Culture
5 Funny Facts about Korean Restaurants
What you will be facing or have faced in local restaurants
Every country has their own eating culture. It’s almost natural for everyone that you are extra careful or nervous when first visiting local restaurants in totally different culture, wondering you might be acting impolite in local terms. We’ve seen many friends who are not Koreans don’t know how to order, thinking that calling out a person could be rude or don’t know where to find water or tableware and so on. There are many eating out custom that are so obvious for locals that no one tells you. And here, we’ve picked out some and will be explaining about them from how to order to how restaurants work.
How to order
This is where all the confusion starts. In some countries, especially western part, you wait for waiters or waitresses to come to take orders or make eye contacts, unless it’s fast food restaurant. Here, you have to call out for waiter or waitress, otherwise, especially during busy hours like lunch or dinner, you will end up getting nothing. This is not rude at all, sometimes people almost shout, if there’s too many people in the restaurant. In most cases, people would raise their hands and say “Excuse me” or “I would like to order.” They would come and take the orders.
- Excuse me: 저기요 (Jeo-gi-yo)
- I would like to order: 주문할게요 (Joo-mun-hal-gae-yo)
There’s another also very common way of taking orders here, ‘ringing the bell’. What do we mean by ringing the bell? You literally ring the bell that are either on your table or sometimes on tissue box. You click on button, the bell rings and the waiter/ waitress comes. Every time when you need something you just need to click on bell, no need to shout out, no need to raise hand or go over to make orders. This came as a shock to many of our friends, they have never imagined they can make orders by ringing some bells. If you don’t know about this and you go to one of them, you’ll surely be in lost.
Nowadays, like places where you go for quick bites, they are equipped with order-taking vending machines. You make order from the machine and pay, then wait for your food to come out. These machines are taking over most of fast-restaurants and some cafes also.
This is pretty much it for making-orders custom and the next part is about how restaurants work in Korea, like what they provide and where to find what.
How restaurants work
Side dishes
‘You never ordered wrong’
As we all know, ‘rice’ takes fundamental part in Korean food culture. Normally, we eat rice with various side dishes, just eating rice alone is considered nonsense for locals. Therefore, almost all restaurants provide side dishes, of course without charge. Some of you might have this kind of experience where you get food that you didn’t order, ending up with whole lot of confusion, thinking that you ordered wrong or something went wrong. For sure, nothing went wrong, it’s just the way it is here. And those side dishes, you can ask for more, if you want. Just to make sure, in local restaurants, they never charge for water, charging for water is like an utter nonsense here. Probably why Koreans get confused when they travel and the local restaurants charge for water.
Tablewares
‘Check underneath the table’
This is another part where people get confused, you can’t find the chopsticks & spoons. They are not given and you can’t find them either. In many cases, they are underneath the table, where there’s a cabinet attached. That’s where you can find all the tablewares you need, for the forks you might have to ask, if they are not there.
Self-Service
‘Look for the signs’
In some restaurants some of the food are served and some are self-service, especially the water. What do we mean by this is that other than the food you ordered, the restaurant will not provide serving services, like getting subsidiary food or water, what we mentioned earlier. So to get more or get them, you need to serve it yourself, usually the have it written it down like ‘self-service’ or ‘물은 셀프입니다.’ Not that hard, once you know it.
Hope this post have helped you all with useful tips! Check out more on our channel for more tips!
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