LEGIT Korean Chicken at Suwon’s Famous “Chicken Street” – 수원 통닭 거리

I met my friend Soyeong to get some chicken, and originally we were planning to go to a different famous chicken restaurant. The street we visited was called 수원 통닭 거리 (Suwon Chicken Street), and it’s famous for having a lot of chicken restaurants in close proximity. The reason is that restaurants used to wash their chickens in the Suwon river adjacent to the street, and after a few restaurants became popular for selling chicken other restaurants followed along. These days there are well over a dozen restaurants, and all have appealing-looking chicken advertising posted around the street.

But despite being a famous location, there weren’t any tourists there at all (except for some kids passing through on a field trip). The reason is that Suwon isn’t a tourist destination – Seoul is right next to Suwon and most people visit Seoul or other historic locations. Suwon has a lot of fun things to do, and in the future I’d like to showcase more of the city, but for today we were just hungry.

So we picked a different restaurant, but it happened to be closed the day we went. We’d heard about 수원 왕갈비 치킨 before – it’d gotten famous from the recent Korean movie “극한직업” – but I wasn’t so interested in it because I thought it was just a trend that only appeared due to the movie. But boy was I glad to be wrong. It was some of the juiciest and crispiest chicken I ever had, without being greasy or overly sweet (or even expensive). I’d highly recommend it if you’re ever in Suwon.