Gwangyang charcoal eel and eel soup: Deokeun Jangeo

A place to choose and grill eel in Gwangyang

Today I’m bringing you my visit to Deokeun Jangeo (더큰장어), a great eel spot in Gwangyang!

Deokeun Jangeo has a spacious dedicated parking lot, so it is easy to use whenever you visit. Even at peak time on a weekend evening, there is plenty of roadside parking right out front.

You can buy the raw eel on the building’s first floor. Just purchase an amount that suits the number of people in your party.

When I visited, it was ₩35,000 per kilogram. For two average adults, buying around ₩50,000 worth should make for a very filling meal.

All the eel at Deokeun Jangeo Gwangyang branch is 100% Korean farmed Japanese eel. The restaurant operates its own eel farm in Yeongam County, lowering distribution costs and selling to customers at reasonable prices.

The table setting fee is ₩4,000 per adult. You can also take home par-grilled eel or eel soup instead of dining in.

After choosing your eel on the first floor, it is time to head up to the second floor. When I came on Malbok, the final hot day of summer, last time, there were no empty seats upstairs and we waited 30 minutesㅜㅜ

This day was not quite as busy as that boknal, or summer hot-day holiday, but it was still packed. The moment we paid for the eel downstairs and were about to go up, the staff had already received a radio call from upstairs and started setting our table in advance.

Group rooms, a self-service bar, and charcoal setup

Deokeun Jangeo Gwangyang branch has regular seating as well as special, spacious rooms for group meals. Reservations are available for all kinds of gatherings, from company dinners to small groups.

As soon as you sit down, the basic side dishes are promptly set out.

These are the precious little friends that help you enjoy rich, fatty eel even more, haha.

There is a self-service bar so you will not feel short on anything during the meal. Feel free to bring over myeonginamul, pickled wild garlic leaves, ssam vegetables, and more.

According to the big data from all my visits to Deokeun Jangeo, the charcoal is usually set up within five minutes of sitting down.

But there is a lot of charcoal, so the heat is incredibly strong. Guardians need to take special care that babies and young children do not touch it :)

How to grill eel over high heat

While I looked after our child, my husband was in charge of grilling it deliciously, haha. (You have grilled it plenty of times, after all~) Once you put it on the heat, sprinkle the salt provided at each table to season it.

For our child to have something while waiting for the eel, we separately ordered eel tteokgalbi, a grilled minced-eel patty, and jumeokbap, rice balls.

Set the eel tteokgalbi on one side of the charcoal too, and it cooks in no time with the most delicious sizzling sound!

Eel and anago, or conger eel, curl outward as they cook, so you should always grill the skin side first.

Because the heat is so strong, the skin side cooks just right in one to two minutes, so do not look away!! Then flip it and grill the other side well too :) The heat is especially intense in the center, so we gathered everything in the middle, haha.

My husband likes it moderately cooked, but I prefer it with lots of golden browning, almost a little overcooked. That is why he has to pay even more attention while grilling, haha.

The heat at Deokeun Jangeo, a great eel spot in Gwangyang, is no joke, so the eel cooks very quickly. We could pick up our first ssam, a lettuce wrap, within 10 minutes of putting the eel on the grill.

This is my husband’s favorite combination: perilla leaf + onion + spicy sauce + wasabi + ginger. It is a combination that absolutely looks like it would smell of a restorative meal, haha.

Honestly, it is delicious with any sauce. In the end, it comes down to how good the eel itself is.

Compared with sea eel, it is clearly larger overall and the flesh is wonderfully thick. It was also full of fat, so there was no need to say more about the savory richness. Since it is farmed eel raised on feed, it does not have that distinctive ocean-fish smell either. If you season it well with salt, it simply melts away even without sauce; if I drank, I think this Japanese eel might be my absolute favorite drinking snack.

My husband truly eats any kind of eel, and whenever a new eel restaurant opens, he has to try it at least once. Yet wherever we go, we come back to Deokeun Jangeo and are surprised every time by its looks and flavor.

Eel tteokgalbi and rice balls that our child loved

Eel tteokgalbi, 1 each (₩3,500)

And one reason we keep returning to Deokeun Jangeo, a great eel spot in Gwangyang, is this eel tteokgalbi. At first, even the name eel tteokgalbi sounded like such an off-putting combination, but it is neither greasy nor fishy, and our child loves it so, so much that there is simply no reason not to come hereㅜ

The jumeokbap to go with it was seasoned just right too, so I felt there could not be a better place for eating out with a child.

Thick, rich eel soup

Eel soup (₩10,000)

And one more thing! This eel soup—at the tables of the older adults around me, I am not exaggerating one bit when I say everyone was having it. It is a menu item we absolutely, positively order every time we come!!!

It is eel soup prepared realllly deliciously. The broth is thick and rich, and there is no better restorative meal when you eat it with white rice.

They also brought us extra side dishes to go with it. I truly had no expectations for those shishito peppers, you know? But I left wanting to eat them nonstop, haha.

If you like grilled eel but are also someone who prefers soup, calculate just a little less raw eel when choosing it, then please try one bowl of this eel soup per person. It is a flavor you will not regret, trulyㅜ

After the meal, we enjoyed the cool sea breeze right in front and looked at POSCO, haha. There were quite a few people fishing out front too!