Commoners' Feast · Spicy Stir-Fried Chicken
Chuncheon Dakgalbi
Photo: Fumikas Sagisavas / Wikimedia Commons · CC0 1.0
A widely told local story credits a Chuncheon restaurant owner, Kim Yeong-seok, who turned to chicken in the 1960s when pork was hard to get — and a whole city's signature dish grew from it.
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.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3443 dishes from 118 countries.
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