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in Sokcho

Dining in Sokcho

Sokcho dines on its history as a refugee city. The Gangwon-Province coastal town of 80,000 sits at the foot of Seoraksan National Park, two and a half hours north-east of Seoul, and was a major Hamgyeong-Province refugee resettlement city after the Korean War — Hamgyeong is the North Korean province directly across the border, and the postwar refugees brought a complete cuisine south with them. The result: Sokcho's signature dish is abai sundae, a Hamgyeong-style blood sausage stuffed with rice and squid that exists nowhere else in South Korea in its original form, and the Abai Village neighbourhood (a small island in the harbour, accessed by a hand-pulled ferry) is built around the dish.

The dining map runs across three coastal zones. Abai Village holds the original sundae and Hamgyeong-cuisine restaurants — Cheongchosu (the original mulhoe house, claiming the world's first cold-fish-soup invention), Jangsang, and a dozen smaller family kitchens. The Daepo Port harbour holds the seafood-market-and-restaurants strip — twenty raw-fish restaurants serving same-day catch from the East Sea fishing fleet. The Seorak-dong area at the foot of Seoraksan holds the trail-base restaurants serving naengmyeon (cold buckwheat noodles, a North Korean dish that Sokcho cooks the way Pyongyang did), barley-mountain-vegetable bibimbap, and dakgalbi (Chuncheon-Province spicy chicken, half an hour west).

Reservations matter at the better seafood restaurants on weekends and during fall foliage season at Seoraksan (late October-early November); abai sundae kitchens and small Daepo Port restaurants are walk-in friendly. The city's restaurant rhythm is coastal: morning at the port for fresh sashimi, midday for naengmyeon, evening for grilled fish.

Pair the food with Gangwon-Province makgeolli (the Mubongri brewery is the regional reference) or the local Sokcho sake breweries' rice spirits. The proper post-dinner anchor is one of the small Abai Village beer houses, which run until 11pm and serve fresh East-Sea octopus alongside Korean lager. Cap the day at the Sokcho Lighthouse promenade — open until 9pm, with a view across the harbour to Seoraksan that is one of Korea's iconic coastal panoramas.

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