Five Dishes Daegu Invented, and Where to Eat Them

The city tells it in this order. Yukgaejang came first — Daegu was already being described as the home of yukgaejang in a 1929 magazine and in Choe Nam-seon's Joseon Sangsik Mundap, the city writes.

Ttaro-gukbap came after. During the Korean War, refugees converged on Daegu from all over the country, and the ones who disliked rice served in the soup asked for it — "bap ttaro, guk ttaro" — — rice separate, soup separate. That request is where the name settled, on the city's account. So ttaro-gukbap describes how the food arrives, not what was cooked.

The city names the place: Gukil Sikdang, which from 1946 sold rice-in-soup at the timber market on the empty lot by the Hanil Theatre, using a broth simmered overnight from marrow bones and shin. That shop is the first entry on this list.

The red, thickened chilli oil is the other thing the city singles out. The chilli powder does not go into the soup directly — it is rendered into melted beef fat first, and the resulting oil goes in as seasoning.

Dongin-dong jjim-galbi began in the residential streets of Dongin-dong in the 1970s: beef ribs cooked in a battered aluminium pan and mixed with a seasoning of hot chilli powder and crushed garlic. The city is explicit that this is a different dish from soy-seasoned galbi-jjim, not a variant of it.

What actually makes the lane hard to navigate is its density. Reduce the city's jjim-galbi shop list to street addresses and eight of them sit on one lane, Dongdeok-ro 36-gil: 9-4, 9-5, 9-9, 9-12, 9-13 (two), 9-17 and 9-18. Consecutive lot numbers, the same dish in each.

Which means a name is not enough to find a shop on this lane. The Nagyeong covered here is at 9-17, and there is a separate "Nagyeong Jjim-galbi Annex" at Taepyeong-ro 256-15. The two addresses are more than a kilometre apart.

The city dates the other three, and all three are late twentieth century.

• Napjak-mandu — early 1960s. It began as an attempt to take the richness out of the Chinese dumpling by using a vegetable filling, and what separates it from an ordinary dumpling is how little of that filling — glass noodle, garlic chive, carrot, cabbage, spring onion — actually goes in. Thin skin, folded into a half-moon, boiled once and then griddled, finished with soy sauce.
• Yaki-udon — 1970s. A Daegu stir-fried udon with no broth: fine chilli powder and garlic, then onion, cabbage, courgette, bean sprout and wood-ear, with garlic chive in summer and spinach in winter, thrown over a high flame to order.
• Makchang — early 1970s. The fourth stomach of the cow, grilled over briquettes or charcoal and dipped in a doenjang sauce. The city writes that the practice developed in Daegu alone before spreading nationally, and records the lineage — Hwanggeum Makchang first, then Seoul, Samil and Sangdong.