Korean Street Food - GIANT SNOW CRAB + Seafood FEAST at Seoul's BEST Fish Market | SEAFOOD in Korea

How do I hold it? Like this? What's up and welcome to another episode of Chopstick Travel. My name is Luke Martin and today we are in Seoul, South Korea. This is an incredible city and it is packed with so much delicious food. If you didn't check out yesterday's episode, make sure to hit the link down in the description box. We checked out the Mangwon Market, which is famous for all kinds of different Korean street foods. This market is really cheap and there is a lot of tasty foods. Oh wow, that is so good. The Mangwon Market is a very good alternative to the Gwangjang Market if you're looking for something a little bit less touristy. And just like we did yesterday, we are going to show you a less touristy version of another popular market here in Seoul called the Noryangjin Fish Market. The one we are going to show you today though is called the Mapo Fish Market. We are going to order up a bunch of really good seafood and I am super excited to check it out. So let's go. In order to get to this market, you're going to want to go to the Mapo-gu office station and take exit 8. It's just a short walk after that and the official name for this place is the Mapo Agricultural and Marine Products Market. It's a little bit discreet but we will leave some information so you can find it yourself down in the description box. So let's go inside and check it out. So this market isn't very large but it's definitely got every seafood you could ever imagine. They have all kinds of different types of fish, all the shellfish you could ever imagine. They even have some really unique things like sea pineapples and stingrays. It's a really different atmosphere compared to the Noryangjin Fish Market. I find the vendors are quite friendly and hopefully the prices will be a little bit lower too. This market also has, besides the seafood, they also have like a pickled Korean side dish section and then a fresh fruit and vegetable section and then dried items as well. So it's really just kind of an overall market and it's a lot of fun just to stroll around. It's really a local feeling, not very many tourists whatsoever. We just made our first purchase in here. This is two small abalone and the owner is really friendly. He helped us out a lot and could speak English really well and he said that we just take this up to the second floor and that's where they are cooking all the seafood that you buy downstairs and that was 5,000 won for two small abalone. I think it's a pretty decent price. So let's go get some crab now. Okay the king. How do I hold? Like this? Okay so they have two different kinds of crabs here. This is the first one and this is the king crab which is not native to Korea. I think maybe this came from Alaska but this thing is absolutely massive. Check this out. It weighs a ton. I think one of these goes between two to three and up kilos. Look at the bottom of it. Whoa crazy. Let's try the snow crab. Let's pick up the second type of crab which I think is the one we're going to buy. This is the native crab which is the snow crab. Snow crab yeah like this. Whoa yeah so I think this is the one we're gonna get. This is the snow crab which is caught in the east sea right off of Korea and man this thing is absolutely huge. Check out the size of this compared to my hand. Okay this one how much? How much? Okay. 16? 16 okay. We have successfully purchased our snow crab. We have our little ticket here which is number 16. They have a bunch of crabs steaming in there and that'll steam away for about 30 minutes and we are gonna go upstairs take a seat and we are gonna have a feast soon. We are seated in the restaurant now. There's two different places you can sit at regular kind of western style tables and then there's the Korean traditional style sitting on the floor in a separate room where you take off your shoes and sit down. I have to tell you that instantly this restaurant is ranking in the top three most hectic and chaotic restaurants I've ever dined at. I don't even know really who's working here or how they function serving everyone. It's really really crazy and we struggled a little bit but it's part of the experience and that's why this place is gonna be good because it's so local. As soon as you are seated you're gonna be served a couple side dishes. It looks like we've got some bean sprouts. I think there's probably some sesame oil in there and then of course kimchi. This looks, I think this is sesame oil too with a little bit of sesame seeds floating on top. We're still waiting for our other dishes to arrive but we did just get served our abalone so this is abalone sashimi which I've actually never tried before and I think you can maybe tell it's got a little bit of a movement left to it so it is extremely fresh and I'm gonna pour a little bit of soy sauce over here into my tray and I'm gonna try this abalone sashimi. Let's go in for a piece right in the middle. Check that out. Oh man I've never had this before. I've only had abalone that's been steamed or in a soup. A little bit of soy sauce. Let's try that. Whoa that has a really unique texture. It's almost crunchy. It's much more firm than I thought and it doesn't have too much of a seafood flavor actually. It just tastes very fresh. A little bit salty but really it's all about that texture. It's almost like a really dense harder cartilage kind of with that crunch. It's pretty good. Second thing we ordered today is something that's really popular at this restaurant. Pretty much every table has one so we just pointed and said we wanted one of those and this is like a Korean fish stew. So you can see there is some big huge chunks of fleshy white fish in there. Some herbs on top. I see some daikon radish floating around in there. Some bean sprouts and then it's all in that gochujang red Korean pepper paste stew and it smells phenomenal. Let's try this Korean stew now. I'm gonna make sure I get a nice big chunk of fish and some of that broth. I'll put it in my bowl here. Oh yeah look at that. You get a little bit more of that broth and that smells a little bit spicy but really delicious. So let me try just the broth by itself. Oh yeah yeah that has a kick to it and I'm gonna break off a little piece of that fish and oh that is some tender soft looking meat on that fish. So let me grab a little bit of that. Try that. Little bones but man that packs a heat punch. That flesh is really nice and soft though. That's good. All right guys our crab has arrived. Our Korean snow crab. It looks even bigger when it's on this plate like this. It looks absolutely incredible. Bright orange red and those legs look like they have a ton of meat on them. So let's crack into this. I'm ready to feast. Okay guys I'm just gonna start cracking these legs off and they come off pretty easy just like that. So let me start disassembling this crab. Oh man I can feel that steamy hot crab juice oozing out. Oh man those have got to have quite a bit of meat on them and the claw. Oh yeah okay my crab is disassembled. I'm gonna snip up this crab leg and let me reveal the meat inside. Try not to to cut the meat on the inside and oh I did kind of wreck it a little bit but oh man there is a lot of meat in there. Let me pry that out with my chopsticks. Oh that is absolutely beautiful. All right my first bite. Let's try this. That is phenomenal. That is so ridiculously soft and so sweet. That has an incredible sweetness to it and just that natural kind of crab flavor. Man this is gonna be a feast. We've got a lot of meat to work with. You break this part off and I'm gonna try to get the rest of that meat out of here which shouldn't be too hard because there's a lot of it. Look at that. Just check that out. That stringy delicious white crab meat. Oh oh man oh man you don't even need any sauce just eat it We are working our way slowly but surely through this crab. There's not any real easy way to eat it but that's what makes it all the more rewarding. You can kind of cut it with the scissors and then use your chopsticks to pry out the meat and man these legs are just packed full of meat. Oh man Here let me open this up. Check that out. And then you just use your chopsticks like this pry all that meat back. Oh man look at that. That is absolutely beautiful. Let's try that. The amount of meat on this crab is unparalleled to any other shellfish I've ever had in my life. Oh man it's so like naturally buttery almost. Okay the moment I've been waiting for the most is here the claw. So let me just crack that open and that's gonna be pretty tough to break into but let me go in with the scissors here try to break through that. Oh man oh yeah and maybe I can actually just bend this backwards pull that out. Not too much meat there but oh you can see that meat in there. One more snip and I should be able to see it. Oh man that is tough. There we go. Oh all right let's see. Oh man look at that. That is absolutely gorgeous. Let me pull that out. Oh man oh man I am in messy crab heaven right now. Oh man I don't care. I'm getting crab juice everywhere. Things are flying out of my mouth. This is a feast. What are your thoughts Sabrina on the meal so far? This is literally heaven for me. This is probably my favorite meal I've ever had of all meals in my whole life. The crab is beautiful. Yeah it is. Korean snow crab. It's so tasty. Finished off with our crab feast. There was so much meat in that we could barely finish the whole platter but the crab was certainly the highlight. Sabrina is claiming best meal ever. I'm convinced that was really really good. This market is a lot of fun and like I said it is a really good alternative to the Noryangjin fish market. I think the prices are a lot better. I'm not exactly sure what the going rate for snow crab is at Noryangjin but I wouldn't be surprised if it was double or even more. So I think what are we doing now? We are going out and hitting the town. We're gonna go look for some coffee. Yeah we're gonna go get some coffee so let's go. So I heard about this cafe on Instagram. The barista is pretty famous for making some really unique types of coffee including some where he does cream art where he just kind of paints a picture on top of the latte and we are gonna go to the cafe now. It's called see-through cafe. They have two different types and let me introduce these. These look really cool. So the first one is this kind of mini cup that has been overflowed with chocolate and cream and this is called the scotchino. So there should be some kind of like butterscotch flavors there and then there's little kind of crunchy pieces of chocolate on top and it's pretty unique because he's completely overflowed it. And next we've got this one the charlie brown. I think that's charlie brown right Sabrina? Yeah. Okay charlie brown. This is the cream art so you can see this is just a regular oh it's actually cold. I thought it was hot coffee but it feels really cold on the outside and you can see that is really a drink even though it looks like art. I don't really want to wreck it by drinking it but I do want to know what it tastes like so let's try both these out. All right let's try this one out here served in a really small glass. Okay definitely butterscotch and this one's also cold. I thought they were both going to be hot but they're both cold and this one has quite a bit of like a chocolate flavor and super super creamy. Oh man that's pretty good. I'm not going to wreck charlie brown I'll let Sabrina do the honors. Okay time to try this charlie brown cup of coffee and we'll give it a taste. Oh my god that's like mocha ice cream. Wow that tastes amazing. It's really cold and I hardly wrecked charlie brown's face that's really nice. Charlie brown's had better days. Poor charlie. Finished off with our coffees that was pretty interesting. Honestly when I saw it on Instagram I was a little bit unsure whether or not it was just gimmicky but the coffee actually tasted really good. I especially like the scotchino one it had a nice kind of butterscotch flavor to it but do note it's a little bit expensive and that scotchino was only like this big it was only like two mouthfuls of coffee but pretty cool and you know really good for Instagram pictures. So now I think we're going to walk around this district. We're in an area called Itaewon. We're just going to kind of explore and build up an appetite before we go get some dinner tonight. Itaewon is full of all these little side streets, all kinds of different cafes, all kinds of restaurants, bars, shopping, everything you could ever imagine. I think I'm not exactly sure about this if you know Seoul maybe let me know down in the comment box but I think this is a really popular area for a lot of foreigners and expats to live so yeah it's a pretty nice little area to walk around and we are starting to get a little bit hungry so I think soon we're going to head to get some dinner. Our final meal today is going to be at a really cool restaurant called Okdongsik and it's in a really kind of discreet alleyway here in Seoul. This is a Michelin recommended restaurant and they are famous for selling gukbap which is a soup of rice and pork and this place is really unique because they only serve a hundred bowls of this a day so I'm really excited to go try it out. Let's go. So we have our bowl here it is quite a simple dish actually there's only two main ingredients and that's the rice and the pork and then the broth is like just a stew of pork and this place is really kind of modern and chic and there's only one counter bar seating it's a pretty cool place. I love the silverware that they're using here too so let's actually try this but I'm just gonna go in grab some some of the rice first here let's try that it's really delicate really delicate and the broth has quite like a really kind of light pork flavor and a little bit of a saltiness too. Let me grab some of this pork you can see it's just these thin thin sheets of pork try that by itself really delicate and a really nice balance between kind of some fatty bits and some lean bits so this pork is like shabu shabu beef it's so thinly sliced it's so delicate and you don't even want to cook it for very long because it's so tender and this sauce that you can dip it in it's quite spicy and it's almost like quite nutty it's got a peanut flavor to it as well as sesame this is amazing and it tastes so healthy finish off with our gukbap that was such a simple and delicate yet delicious dish and as soon as we were leaving there's a massive lineup and now I know why that place is really intimate but it is a really cool dining experience with delicious food so I recommend you try it out all the spots we tried today can be found down the description box for more detailed information if you want to visit and that's going to be it for today's episode from Seoul I hope you enjoyed it if you haven't already make sure to subscribe hit the bell icon so that you're notified when we post a video and let us know what you thought was the most delicious food we ate in today's video so thanks for watching guys and we'll see you again very soon bye bye