Food guide
Eating in Korea: Fermentation, Banchan and the Table
Korean food is among the most immediately likeable cuisines in the world and among the most consistently misread by visitors, because its organising principles are not the ones most diners arrive with. There are no courses. The small dishes are not appetisers and are not charged for. The heat is not ancient. And the meal is built around sharing to a degree that makes solo ordering genuinely awkward until you know the workarounds. None of this is complicated, but knowing it in advance is the difference between eating well here and eating tentatively.
Updated 2026-08-15
The banchan table, and why you are ordering too much
Order almost anything in a Korean restaurant and the table fills before your dish arrives: small plates of kimchi, seasoned greens, braised beans, pickled radish, dried anchovies, egg, whatever the kitchen makes that day. These are banchan. They are not appetisers, they are not a starter course, and they are not on the bill — they come with the meal as a matter of course, and in most places they are refilled on request at no charge.
The practical consequence is the single most useful thing a visitor can know here: you are almost certainly over-ordering. Two people ordering two main dishes plus extras will end up with a table they cannot finish, because the banchan alone amounts to a substantial spread. Order less than instinct suggests, see what arrives, and add afterwards. The corollary is that asking for a refill of a banchan you like is entirely normal and mildly flattering to the kitchen, not an imposition.
Fermentation is the whole flavour system
Korean cooking builds flavour from fermented pastes rather than from stocks or fats, and three of them do most of the work: soy sauce, doenjang the soybean paste, and gochujang the fermented chilli paste. Collectively these are jang, and traditionally they were made at home over months in earthenware onggi jars kept on a raised platform in the yard, where the porous clay allowed slow air exchange while the sun did the rest. A household's jang was a multi-year asset and the taste of its cooking.
Kimchi belongs to the same logic but is a category rather than a dish — a method of salting and fermenting vegetables that produces hundreds of regional and seasonal variants, of which the familiar napa cabbage version is only the best travelled. The autumn communal kimchi-making, kimjang, when families and neighbourhoods produce the winter supply together in a single mass effort, is recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. If you eat one thing here with real attention, make it the kimchi in a good restaurant, and notice that it is not the same twice.
Korean food was not always spicy
The chilli that defines the modern Korean palate is a late arrival. Peppers came from the Americas and reached the peninsula only around the turn of the seventeenth century through regional trade, and gochujang as we would recognise it is documented well after that. For most of Korean culinary history the seasoning was black pepper, mustard, ginger and fermented soy — which means the red-heavy food that now reads as timelessly Korean is, in the long view, a relatively recent reinvention.
This matters practically as well as historically, because a great deal of Korean cooking is still not spicy at all and visitors who assume otherwise miss half of it. The white kimchi, the clear beef and radish soups, the steamed egg, the ginseng chicken broth, the soy-braised dishes and most temple food carry no chilli whatever. If heat is a problem for you, Korea is far more accommodating than its reputation suggests — you are not restricted to a corner of the menu, you are choosing a different half of it.
The rules of the table
Korean table manners diverge from those of its neighbours in ways that catch out travellers who arrive via Japan or China. The rice bowl stays on the table and is not lifted to the mouth — doing so reads as poor manners here, though it is normal elsewhere in the region. Rice and soup are eaten with the spoon, and chopsticks are for the banchan, so the two utensils are used in alternation rather than the spoon being reserved for liquid. The chopsticks themselves are metal and flat, which is a Korean peculiarity and takes a meal or two to handle confidently.
The social rules cluster around age and around pouring. You do not fill your own glass; you fill your neighbour's and let them fill yours, which keeps a table's attention circulating. When an older person pours for you, receive the glass with two hands, and turn slightly away from them when you drink. Wait for the eldest at the table to begin. None of this is enforced against foreigners, and getting it wrong costs you nothing — but getting it right is noticed immediately and warmly, because it signals that you looked it up.
Drinking is eating
Alcohol in Korea is not ordered on its own. Drink comes with anju — food specifically eaten alongside it, which is a category rather than a snack, ranging from fried chicken to spicy stews to plates of raw fish. Ordering a round without ordering something to eat is close to unintelligible in a traditional setting, and the pairing is the reason a night out here tends to run through several venues in sequence rather than parking at one.
Soju does most of the drinking, cheap and clean-tasting and drunk in small glasses rather than sipped; beer is common alongside it, and the two are frequently combined. The tented street bars that appear in the evenings are the most atmospheric version of all this, and the least intimidating way in for a visitor is to order something obvious to share and let the pouring etiquette carry the conversation. The rule to actually observe is the one about pouring for others rather than yourself; the rest will sort itself out.
A regional map of the cooking
Korea is small but its cooking is genuinely regional, and knowing the map helps you order. The south-western Jeolla region is the acknowledged food heartland, with the richest agricultural land and a reputation for tables that arrive with noticeably more banchan than anywhere else — a meal there is the clearest demonstration of the shared-table principle at full extension, and Jeonju in particular is the acknowledged home of bibimbap. The south-eastern Gyeongsang cooking runs saltier and hotter, with more raw and grilled seafood along its long coastline.
Seoul's food is milder and more composed, historically the court cuisine and the food of a capital that drew from everywhere, which is why the city is the easiest place to eat a bit of everything and the least representative place to judge any one thing. The mountainous east eats more buckwheat, potato and freshwater fish; the far south-western islands and the southern coast lean hard on fermented and salted seafood. Eating your way across the country is a genuinely different experience from eating well in one city, and the distances are short enough that it is realistic.