The port city of Gunsan in North Jeolla Province staged its 2026 Gunsan Jjamppong Festival from Friday to Sunday at Baeknyeon Plaza in Jangmi-dong, part of an annual effort to promote the city to food tourists. The festival had 20 booths, including traditional Chinese restaurants from Gunsan and collaborations with well-known chefs, and every food stall sold jjamppong and jjajangmyeon in half portions so visitors could sample more than one.
Jjamppong is a spicy noodle soup made by stir-frying vegetables, seafood and meat and then simmering them in broth. Together with jjajangmyeon, or black bean noodles, it is one of the two pillars of Korean-Chinese cooking. Gunsan’s version traces back to chomamyeon, a noodle dish that the city’s ethnic Chinese residents made with broth from pork, beef and chicken bones until the early 1970s. Local cooks later added fresh seafood from nearby waters and red pepper powder suited to Korean tastes, turning the soup into a dish closely tied to the city’s own history.
Television chefs were a central draw this year. Mikael, known for the JTBC show Please Take Care of My Refrigerator, took part alongside David Lee and Lee Mi-young, who gained recognition on the Netflix competition Culinary Class Wars. The line-up drew on two cooking programmes, one on broadcaster JTBC and one on Netflix. Each chef presented special dishes that reflected their own cooking philosophy, while local restaurants such as Gunsan Squid Jjamppong served their house versions of the soup.
Daytime hours focused on tastings and hands-on activities. In the evenings, an outdoor dining programme called Jjamppong Restaurant paired food with live performances. The city has also designated a jjamppong specialty street in Jangmi-dong, and it plans to link the festival with nearby attractions, including Gunsan’s modern cultural heritage sites, the Time Travel Village and the Gogunsan Islands, so that visitors who come for the noodles stay to see more of the area. Organisers framed the festival as a broader day out than a food fair. An official from the Gunsan Foundation for Culture and Tourism said the aim this year was to give visitors “a richer experience with a variety of food”, along with hands-on programmes and performances. The official added that the foundation hoped people would enjoy Gunsan’s jjamppong and the wider programme and leave with “special autumn memories”.
