Commoners' Feast · Spicy Stir-Fried Chicken
Chuncheon Dakgalbi
Photo: Fumikas Sagisavas / Wikimedia Commons · CC0 1.0
It exists because a restaurant owner, Kim Yeong-seok, ran out of pork one day in the 1960s — he grabbed chicken instead, and a whole city's signature dish was born by accident.
Marinated chicken pieces are stir-fried on a huge sizzling pan with a spicy gochujang sauce, cabbage, sweet potato, rice cake, and perilla leaf, all mixed together tableside. Chuncheon's Dakgalbi Street is lined with restaurants built entirely around the dish, cheap enough that locals nicknamed it 'commoners' galbi.'
Why it's made this way: Chuncheon's postwar poverty and abundance of local chicken farms made this stir-fry a filling, low-cost alternative to real beef or pork ribs, and it stuck as the city's defining street specialty ever since.
More from South Korea
Makgeolli
Tteokbokki (Spicy Rice Cakes)
Hotteok (Sweet Filled Pancake)
Eomuk / Odeng (어묵)
Korean Corn Dog (핫도그)
Ssiat Hotteok (Seed Hotteok)
Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries.
Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below.
Photo credits.