Daegu's Jingolmok, the merchant alley most travellers ride straight past

Daegu sits about ninety minutes south of Seoul by KTX, and most people meet it as a name on the platform display on the way to Busan. The reason to get off is one downtown alley, narrow enough that two umbrellas have to negotiate, where the city's early twentieth-century merchant families built their houses and never entirely left.

What the alley holds

Jingolmok (진골목) takes its name from the Gyeongsang dialect word for long, jin, and runs a few hundred metres off Jungangno between office blocks and parking lots. Brick and tile houses that belonged to the Dalseong Seo family and other trading clans still stand along it, some now tea rooms and restaurants, their courtyards left at their original proportions. You can stand in one and see how a house built with money in the 1930s handled light and privacy, which is harder to learn from a museum.

Flat dumplings and scissors

The alley's plainest pleasure is napjak-mandu (납작만두), the Daegu flat dumpling: a paper-thin pocket of glass noodle, griddled, cut with scissors at the table, dusted with chilli and spring onion. It is usually the cheapest line on the menu and arrives on a steel plate without ceremony. Order it alongside a bowl of noodles and you have eaten the way the neighbourhood has eaten for decades.

The alley has not been preserved so much as continued.

The herb street next door

Walk two minutes west and the air changes. Yakjeon-golmok, the lane of the Yangnyeongsi medicinal herb market, has traded on this ground since the seventeenth century, and the smell of liquorice root, dried jujube and cinnamon bark reaches you before any signage does. Many of the shops close on Sundays, so a weekday afternoon is the honest time to come.

진골목은 관광지라기보다, 대구 사람들이 여전히 밥을 먹으러 오는 골목이다.