Icheon: Korea's Pottery Town, Its Most Famous Rice, and a Hot Spring to Finish

Icheon is a small city an hour southeast of Seoul with three claims, all of them about making things: it is Korea's ceramics capital, it grows the country's most famous rice, and it sits on a hot spring. UNESCO named it a Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art, which is unusual for a place this size.

It's an easy day trip, and a genuinely different one from the palace-and-market circuit.

Ceramics

Icheon has been making pottery since the Joseon period, and there are now several hundred kilns and studios in and around the city. Two places to aim for:

• Icheon Ceramic Village (Sindun-myeon). A working cluster of studios and shops along Dojayesul-ro. You can watch potters throw, buy directly, and in many studios sit down and make something yourself — a one-hour wheel or hand-building session is a much better souvenir than a keychain.
• The Icheon Cerapia complex, which hosts the Icheon Ceramics Festival each spring — the biggest of its kind in Korea.

The rest of the day

• Seolbong Park. A large park at the foot of Seolbongsan with a lake, a sculpture park, and the World Ceramic Center. The walk up Seolbongsan takes about 40 minutes and gives you the whole valley.
• Icheon Hot Springs. Natural alkaline spring water, developed into a spa quarter. A soak after a day of walking and a large lunch is the correct order of operations.
• Sanchon and the rice fields. In autumn the valley is gold and the roadside stalls sell the new harvest.

What to eat

Icheon's food identity is simple and it starts with the rice:

• Icheon ssalbap jeongsik (이천쌀밥정식). The set meal built around a bowl of Icheon rice, cooked in a stone or brass pot and served with fifteen or more banchan, a soup, and grilled fish. Historically the rice grown here went to the royal table. There is a whole road of restaurants doing nothing else, and it is the single thing to eat in this city.
• Hanwoo over charcoal. Icheon has a strong butcher-shop restaurant culture — buy the beef at the counter by weight, grill it yourself.
• Sogeum-gui. Salt-grilled pork, done plainly and well, in old restaurants that have run for decades.
• Sundae and gukbap at the traditional market.
• Makgeolli. Local rice means local rice wine, and the breweries here are worth a bottle.

The logic of the place is that if the rice is that good, the correct meal is one that puts the rice at the center rather than hiding it.

Practical tips

• Getting there: Icheon Station on the Gyeonggang Line from Pangyo, or an express bus from Seoul's Dong Seoul Terminal — about an hour either way.
• Pottery classes need booking, especially at weekends.
• Rice set meals are usually a two-person minimum.
• The ceramics festival is late April to early May, and accommodation gets tight.
• A kiln-fired piece takes weeks. If you make something, arrange shipping before you leave the studio.

Each restaurant below has a video on its EatHub page, which is useful on a road where twenty restaurants advertise the identical set meal.