The carts that return with the cold: how Korea eats its winter streets

The first cold night in Seoul does something to the street corners. By late November the wind off the buildings has an edge to it, and somewhere near a subway exit a rectangle of steam appears that was not there in October — a cart, a gas ring, a cast-iron mould, and a man turning small fish-shaped cakes with a pair of chopsticks. He was selling socks or phone cases in summer. Now he is selling winter.

The carts return with the cold

These are pojangmacha (포장마차) in their smallest form — not the orange-tented drinking tents, but a single cart parked where foot traffic pools: the mouth of a subway exit, the entrance to a market, the bus stop where an office district empties at six. They are seasonal in the truest sense. You will not find most of them in August. They surface with the first serious cold, roughly mid-November, and by March they have folded back into whatever the vendor does the rest of the year.

The economics are plain and the reader can watch them work. A cart runs on cash, a gas canister, and a spot that costs nothing but nerve. What it sells has barely changed in fifty years, which is part of why Koreans treat the first sighting of one as a small seasonal marker, the way others note the first frost.

A bestiary of the paper cup

The headline act is bungeoppang (붕어빵), literally "crucian carp bread" — a fish-shaped waffle-batter shell filled traditionally with sweet red-bean paste (팥, pat). It is not fried and not quite a pancake; the batter crisps against the iron and stays soft inside. Expect ₩1,000 to buy two or three, depending on how generous the cart is that day. A smaller cousin, gukhwappang (국화빵), comes moulded like a chrysanthemum and sells by the handful in a paper cup.

There is a schism worth knowing about. The old filling is red bean; the newer one is syukeurim (슈크림), a vanilla custard. Purists hold that bean is the only honest bungeoppang and custard is a concession to children, and they will tell you so unprompted. A third camp has appeared selling pizza and even mozzarella versions, which the same purists regard as vandalism.

Koreans argue, without irony, over whether to eat a bungeoppang head-first or tail-first — the head holds more filling, the tail more crust.

Alongside the fish you will often find gunbam (군밤), chestnuts roasted until the shells split, sold warm in a paper sleeve you peel as you walk. None of it is meant to be sat down with. The whole category is food for the ten minutes between a station and somewhere warmer.

Hotteok, and the seeded version down south

The other winter fixture is hotteok (호떡): a yeasted dough round, pressed flat on a griddle, filled with brown sugar, cinnamon and a little crushed peanut that melts into a scalding syrup. The first bite is a hazard every Korean learns young — the sugar inside runs like lava. A plain one is ₩1,000 to ₩2,000, handed over folded in a paper cup so the syrup does not reach your sleeve.

In Busan the dish mutated into something better. At BIFF Square in Nampo-dong (남포동) — Busan Metro Line 1, Nampo Station, exit 7 — the ssiat hotteok (씨앗호떡) is slit open after frying and packed with a spoonful of sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds and sesame, so it crunches against the syrup. It runs about ₩2,000 and the queue at the busiest stalls tells you which one to join. This is the version worth planning a walk around; the plain northern hotteok is everywhere, but the seeded one belongs to that square.

겨울이 되면 붕어빵을 어디서 파는지가 동네의 작은 관심사가 된다.

The drum of sweet potatoes

Then there is the gungoguma (군고구마) man, who works from a converted oil drum turned into a stove, sweet potatoes roasting on the coals inside until the sugars caramelise and weep out black at the ends. He sells by weight, not by the piece — a fist-sized one lands around ₩3,000, priced off a small scale on the cart. Break it in half and the flesh is orange and wet, almost like custard. In the cold it doubles as a hand-warmer for the first block, then dinner for the second.

You find these near residential subway exits more than tourist ones — the edges of Namdaemun Market (남대문시장, Hoehyeon Station, Line 4, exit 5), the entrances to Gwangjang Market (광장시장, Jongno 5-ga, Line 1, exit 8), and unglamorous office-district corners where the after-work crowd files past.

How to find one, and how to pay

The carts move, and Koreans have responded the way they respond to everything — with an app. Gabung Gabung (가붕가붕) is a crowdsourced map where people pin the bungeoppang cart they passed, because a good one near your flat is genuinely a small quality-of-life upgrade. There is even a word for it: bungsekwon (붕세권), a pun on the property term for "near a subway station," meaning your home falls within walking range of a fish-bread cart. Search the app the day before and you will not wander.

Bring cash in small notes; many carts now accept a Kakao transfer, but a ₩50,000 note at a ₩1,000 stall is a way to make an old vendor sigh. Season matters more than time of day — come between late November and February and the corners are dense with them; arrive in April and you will hunt. The one mistake to avoid is the obvious one: bite straight into a fresh hotteok and the sugar will take the roof of your mouth off. Let it sit thirty seconds. Everything on these carts is best eaten warm, standing, moving, the way the city eats it.