Same table, different meals: Korean food’s draw is participation

Visitors listen to a talk on Korean dining culture. Courtesy of O’ngo Food Communications

One of the questions visitors ask me most often is why Koreans share their side dishes. First-timers walking into a Korean restaurant are often caught off guard. They ordered one dish, and within minutes the table fills with kimchi, seasoned vegetables and pickles. None of it lands on their own plate. It all goes to the middle of the table and belongs to everyone. Most visitors view this as part of Korea’s sharing culture. They are not wrong, but every time the question comes up, I tell a slightly different story.

What sets Korean cuisine, or “hansik,” apart is not that people share dishes. It is that people sharing one table can eat entirely different meals.

A few years ago I shared a meal with a journalist from Austria. She is a vegetarian, yet I had managed to arrange the meeting at a Korean barbecue restaurant of all places — still, the meal went smoothly. The table filled up with rice, soup, leafy greens, and side dishes. She asked me how to eat ssam, a traditional kind of lettuce wrap, and then asked whether any side dish should not be put inside. I told her none was. A little while later, she fished a mallow leaf from her fermented soybean paste soup, placed it on a lettuce leaf and wrapped it up to eat.

I laughed out loud. She asked whether she had broken any dining etiquette. No such rule exists, I told her, explaining that Koreans do not often build a wrap out of the greens they pull from their soup.

“The soft mallow and the crisp lettuce really go well together,” she said, urging me to try one myself.

She ate mallow wraps and I ate meat wraps. That day I realized what makes Korean food interesting: The same spread on the same table can produce a completely different meal for each person.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang eats at a restaurant in Mapo District, Seoul. Korea Times photo by Park Si-mon

Differences in taste, in other words, never turn into conflict. Those who like their food spicy, those who prefer milder flavors, meat lovers and vegetable lovers can all comfortably share the same table.

From a distance, that is a fairly unusual dining experience. In many countries, dishes arrive fully prepared, and the point is to taste exactly what the cook intended. Korean food Kleaves the final step to the diner. Mixing, wrapping and combining turn a guest into the creator rather than a mere consumer.

We live in an era with information overload. A smartphone will show anyone the view at a destination and reviews of its food, so why do people still get on planes and travel to countries they do not know? The answer lies in experience rather than information: How you eat is starting to matter more than what you eat, and how you take part more than what you see.

A boy holds up the bibimbap he made himself during his first Korean cooking class. Courtesy of O’ngo Food Communications

That is what makes Korean food worth enjoying. When people first encounter the mixed rice dish known as “bibimbap,” some of them ask, “Why make it so carefully and then go to the trouble of mixing it all together?” Running cooking classes has convinced me that bibimbap is about the mixing, not the making. Plenty of participants pick at the toppings individually or stir the bowl gently, as they would dress a salad. Wrecking that neat arrangement in one motion seems wrong to them, so I often mix a bowl in front of them.

Bibimbap really does rest on the act of mixing rather than on its ingredients. Rice, vegetables and gochujang — a fermented red chili paste — become one flavor at a stage where the diner performs, not the chef.

Nor is bibimbap alone in this. “Samhap,” a combination of foods eaten together in a single bite, changes depending on the combination. A ssam wrap tastes entirely different depending on what goes inside. We tend to think of these as dishes as a menu but they work more like a principle.

Ingredients change with the season and the region, and people still call the result bibimbap or samhap. Korean food’s identity lies in the way it is eaten rather than in any fixed list of components. That flexibility may be its most modern quality. Travelers today would rather curate their own cultural experience than replicate a local’s exact routine.

Tourism works the same way. Visitors do not go to Jeonju, a city in southwestern Korea, to eat a single bowl of bibimbap and then fly home. They go for what goes into the bowl and how it gets mixed, for the local flavor held inside that one serving. In the same way, visitors don’t travel solely to Mokpo for the flavor of samhap. Visitors go to find out why those particular ingredients ended up on one table and to experience the life and the story behind them.

Fermented skate, steamed pork and kimchi are served as “samhap” / Korea Times file

What stays with people in the end are the stories around a dish rather than the dish itself. Korean food’s advantage was never only in its recipes. It is that the food makes people take part in a meal instead of watching one.

Dishes are shared, yet each person has their own experience. Everyone sits at the same table, but nobody eats the same meal That may be the most unusual thing travelers find in Korean food today, and the reason it stands as Korea’s most authentic attraction.

This column by O’ngo Food Communications CEO Choi Ji-a was originally published by the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, and translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.