cream, seasonal fruit desserts. Prices are noticeably higher than a market. What you’re paying for is a courtyard and a low wooden table.
Two practical things. Most places are ten or twelve seats and don’t take reservations, so weekends mean queuing. And the alleys are dark and narrow at night in a way that photographs beautifully and navigates badly — pin your restaurant before you go in.
Getting there: Jongno 3-ga Station, served by Lines 1, 3 and 5. Exits 4 and 6 both drop you at the edge of the block.
3. Sindang-dong Tteokbokki Town — the red-sauce street
There is a street in Jung-gu with an arch over it that says, in enormous letters, “Sindang-dong Tteokbokki Town.” This is not a themed tourist installation. It’s where the sauced, cheese-topped, boil-it-at-your-table style of tteokbokki was popularized in the 1970s, and the same families are still running some of the shops.
Order jeukseok tteokbokki — a wide pan of rice cakes, fish cake sheets, cabbage and ramyeon noodles arriving raw at your table over a burner. You stir it as it thickens. Add the cheese. At the end, ask for bokkeumbap and they’ll fry rice into the leftover sauce, which is the entire point of coming.
It’s mild-to-medium spicy by Korean standards, which still means a solid 3 out of 5 for most visitors. Milk-based drinks are on every menu for a reason. If you want to try the same thing in your own kitchen first, our tteokbokki recipe uses the sauce ratio these shops use, scaled down.
Getting there: Sindang Station, Lines 2 and 6. Leave on the north side and follow the signs — the arch is unmissable.
4. Itaewon and the Noksapyeong slope
Itaewon Class did for this neighborhood what few dramas manage: it made a specific hillside feel like a character. The show centers on a small bar and the people who staff it, and its first bar exterior was shot on Noksapyeong-daero 40-gil, a short walk uphill from Noksapyeong Station.
Fair warning — the tenant at that address has changed since filming, more than once. Treat the street as the destination rather than any single door. What makes the walk worth it is the stretch running from Noksapyeong up through Gyeongnidan-gil: small bars with eight seats, Korean-run kebab counters, soju-and-anju joints where the menu is four things written on paper taped to the wall.
Eat golbaengi muchim (spicy sea snails tossed with somyeon noodles), gyeran-mari (a rolled omelet the size of a brick), or Korean fried chicken with a pitcher of beer. This is anju territory — food designed to be eaten slowly, alongside drinking, over several hours.
Getting there: Noksapyeong or Itaewon Station, both Line 6, one stop apart. Walk between them.
5. Ssangmun-dong — and the honest disclaimer
Reply 1988 is set in an alley in Ssangmun-dong, northern Seoul, where five families eat out of each other’s kitchens. People come looking for that alley. It isn’t there.
The alley was a set, purpose-built on old military land in Uijeongbu, outside Seoul, and it was demolished after filming rather than kept as an attraction. I’d rather tell you that now than have you ride Line 4 for forty minutes to find a normal residential neighborhood.
That said — a normal residential neighborhood is arguably the point. Ssangmun-dong is a real place in Dobong-gu with no tourist infrastructure whatsoever, which makes it one of the better spots in Seoul to eat like a resident. The area around the station has old Korean-Chinese restaurants doing jjajangmyeon and tangsuyuk at prices that haven’t moved much in a decade, plus fried chicken shops and a handful of tteokbokki stalls. Walk twenty minutes north and you’re at the foot of Bukhansan, where the trailhead restaurants serve acorn jelly, scallion pancakes and bowls of makgeolli to descending hikers. That combination — mountain, cheap food, no English menus — is closer to the spirit of the show than any set would have been.
Getting there: Ssangmun Station, Line 4.
6. The pojangmacha tents around Jongno
The orange tent. Two people on plastic stools, one bottle of soju, an argument or a confession. Every Korean drama has this scene, and Crash Landing on You built half its comedy on outsiders discovering how much of Seoul’s social life happens over cheap food at night — fried chicken delivered to a doorstep, beer in a convenience store, a tent bar at 1am.
You can still do this. The stretch of Jongno east of Jongno 3-ga Station has a run of pojangmacha — literally “covered wagon” — that set up in the evening and stay open until the last customer leaves. Inside there’s a griddle, a pot of broth, and about six things you can order: fish cake skewers in hot broth (usually free refills of the broth), stir-fried snails, a rolled omelet, chicken feet if you’re committed, and instant ramyeon upgraded with egg and scallion. That last one is the same trick we cover in our ramyeon upgrade guide, just performed by a woman who has made it forty thousand times.
Prices are per-dish and modest. Soju is cheaper than water. Nobody will rush you.
Getting there: Jongno 3-ga Station, Lines 1, 3 and 5, then walk east along Jongno after dark.
How to order when you don’t speak Korean
Point and hold up fingers. That covers most of it. Two phrases will cover the rest: igeo juseyo (이거 주세요, “this one please”) and gyesan haejuseyo (계산 해주세요, “the bill please”). At market counters you pay at the end, not up front. At pojangmacha you pay when you leave.
One etiquette note that matters more than people expect: at a shared counter, don’t take more seats than your group needs, and don’t linger over an empty plate during the dinner rush. Turnover is how these places survive. Eat, pay, go stand outside and talk.
Make it at home first
Honestly, the best preparation for eating your way through Seoul is cooking two or three of these dishes before you land, because then you arrive knowing what “correct” tastes like. Start with tteokbokki and gimbap — between them they cover most of what you’ll be handed on a paper plate. And if you’re going for the Squid Game pilgrimage angle, our dalgona candy recipe is the one street snack you can practice with two ingredients you already own.
Questions people actually ask
Can I visit the Reply 1988 filming location?
No. The alley set was built in Uijeongbu and torn down after the series ended. Ssangmun-dong itself is a real neighborhood you can visit, but it doesn’t look like the show and never did.
Are the restaurants from Itaewon Class still open?
Some of the addresses are still operating businesses, but under different names and owners than at the time of filming. Plan the neighborhood, not the specific door — Itaewon turns over faster than any guide can keep up with.
Is Gwangjang Market worth it if I only have one day in Seoul?
Yes, if you go before 6pm. After that the aisles are packed and you’ll spend more time queuing than eating. It’s also close enough to Ikseon-dong and Jongno 3-ga that you can do a market lunch and an alley dinner without changing trains.
Planning the rest of the trip
We stop at “how to eat it.” For the walking routes, opening hours and the non-food filming sites in the same neighborhoods, our sister site has a full guide to K-drama filming locations around Seoul. And if Gwangjang is on your list, their stall-by-stall Gwangjang Market guide tells you which aisle to enter from, which is the difference between a good visit and forty minutes of shuffling.
Official hours and closures for markets and districts are worth double-checking on Visit Seoul or the Korea Tourism Organization before you set out.