🇰🇷 Everyone Comes to Gangneung for the Coffee. Locals Are Two Blocks Away Eating This. (2026)

Every foreigner who tells me they're going to Gangneung says the same word first: coffee. Anmok Beach's coffee street is all over Instagram, and it deserves to be — rows of glass-walled cafes staring straight at the East Sea. But I lived in Gangneung for a stretch a few years back, and here's the thing nobody who's only seen the reels knows: the locals barely go there. They're two blocks inland, sitting on plastic stools, eating soup that has nothing to do with espresso.

If you're planning a Gangneung day trip off the KTX (it's about two hours from Seoul), the coffee street is fine — genuinely, go take the photo. But if you want to eat like someone who actually lives there, this is where you go instead.

🌊 The Tofu Village Everyone Photographs, Nobody Explains

Chodang Dubu Village (초당순두부) is Gangneung's other famous stop, and it's usually described as "cute tofu restaurants by the beach" — which undersells it badly. The story is that a Joseon-era scholar's father, Heo Yeop, found a freshwater spring here, used it to make soybean curd, and then — because he was right by the sea — set the curds with clean seawater instead of the usual salt brine. Seawater instead of nigari gives the tofu a softer, slightly savory edge that regular tofu doesn't have, and it's the reason more than twenty tofu restaurants still cluster in this one neighborhood today.

The full "순두부백반" set — a bowl of soft, barely-set tofu next to a spread of banchan and rice — typically runs 💰 ₩9,000–13,000 (~$6.70–$9.70) depending on the shop. Some places have started doing a spicy jjamppong version for people who find the plain kind too mild, and yes, someone actually makes tofu-flavored gelato here now. I haven't tried it. I'm not going to pretend I have.

⚠ Note: this is the one stop in Gangneung that is touristy — locals eat here too, but mostly when they're showing visitors around, not on a random Tuesday.

🥔 The Soup That's Actually Just for Locals

This is the one that never makes it into "what to eat in Gangneung" roundups aimed at foreigners, and I genuinely don't understand why. 감자옹심이 (gamja-ongsimi) is a chewy potato-dumpling soup that's a straight-up Gangwon Province staple — the region grows potatoes on cooler mountain soil where rice used to be harder to come by, and this dish is what came out of that. Little hand-rolled potato-starch dumplings, usually with hand-cut noodles (kalguksu) in the same bowl, in a broth that ranges from clear and mild to a deeper anchovy-based version depending on the restaurant.

A bowl generally costs 💰 ₩9,000–12,000 (~$6.70–$8.95), and the best versions are in unglamorous neighborhood spots that have clearly been open since your grandmother was young — think faded signs, mismatched chairs, a menu that hasn't changed in decades. That's not a bad sign here. That's the sign.

🎁 Fun fact: Gangwon-do's other big noodle export, makguksu (buckwheat noodles in an icy, spicy-sweet broth), is technically more associated with towns like Chuncheon and Pyeongchang, but you'll still find solid versions in Gangneung — locals treat the two dishes as a package deal, often ordering makguksu alongside sliced boiled beef (pyeonyuk) rather than as a meal on its own.

☕ My Actual Coffee Street Confession

I'm not going to tell you to skip Anmok. It's genuinely pretty, and the espresso is fine. But if you ask a Gangneung local where they get coffee on a normal day, almost none of them will say the beachfront row. They'll name some small, one-owner place a few streets back that doesn't have a view of anything except a parking lot — because the coffee street prices are built for a slow, photogenic sit-down, and most days people just want a cup on the way to work.

Think of it like the difference between a beachfront café on a European coastline and the espresso bar the fishermen actually use. Same coffee, completely different crowd, and the second one is always cheaper.

🦀 What Shows Up on Local Tables in Winter

If you're here between late autumn and winter, ask around about snow crab. Gangwon's east coast ports pull it in seasonally, and it shows up on local dinner tables and at neighborhood seafood spots in a way that has nothing to do with the tourist seafood markets near the train station. Prices swing a lot with the catch and the season, so I won't pin a number on it — just know that if a local invites you to "go eat crab," they mean something specific and seasonal, not a general seafood outing.

💡 Pro tip: none of these places take reservations and most don't have English menus. Pointing at what the table next to you is eating works better than trying to sound out the menu — it's what I did for the first two months I lived there.

Gangneung isn't just one of the cities tourists don't know exists yet — it's a place where the famous photo spot and the actual daily food culture happen to be a five-minute walk apart and almost never overlap. If you've already read about Jeonju's food scene, Gangneung is a completely different flavor of "outside Seoul" — colder, saltier, and a lot more potato than you'd expect from a beach town.

Go take the coffee photo. Then walk two blocks and eat like you actually live there.

Enjoy~