Haebangchon Ogeori after dark
The five-way intersection at the top of the hill: Shinheung Market, what surrounds it, and where to go once dinner is over.
Most people meet Haebangchon from the bottom. They come up from Noksapyeong, walk the main strip, eat something, and turn around. That's a perfectly good evening, and it misses the part of the neighbourhood we live in.
We're at the top, at the Ogeori — the five-way intersection where the hill finally levels out.
What's actually up here
The centre of it is Shinheung Market, and it is not what the word market suggests. There are no fish counters or vegetable stalls. It was rebuilt into something closer to a small indoor mall aimed at people in their twenties and thirties: photo booths, silver jewellery workshops, cafés, a wine bar, taco and Thai places, an izakaya, a fried chicken pub, and one gloriously worn-out old draft beer shack that has outlasted everything around it.
It's a genuinely good place to spend two hours. It is also, for most of the day, the only reason anyone climbs this far.
Above the intersection is the Namsan trail up to N Seoul Tower. Plenty of people come through for the walk — but they come in daylight, and by the time we open, they've long since gone home.
The gap this neighbourhood has
Here's the pattern we watch every week. The market fills up in the afternoon and through dinner. Then, somewhere around nine, it empties. People finish eating and head back downhill toward Itaewon or Gyeongnidan for the rest of the night.
Which is fair enough. For a long time there hasn't been much reason to stay.
That gap is roughly the entire reason we exist. Korean nightlife runs on the idea of 2-cha — the second round, the place you go after the place you were. The Ogeori has always been strong on first rounds and thin on second ones.
Where to go for your second round
We're a two-minute walk from the market. Come out of it, head downhill into the alley, and look for the building with a wine bar on the ground floor. We're underneath it, one floor down, behind a red LED sign.
It is a music venue first — house and techno on a proper system, most nights with a DJ playing vinyl — and a cocktail bar second, though we take the cocktails as seriously as anyone in the area.
If you've eaten in the market and you're deciding whether to walk back down the hill: don't. The second round is fifty metres away.
Getting here
The Ogeori is about a fifteen-minute walk uphill from Noksapyeong Station (Line 6, Exit 2), or a short bus ride if the hill isn't appealing — and it is a real hill, so no judgement either way.
We open at 19:00 Thursday through Saturday and 20:00 the rest of the week, though the room doesn't properly fill until around 22:00.