Jjajangmyeon짜장면

Jjajangmyeon (짜장면) traces its roots to zhajiangmian (炸醬麵), a home-style noodle dish from China's Shandong region. Most of the ethnic Chinese community that settled in Incheon came from Shandong, and the dish came with them and began to be sold there. Early versions were different from today's: instead of being fully mixed, the noodles were eaten by dragging them through the sauce piled on top. The city of Incheon considers the most likely start to be around the 1910s, and in 2025 named jjajangmyeon one of its local heritage items.

Gonghwachun, a restaurant in Incheon's Chinatown, is known as the first place in Incheon to sell a dish called jjajangmyeon. The story goes that its owner renamed it in 1912 to celebrate the founding of the Republic of China, the name meaning "spring of the republic." The restaurant closed in 1983, but its old building was restored and reopened in 2012 as the Jjajangmyeon Museum.

The glossy black, slightly sweet jjajangmyeon of today is generally thought to have taken shape after the 1950s. Wang Songshan, an ethnic Chinese from Shandong, blended caramel made from heated sugar into chunjang, the dark fermented soybean paste, and the sweeter flavor won over Korean diners. During a government campaign encouraging flour-based meals that ran from 1964 for more than a decade, jjajangmyeon became an everyday treat for everyone. In the early 1960s, a bowl reportedly cost just 15 won.