Best Restaurants
in Gangneung

Dining in Gangneung

Gangneung dines on the East Sea. The Gangwon Province coastal city — population 220,000, two hours from Seoul by KTX — was named a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy in 2024 and runs three distinct food cultures simultaneously. There's the morning seafood — sashimi, mulhoe (cold raw-fish soup), and grilled clams — at the Jumunjin Port and Gyeongpo Beach raw-fish streets, where the boats unload from 4am and the restaurants serve from 6am. There's the chodang sundubu (silken sea-water tofu) culture in the Chodang Tofu Village west of the centre, where two dozen specialist restaurants make tofu fresh each morning using filtered seawater rather than mineral salt — the Gangneung-only technique. And there's the cafe-and-coffee culture along Anmok Beach, where the Gangneung Coffee Festival each October draws a hundred-thousand visitors and the beach is nicknamed Korea's 'coffee city'.

The dining map runs across three coastal zones. Jumunjin Port to the north holds the morning seafood market and twenty raw-fish restaurants serving same-day-caught East Sea fish. The central Chodang Tofu Village holds the two dozen sundubu specialists in a quiet residential lane built around the original Chodang Park (named for the Joseon-era Confucian scholar Heo Yeop, who reportedly invented the seawater tofu technique). Anmok Beach south of the centre holds the coffee-street cafes and the better dinner restaurants with ocean views. Beyond these, the city's hotel-restaurant axis (the Skybay Gyeongpo, the St. John's Hotel, the new Hyatt Regency) holds the formal multi-course Korean and Western fine-dining rooms.

Reservations are useful at the better seafood restaurants on weekends and at the formal hanjeongsik rooms; sundubu houses and Anmok cafes are walk-in friendly. English menus are common at the tourist-facing addresses and rare at the smaller fish-port restaurants. The city's restaurant rhythm is Korean coastal: morning starts at 6am with sashimi at the port, mid-morning shifts to coffee, lunch is sundubu, dinner is grilled fish or hanjeongsik, and the late-evening anchor is a beach-front cafe with a view.

Pair the food with Gangwon-province makgeolli (Mubongri and Songmyeong are the two reference local breweries) or with the Korean Cha-Cha-Cha rice wine the better sundubu houses serve. The Gangneung Coffee Museum (in Gujeong-myeon, twenty minutes south of the centre) is the proper afternoon detour; the Bohemian Cafe and Terarosa Coffee are the two local-roastery coffee-tour anchors.

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