Jagalchi

The name comes from jagal, gravel — this stretch of shore was gravel before it was a market. Fish has been sold here since the colonial period, but Jagalchi as it is now was made in the 1950s, when the refugee city needed feeding and the people available to do it were overwhelmingly women.

Many were war widows. They took a patch of ground, a basin and a knife, and they held it. The term Jagalchi ajumma — roughly "the Jagalchi aunties" — is not a nickname a tourist board invented. It is what they are called, and it carries respect.

The current building opened in 2006 and its roof is shaped after a seagull in flight. The market it houses is considerably older than the architecture.

How it works, which nobody tells you

The ground floor is the market: tanks, ice, and several hundred vendors. You choose a fish there, alive, and agree a price. Then you carry it upstairs, where restaurants prepare it — sliced raw as hoe, or grilled, or made into a stew — for a per-person preparation fee on top of what you paid downstairs.

That two-step system confuses almost every first-time visitor. It is also the whole appeal: you are not ordering from a menu, you are buying an animal and having it cooked.

Prices are negotiable and the negotiation is expected. Ask the price, look unconvinced, and see what happens. Doing this cheerfully is good manners; doing it aggressively is not.

What to look for

Autumn and winter are the seasons here. Look for flounder and rockfish for hoe, hairtail grilled, and — if you are the kind of person who wants the local benchmark — gomjangeo, hagfish, cooked over charcoal at the stalls outside. It is a Busan speciality and it is not for everyone.

In autumn the outdoor grills go up along the waterfront and the whole street smells of it. That is the version of Jagalchi worth planning around.