Korean Winter Street Snacks: Bungeoppang, Hotteok and What ₩1,000 Buys Now

In Korea, the first cold evening of the year is announced by smell before it is announced by the weather service: batter on a cast-iron mould, brown sugar hitting a griddle, sweet potatoes blackening in a drum oven. These are the 겨울 간식 - winter snacks - and for most Koreans they are tied to a specific memory of walking home from school with a paper bag going translucent from the heat.

They are also, unusually for street food, a national economic indicator. When the price of a fish-shaped pastry moves, it makes the evening news. This guide covers what each snack is, what it costs in the 2025-26 season, why the stalls are getting harder to find, and how to get hold of them as a visitor. For the wider picture of what Korea eats in the cold months, see our guide to Korean winter foods.

When do the winter snack stalls appear?

Roughly from late October or November to February or early March. There is no official season. Each vendor decides when it is cold enough for people to queue for something hot, and in a warm autumn the carts can appear weeks late.

The apps offer a rough signal. Daangn, the neighbourhood marketplace app, opened its bungeoppang map on 20 November in 2024. Convenience stores move earlier: GS25 put a ₩700 roasted sweet potato on sale in September 2025, while summer heat was still hanging on, and SPC Samlip released its 2025 hoppang line-up in October.

What are the snacks, and what is in them?

Two more notes on names. Koreans say 어묵 (eomuk) in writing and very often odeng out loud - the second is the older, Japanese-derived word, and you will hear both. And 붕어빵 (bungeoppang) has a well-worn second meaning: a child who looks exactly like a parent is “a bungeoppang,” because they came out of the same mould.

The bungeoppang cart usually sells more than bungeoppang. The reporter from Herald Economy who worked a shift at a Mapo-gu stall in November 2025 was also selling hotteok, egg bread and corn. Sweet potatoes and chestnuts tend to come from a separate drum-oven cart. Eomuk sits on a different circuit altogether: it is sold year-round at bunsik stalls next to the tteokbokki, but it is in winter that people stop for a skewer and a cup of broth on the way to the bus.

How much does bungeoppang cost now?

At an ordinary street stall in the 2025-26 winter, ₩1,000 buys one bungeoppang, or you get three for ₩2,000. A generation of Koreans remembers three for ₩1,000; Korean press reporting in autumn 2025 described that price as effectively extinct. Seoul Economic Daily found ₩1,500 a piece around Gangnam Station and Hongdae in February 2026, and ₩2,500 at premium franchise shops.

The main culprit is the filling. According to price data from the Korea Agro-Fisheries and Food Trade Corporation (aT) cited by the Korea Economic Daily, wholesale red beans cost ₩364,873 per 40kg in November 2023, ₩616,810 a year later and ₩726,600 in November 2025. The retail price of a 500g bag rose from ₩10,590 to ₩13,703 over the last of those years. Sugar and flour are up too, and vendors list LPG for the burners, paper bags and pitch fees on top.

🧾 Typical winter snack prices, 2025-26 season (Korean press reports; stalls vary)

Myeongdong is its own price zone. In July 2023, when complaints about the district’s stalls peaked, Seoul Shinmun listed bungeoppang at four for ₩5,000 and grilled squid at ₩12,000. A price-display rule came into force in Myeongdong in October 2023, but it covered about 1,011 shops and explicitly left the street stalls out.

Why are the stalls disappearing?

Money is only part of it. Seoul’s count of street stalls of all kinds fell from 6,079 in 2020 to 4,741 in the most recent figure cited by Korean press in late 2025, and only around 45% of those hold a permit. The city has run a permit scheme for “street shops” since 2018, but, as one November 2025 investigation put it, the 25 districts run 25 different policies. An unlicensed cart that sells for four winter months is an easy target for a complaint from a nearby bakery, and fines eat a season’s margin quickly.

Asia Economy tried the obvious test in November 2025: it took 15 bungeoppang stalls listed on a map app across four Seoul districts north of the Han and went to look. Three were open.

The demand has not gone anywhere - it has moved. Seoul Economic Daily reported that CJ CheilJedang’s frozen bungeoppang went from 240,000 units sold in the 2023-24 winter to 300,000 in 2024-25, and convenience store sweet potato sales jump every December. Meanwhile cafés sell “premium” bungeoppang at two for ₩2,700, and in early 2026 the snack apps were competing for attention with a craze for Dubai-style chewy cookies (see our Korean dessert trends timeline).

How do Koreans find a stall? The 붕세권 apps

With crowd-sourced maps. The slang for living near a bungeoppang stall is 붕세권 (bungsegwon) - a pun on yeoksegwon, the estate-agent term for “within walking distance of a subway station.” A flat in a bungsegwon is, jokingly, a flat with a premium.

Gasumsok 3cheonwon (가슴속3천원, “3,000 won in your chest”) is the app that made the idea mainstream. The name comes from the old advice to keep about ₩3,000 inside your coat in winter in case you pass a bungeoppang cart. It launched on iPhone in February 2020 and Android a year later; by October 2023 it reported about 900,000 users and around 15,000 registered bungeoppang stalls. It has since broadened to other street food - in September 2026 the App Store listing is titled “bungeoppang and Dubai chewy cookie map” - and the listing shows English language support. Users post the stall’s location, menu, prices, hours and payment methods, with photos.

Daangn (당근, formerly Karrot Market), Korea’s neighbourhood second-hand app, has run a winter snack map since 2020 and opened a bungeoppang-only map in its Neighbourhood Map tab in November 2024. It is Korean-language and built around verified neighbourhoods, so it is more use to residents than to visitors.

Cash or transfer: how do you pay at a stall?

In cash, ideally in ₩1,000 notes. Most stalls have no card terminal. Many tape a bank account number or a QR code to the cart for gyejwa ichae - direct transfer from a Korean banking app - which is how young Koreans without cash pay. Foreign visitors mostly cannot use this, because transfers need a Korean bank account; our guide to paying in Korea covers what does work.

Some vendors have gone the other way and stopped taking transfers. Asia Economy reported in November 2023 on stalls refusing them after customers sent ₩200-300 for a ₩3,000 order and walked off during the rush, and after an account-freezing scam aimed at small traders. A cash-only sign on a bungeoppang cart is, in other words, not a sign of a backward business.

No stall nearby? What does the convenience store sell?

Hoppang, above all. SPC Samlip has made its steamed buns since 1971 and says it had sold 6.8 billion of them by the end of 2024; the 2025 season added 14 new flavours, among them kimchi dumpling and honey sweet potato. In the heated cabinet next to the till at a Korean convenience store, a red bean hoppang cost ₩1,400 at GS25 and ₩1,600 at 7-Eleven in December 2025, according to Newsis. The name is usually explained as the sound of blowing on a hot bun - ho-ho.

The same stores have taken over much of the sweet potato trade. All four big chains sold roasted sweet potatoes for around ₩2,000-2,200 in December 2025, and their sales in the first two weeks of that month were up 55-92% on the previous period. Several also stock eomuk in broth and frozen bungeoppang to heat at home. It is not the same as eating out of a paper bag on a cold street, but it is reliable, it takes foreign cards, and it is open all night.

For more on who stands behind those shelves, see who makes Korean convenience store food.

Where can visitors reliably find winter snacks in Seoul?

The honest answer is: near where Koreans live, not where tourists stay. Subway exits in residential districts, bus stops outside schools and the edges of neighbourhood markets are where the classic carts cluster. For a visitor on a short trip, these are the places that are most likely to deliver.

Namdaemun Market. The hotteok here is its own genre: yachae hotteok, deep-fried and stuffed with glass noodles and vegetables, from the stall at Namdaemun-ro 12 near Gate 2 of the underground arcade. There is a queue in every season, which is the best indication it is fresh. Our Namdaemun food guide listed it at ₩2,500 from 2025 listings.

📍 Open in Naver Map — Namdaemun Yachae Hotteok

Gwangjang Market. Better known for mung bean pancakes and gimbap, but there are hotteok stalls inside, and the hot food here runs all year. Street stalls in the aisles are largely cash-only; see our Gwangjang Market guide for how the stalls differ from the fixed shops.

📍 Open in Naver Map — Gwangjang Market

Myeongdong. The evening street food lane is the one place you are almost guaranteed to find something hot, winter or not - but it is built for visitors, and the prices show it. Jung-gu ran a month-long crackdown on the stalls in summer 2025, taking 45 administrative actions for unlicensed trading and other violations. Buy a snack, but do not use it to judge what Koreans pay. Our Myeongdong food guide has where the locals eat instead.

📍 Open in Naver Map — Myeongdong

Insadong. The stalls along the main street are photogenic and sell sweets year-round, but our Insadong guide is blunt that they are for photos rather than value.

Winter food in Korea is not only street food. Late November is also kimjang, when households make the year’s kimchi in one go - see our kimjang season guide - and for what ends up on the table at home once the snack bag is empty, read what Koreans eat at home. For the year-round snack-shop counterpart to the winter carts, we have a guide to ordering at a bunsik shop.