JungJiyoung Coffee Roasters — a basement roaster, an old fortress, and my favorite day in Korea

We took the train down to Suwon to see the old fortress and ended up staying half the night for everything around it — the food streets, the walk along the wall, and a coffee roaster in a basement that I keep thinking about.

Suwon is a short train ride south of Seoul. Most people go for the fortress up on the hill, and that's why we went too, but the part I keep coming back to is everything that happened around it. The streets full of small restaurants, the food carts firing up as it got dark, and a coffee roaster hidden in a basement that turned into one of my favorite stops of the whole trip.

The castle was the plan. Suwon Hwaseong is a walled fortress built in the 1790s under King Jeongjo, and the wall runs for almost six kilometers of brick and stone over the hills, with painted wooden gates and pavilions spaced out along it. It's a UNESCO World Heritage site now. Standing under one of the eaves and looking straight up at the woodwork, you understand why people make the trip for it.

We walked the wall for a while, and it's a real walk — up onto the battlements and along the top of them, with the town spread out below you on one side and the old ramparts curving off ahead on the other. My girlfriend kept finding good corners to sit in, and I kept photographing her in them.

By the time we came down off the hill it was getting dark, and this is where Suwon really got me. It's the kind of town you just wander through with no plan, talking, drifting toward wherever dinner is going to end up being. Every street was lined with tiny restaurants, each one with its own theme and its own little glow, and picking one was half the fun.

We ate our way down the street. There's a stretch everyone calls chicken alley, which is exactly what it sounds like — Korean fried chicken done every way you can think of. In between the sit-down places there were food carts going the whole length of it. I got a bowl of takoyaki off a griddle, still steaming, with the bonito flakes waving around on top, under a big grinning neon octopus.

Down the stairs

The coffee was the last stop of the night. JungJiyoung Coffee Roasters isn't somewhere you'd find by accident. You go down a flight of stairs into a basement and it opens up into this raw room — white tile on the walls, pipes and ductwork running across the ceiling, a long steel counter, security monitors glowing in the corner, and a globe sitting on a shelf for no reason I could work out. By rights it should feel cold and industrial. It doesn't. It feels lived-in and, honestly, kind of great.

I drink my coffee black, so a roaster doesn't have anywhere to hide with me, and theirs was good. Clean and roasty and honest, made by people who obviously care more about what's in the cup than about how the place looks, which is funny because the place already looks good. We grabbed an Oreo s'more pastry to go with it.

They also had a whole cart of their own merch down there — caps, t-shirts (one of them read "No Coffee No Wokkee," which I've been thinking about ever since), pins, and a bunch of little frog mascots sitting around watching everything. It's a shop with an actual personality instead of a template, and that's the kind of place I go out of my way for when I travel.

That's really why I started doing these. I like finding rooms like this one, run by people who love the work, and bringing a little of it home with me. Suwon handed me a good one.