Seodaemun bakery garlic baguette return: Mandong Jegwa

Visitor information for Mandong Jegwa Yeonnam Branch near Hongik University Station

Mandong Jegwa Yeonnam Branch, a bakery stop on a Yeonnam-dong bread crawl, is easy to visit near Exit 3 of Hongik University Station on Subway Line 2, the Gyeongui–Jungang Line, and the Airport Railroad. With Donggyo-dong Samgeori nearby, it is also a nice stop when eating around Donggyo-dong Samgeori.

It opens at 11 every morning, making it easy to pick up bread for a late breakfast or lunch brunch, and stays open until 9 PM, so it is also good for an evening visit after work. Parking is available at the nearby Yeonnam 4 Street Public Parking Lot and Yeonnam 3 Public Parking Lot.

The Yeonnam-dong bakery I kept thinking about and returned to

Today’s Hongdae bread-crawl stop is Mandong Jegwa near Hongik University Station, a Yeonnam-dong bakery. There are so many great places to eat, including new ones, around Hongik University Station that I do not often revisit places, but I came back to Mandong Jegwa because its crazily addictive flavor had stayed on my mind ever since my last Yeonnam-dong bread crawl.

I visited just after weekday lunch, and there was no wait that day. There was no wait when I did an opening run on a weekday last time either, so weekday daytime visits seem comfortably easy. Customers kept coming and going even right after lunch, but no one was lining up.

Choosing breads with free samples

Mandong Jegwa is famous not only for delicious bread but also for generous portions and great-value prices. And then there are the free samples they hand out so generously—heaven!

The kabocha squash ciabatta I tried as a sample had a lovely combination of hefty, sweet squash and chewy ciabatta. Once you start sampling, the bread is so good that you magically forget your original mission while loading up on the samples. I absolutely have to buy the corn mayo bread, my original target, on my next return.

The bacon ciabatta was good too. After sampling the chestnut, red bean, and mugwort bread, I thought its chestnut-red bean-mugwort combination had a very grandma-taste vibe, but it felt like a great dessert bread to give parents as a gift. Of course, I liked it too.

The fig campagne was also lovely, with pleasantly chewy bits of fig, as were the yakbap bread and chestnut loaf.

The chili sausage bread and tortilla bread looked delicious too, and the bread prices were so low. I was moved.

The shelves were full of breads for all kinds of tastes: sweet, savory, sweet-and-salty, and nutty.

You can put the other breads on a tray and pay for them, but the cappuccino bread and

the basil tomato cucumber baguette, onion bagel, and Mandong Jegwa’s highlight, the garlic baguette, are not items customers place on their own trays. Tell the counter when paying, and the kind staff pack them with you.

Packed kaya coconut bread, bagels, and garlic baguettes

They pack purchases in paper bags; a paper shopping bag costs ₩100. When you walk in, it is a little funny to see people coming out carrying bags labeled “bread,” haha. I did not buy that much bread, but I had lots of other things to carry, so I put everything in a shopping bag while I was at it.

This time, my finds were kaya coconut bread, a squid-ink onion bagel, and a garlic baguette. All the packaged breads I got on my last visit were delicious, so the only difference this time was adding the kaya coconut. I got the squid-ink onion bagel and garlic bread again too—because they are ridiculously delicious. The other breads are good too, but I had a lot to carry, so I packed only the ones I had kept thinking about after eating them last time.

The squid-ink bread has soft bread filled with condensed-milk cream—pure bliss. Should I say there is a faint cheese-like flavor in the squid-ink bread? Seriously so delicious.

The kaya coconut bread has a crisp exterior and an insanely nutty coconut-and-almond combination. It is full of rich, toasty kaya jam filling, sweet and nutty and deeply savory all at once; I enjoyed it so much that I finished it in one sitting.

The onion bagel is generously filled with onion cream cheese full of crunchy onion, tucked into a bagel that is crisp outside and chewy inside—obviously, insanely delicious. If you cannot eat it right away, freeze it. Even after freezer storage, the onion bagel’s onion crunch was still there.

Mandong Jegwa Yeonnam Branch was a great-value Hongdae bakery where I could sample and pack generously portioned breads made with no skimping on ingredients. I recommend it as a place that will make you want to return.