Dakgalbi (Chuncheon Stir-fried Chicken)

Let's clear up the name first: there are no ribs in dakgalbi. The story goes that in early-1960s Chuncheon, a shop owner selling marinated pork ribs found pork too expensive and started marinating chicken the same way, grilling it over charcoal. 'Chicken done rib-style' stuck as the name. For its first decade it was purely a drinking snack, cooked on a wire rack over briquettes, and it was so cheap it earned the nicknames 'student ribs' and 'working man's ribs.' There's a reason it happened in Chuncheon specifically: the area was full of poultry farms and processing plants at the time, so chicken was cheap and always available.

In the 1970s the wire rack gave way to a flat iron griddle, and the dish we know today took shape. Boneless chicken thigh marinated in gochujang, soy sauce, garlic and ginger goes onto a huge cast-iron plate in front of you, buried under cabbage, onion, sweet potato, scallion, rice cakes and perilla leaves. None of that is decoration. Water released by the cabbage and onion keeps the marinade from scorching, sweet potato lays a base of sweetness under the heat, and the cylindrical rice cakes soak up sauce until they go pleasantly chewy. Which is why the first eight to ten minutes are a waiting game — stir it too early and you'll just burn sauce onto the griddle.

There are three main formats. Griddle dakgalbi is the default you'll find nationwide. In Chuncheon itself a handful of places still do the original charcoal version, grilled on a rack with the bone in and eaten with your hands — rougher, but far smokier. The third is a soupier braised style closer to a chicken stew, and interestingly the word 'dakgalbi' may have been used first in neighbouring Hongcheon for exactly that kind of dish. Cheese dakgalbi, with a molten moat of mozzarella around the edge, is a 2010s addition. Ordering is idiosyncratic too: portions are counted in dae rather than servings, roughly one chicken leg's worth of meat per dae, with two dae counting as one person's share on the griddle.

And dakgalbi saves its best move for last. When about a third of the meat is left, order the fried rice. Rice, seaweed flakes, sesame oil and chopped kimchi go into the remaining sauce, get stir-fried, then pressed flat against the griddle until the underside crisps into a golden crust. Leaving without it means you only ate half the meal. If you'd rather, swap in udon or chewy jjolmyeon noodles instead, and in Chuncheon the classic close is a bowl of cold makguksu or naengmyeon afterwards. The original cluster of shops sits in the back alleys of Chuncheon's Myeongdong district, and it's just over an hour from Seoul on the ITX-Cheongchun train — an easy add-on to a Nami Island day trip. Budget around ₩10,000 per person, though prices vary by shop, so check before you go.