Food & Drink

The side dishes are free and they are not a starter

Sit down in a Korean restaurant and small plates arrive before you have ordered anything. These are banchan. They come with the meal, they are included, and in most places they are refilled free — you ask, or you help yourself from the counter. Kimchi, pickled radish, seasoned greens, egg, small fried things. They are not an appetiser to be worked through before the food arrives; they are eaten alongside it, all the way through.

This one convention is the biggest single difference between eating in Korea and eating anywhere else, and getting it wrong makes a meal confusing.

Why there is a grill in the table

Korean barbecue is cooked by the diners, at the table, over gas or charcoal set into it. Staff will start it, cut the meat with scissors as it cooks, and change the grill plate when it burns — that is normal and not a hint. Meat is ordered by weight, usually with a two-portion minimum, which is why solo barbecue is unusual and why the format is built around a group.

You eat it wrapped: a leaf of lettuce or perilla, meat, a smear of ssamjang, garlic if you want it, folded and eaten in one.

What to actually order

• Bibimbap — rice, vegetables, egg, gochujang, mixed vigorously before eating.
• Samgyetang — a whole young chicken stuffed with rice and ginseng in broth, eaten in the hottest weeks of summer, which sounds wrong and is not.
• Naengmyeon — cold buckwheat noodles in iced broth, the other summer answer.
• Bindaetteok — mung bean pancake, best at Gwangjang.
• Jjigae — a bubbling stew, kimchi or soybean paste, shared from the pot.
• Chimaek — fried chicken and beer, an institution rather than a meal.

The tent bars

A pojangmacha is an orange-tarpaulin street tent with plastic stools, serving soju and a short list of things to eat with it. They appear in the evening and are gone by morning. They are fewer than they were, and they are the most enjoyable cheap night out in the city.

Practical

⭐ Nobody tips. Not in restaurants, not in taxis, not in bars. It is not expected and can be genuinely awkward. The price on the menu is the price.

Water is free and self-service on almost every table. Call staff over — there is often a button on the table for it — rather than waiting to be noticed. Eating alone was once socially odd and now is entirely normal, but barbecue and stew places are still built for groups.

⚠️ Vegetarians should be careful. Fish sauce and anchovy or beef stock are in a great many dishes that read as vegetable, including most kimchi. Buddhist temple cuisine is the reliable exception and there is now a real vegan scene, but "no meat" does not mean what it means elsewhere.