Jajangmyeon (Noodles in Black Bean Sauce)

Jajangmyeon, more often written and said jjajangmyeon (짜장면), descends from zhajiangmian (炸醬麵), noodles topped with fried bean paste. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture traces it to the Shandong peninsula, where the sauce is minced pork fried with sweet wheat-based tianmianjiang. After Incheon's port opened in 1883 and Chinese merchants and laborers settled there — most of them from Shandong — restaurants followed.

Who sold it first is less certain than the usual story suggests. The Encyclopedia of Korean Culture says jajangmyeon was first sold at Gonghwachun, which opened in 1905 as the first Qing-style restaurant and closed in 1984, and whose red-brick building was registered as national cultural heritage in 2006. The heritage registry itself lists the building's era as 1905 while its summary dates construction to around 1908. Writing in Incheon Today in 2025, columnist Jeon Yeong-woo, who heads a local civic cooperative, notes that Gonghwachun is generally said to have been opened in 1912 by Wu Xiguang of Yantai and named "spring of the republic" for the new Chinese Republic, but that the actual founder was probably another merchant, with Wu joining after 1920; the business was jointly owned, records are thin, and much rests on descendants' recollections. He dates the closure to 1983, and stresses that today's Gonghwachun restaurant in Chinatown is unrelated — a Korean businessman registered the name and opened it in 2004, and the city's 2005 "100 years of jajangmyeon" campaign fixed the 1905 date in the press. The safest summary: the dish grew up in Incheon's Chinatown around the turn of the 20th century, and no single restaurant's claim to be first is firmly documented. The old Gonghwachun building now houses a jajangmyeon museum.

The Korean taste came later. The folk encyclopedia credits Wang Song-shan, an ethnic Chinese resident of Korea, with adding caramel to tianmianjiang in 1948 to make the sweeter, darker chunjang used today, and suggests the name grew out of a Shandong "scallion sauce" eaten with raw green onion. Early jajangmyeon, it says, poured oil-fried paste straight over the noodles and struck Koreans as greasy, so cooks began draining the oil and adding vegetables and a starch slurry. American wheat aid from the 1950s and the flour-promotion campaigns of the 1960s and 70s made it cheap, and telephone (later mobile) delivery made it a national habit. See Korean-Chinese food.

• Vegetables in the sauce: onion, potato and zucchini make up most of the sauce, supplying potassium and some vitamin C.
• Fermented soybean paste: chunjang is a fermented paste of soybeans and wheat. See fermented soybeans.
• Adjustable at home: more vegetables, lean pork and a smaller noodle portion make a much lighter bowl than a delivery serving.

• Chinese zhajiangmian: the Shandong ancestor — a thick, small portion of minced pork fried with sweet bean paste, mixed into the noodles.
• Restaurant variants: the folk encyclopedia lists gan-jjajang, yuni-jjajang, samseon-jjajang (with seafood), jaengban-jjajang (served on a large platter), gochu-jjajang (with chili) and yuseul-jjajang.
• Local toppings: depending on the region, a fried egg, julienned cucumber, a boiled egg or quail eggs.
• Instant jjajang-ramyeon: sold by food companies since the late 1970s, according to the folk encyclopedia.