u/Cerullie — reddlx

My partner and I went to the Jung Festival on Saturday!

We were really excited after seeing a ton of creators talking about it, and while I'm typically wary of "influencer hosted" events, everyone really seemed to like the guy in charge and the restaurants and community seemed to be really rallying and supporting this. So, we made the 1.5 hour commute into London and spent our day here!

I'll preface that my boyfriend and I are very familiar with Korean cuisine (also very big foodies) and were mainly excited to get our hands on things that were harder to find or our personal favorites, which may impact our feelings on food / the event.

TLDR: Absolutely DO NOT go to this event. Research the restaurants who were present and go visit their physical locations or their stalls at a different market instead.

Note: not a special person, just an average individual who went to the event
Other note: this is a mix of an event + food review, but let me know if it should only be food!

Food

The foods I was really looking forward to: Korean Fried Chicken, Pork Bone Broth Soup, fancy Korean-inspired financies (desserts), Sikhye (Korean sweet rice punch), Heotteok (Savoury or Sweet Korean Stuffed Pancake... I think is the best way to explain it).

The food we got: none of that. Literally not a single one of those items.

The reason was that by the time we entered into the market grounds the majority of the stalls had sold out of these specific items, packed up and left (with no announcement on the Instagram), or had 1+ hour queues after we had to queue hours to even to get INTO the market. We were so hungry because we hadn't eaten all day waiting for this.

So, we simply lined up for... well, whatever had the shortest lines. Here's what we got:

Kimchi Cookie (1/10): yes, like a dessert cookie but with Kimchi flavoring. The sample tasted good and interesting but the full cookie we got was kind of hard and when you bit into it, and it has that feeling like toffee where it sticks in your teeth a little if that makes sense. Maybe we're unlucky and got an old or stale cookie is my hope, the shopkeepers seemed really nice. This was 3.50.
Dongchimi Guksu (4/10): essentially something like a water kimchi noodle soup. I enjoyed the noodles, but the broth flavoring just tasted lightly salted. It was refreshing and I figured water Kimchi flavoring would be light, but I think it was a bit too light in my opinion. This was 9.50.
Tteokgalbi Patty (8/10): really good!! The meat flavor is really meaty and there's some melted cheese inside. Even cooled down it tasted quite nice. This was 8.50.
BBQ Beef Dumplings (9/10): normally I don't like to buy dumplings going out since they can get quite pricey but my partner went ahead and got these. Absolutely WORTH IT. Surprisingly well filled, very meaty and smoky, and my favorite thing I ate that day at the festival! This was 5.00, and I would have gotten it again!
Ddakgalbi Bowl (7/10): chicken and rice bowl situation, I thought it was quite average but my partner said he really liked it. They have a medium and large portion size. This was 14.00.
Matcha Oatmilk Latte (5/10): perfectly average, not really good or bad. I think this was about 5.20.

There were in general a lack of drink options from the Jung Festival itself, but neighboring stalls in the market sold smoothies and the venue is attached to a Waitrose so you can go there to fetch yourself a bottle of water. Really, this event I think would have been a good introduction if you never had Korean food / limited experience with Asian food before.

If you know your stuff, then it's just alright but I would research these restaurants and visit their physical locations instead to get proper food at proper pricing with proper service. Some items in this list were good, but overall absolutely not worth the wait times and price to portion ratio.

Now onto the fun part...

Logistics Inside the Event

Be prepared to wait an extreme amount of time for the popular food once you're in the market (I'm talking about 1+ hours and the fact that lines for popular stalls in the market... STRETCHED OUTSIDE THE MARKET VENUE).

There's also limited seating. This event is crazy popular and the seating area towards the entrance just doesn't have the capacity for everyone. Lots of folks will never end up sitting and eating because they're stuck in queues, so they eat standing up.

We fortunately had some spare shopping bags and used these to cover the floor and sat down out of the way to finally eat and stop standing, but then got told by security we had to move and couldn't eat on the ground. Not mad at security (I will say, they all were so polite and understanding during this insane event, I was really impressed), but really a massive oversight by the event folks.

So if you're excited to sit down and eat, hunt those table areas like a vulture or commit to standing up and only buying 1-2 food items at a time.

Logistics Outside the Event

I suppose some people reading this might be thinking "it's a big event, a 1+ hour wait time is probably expected even if it's not fun." I would agree with that sentiment usually, however...

Those 1+ hour wait times are once you're IN the event. You actually have to queue outside to get into the festival at all, which ENDED UP TAKING 3+ HOURS. You'll see a lot of people like us who went yesterday probably popping off in the Instagram comments and, rightly so.

Even though yes you could "technically" leave and choose not to do the event if you're tired of waiting that long (and tons of people did), it was a bit hard to gauge the wait time because there wasn't much communication from the staff towards the back of the queue. So, we committed without knowing it was worse than we could possibly imagine.

If you're waiting under the bridge by the canal, the time from there to the main queue line took us about 1-1.5 hours. So, we estimated by the time we got to the main queue it would be +30 min (yes, there was a queue for the queue). We were incredibly wrong; this barricaded section took the longest, barely moved, and took 2 hours.

The whole time we were being blasted by the British sun and, I think like us, many people were dehydrated and a bit grumpy because we had come on empty stomachs to fill up at the festival and didn't expect such a long wait time. This barricaded section snaked back and forth, so it's also a little harder to exit the queue.

There were however some people who would leave, buy water or snacks, and then come back and cut the queue. If this was in the section before the barricades I wouldn't have minded. However, so many of us wouldn't be able to leave and do such a thing without losing our spots or causing a riot, so it was really annoying to see this happen.

Final Thoughts

I get the event was way more successful than they anticipated, and good for them. I really wanted to be happy for them and support them. Not once though did an event organizer come out and apologize, not one bottle of water was spared by the event to those who waited 3+ hours in queue, and only one single Instagram post was made (which they did not decide to verbally come out and tell us waiting in line about) saying essentially "it's best to not come at all, we're overwhelmed." If we had seen / known that, we would have left the queue ourselves and spent a marvelous day elsewhere.

Very rarely have I gone full Karen on something, but I do not want anyone else to waste their time or money on this event like we did. Go support these stalls at their physical locations, head to Chinatown for better food prices and service, and even next year if they expanded the venue and everything, I would not trust these organizers enough to go again.