Boneless chicken feet and hanwoo beef tartare in Hongdae: Cheongnyeon

Today I went to Yeonnam-dong.

Cheongnyeon Dakbal 1987 Hongdae Branch 📍218-1 Donggyo-ro, 1F, Mapo-gu, Seoul ⏰ Hours | Mon–Thu 16:00–00:30 Fri–Sat 15:00–01:30 Sun 15:00–00:30

Outdoor pojangmacha seats and indoor tables

There's outdoor seating that feels like a pojangmacha (street food tent)

Inside there were tables like this — good for groups of 2 to 4.

Once you sit down they bring the basic sides first: bean sprout soup and pickled radish.

Chicken feet menu, prices, and toppings

I checked the chicken feet menu first, and it was only ₩12,000 per serving. Your first order has to be 2 servings or more, so it's ₩24,000 for two. There's soup chicken feet and grilled chicken feet, and you can choose whole-bone, tulip-cut, or boneless.

If you want to try a variety of sides, I'd recommend the chicken feet set menu! It comes with 2 servings of chicken feet, fried chicken skin, mukbap (acorn jelly salad), tuna mayo rice balls, and kalguksu (knife-cut noodles).

You can also add toppings to your chicken feet. There's Chinese glass noodles, buchu noodles, sausage, and rice cake, but interestingly you can also add beef intestines (daechang) and pork belly! If you like both chicken feet and daechang, I'd recommend adding daechang to your chicken feet here! I didn't add it myself, but the chicken feet here are really spicy, so I think daechang would go well with it.

There were plenty of menu items besides chicken feet too.

Drinks — from pineapple soju to cream makgeolli

For drinks there's soju, beer, and makgeolli, plus house-made coconut cream makgeolli, strawberry cream makgeolli, banana cream makgeolli, and pineapple soju. A lot of people were drinking the pineapple soju too, and it actually comes served inside a real pineapple!

What we ordered

We ordered: Boneless soup chicken feet for two ₩24,000 Tuna mayo rice balls ₩5,500 Chum Churum soju ₩5,500 Terra beer ₩6,000 Just a heads up — there's only one beer option, Terra.

The rice balls came out first, made with tuna, mayonnaise, pickled radish, and seaweed. They go perfectly with spicy chicken feet, so I'd definitely recommend ordering them!

Before the chicken feet arrived, we had a toast — cheers!

Tissues and disposable gloves are on the wall, so you can just use them from there.

Before the chicken feet came out, we put on gloves and worked hard shaping the rice balls.

How to eat the boneless soup chicken feet for two

Boneless soup chicken feet for two. The chicken feet came topped with a thick sauce, and a few pieces of fried chicken skin on top too. I was curious about the fried chicken skin, so I was happy a little bit came along with it.

At first the sauce looks thick and dense, but it thins out once you bring it to a boil.

The chicken feet had a slight char, like grilled chicken feet. Seems like they're cooked once first, then topped with the sauce.

I'd recommend adding the bean sprouts from the soup into the chicken feet pot while it boils. Check the spice level and add a little of the broth too.

Once the sauce thins out and gets hot like this, you can eat it right away.

How spicy is it?

I ate the chicken feet first — they weren't the soft, falling-apart soup style, but chewy and firm like grilled chicken feet, which made them more satisfying to bite into. The broth wasn't sweet like tteokbokki (spicy rice cake) sauce — it was a chili-hot sauce with almost no sweetness! They said they don't use capsaicin, getting the heat from chili powder and cheongyang chili instead.

I wouldn't recommend it for people who can't handle spice, but if you love spicy food, you'll really love this. If you order the spiciest level, I think it would be seriously intense.

It went so well with the rice balls that we ended up piling it on top of them too.

The fried chicken skin was a bit firm, so I'd recommend boiling it briefly in the soup chicken feet and then dipping it in the sauce! If you boil it too long it gets mushy, so pull it out after a bit of boiling and dip it in the sauce.

Grade 1++ hanwoo beef tartare ₩19,000 — a break from the spice

Grade 1++ hanwoo beef tartare (yukhoe), ₩19,000. I saw beef tartare on the menu and added one on. It comes with somyeon (thin wheat noodles).

The seasoning on the beef tartare wasn't too strong, and after eating spicy chicken feet, the slightly sweet tartare tasted even better. The beef was also chewy, so the texture was great.

You can mix the noodles with the beef tartare, or eat them plain — they had a slight sweetness even on their own. I think just the noodles dipped lightly in the chicken feet broth would be tasty too. Ordering something like this in the middle of eating spicy chicken feet is a great move.