My son works at Tours Les Jours. And here is the thing that always makes me laugh a little — in our house, we probably buy a cake once a year. Maybe. If someone asks me why Koreans don’t eat cake often, I would say, well, ask my own kitchen. There isn’t one in there right now, and there wasn’t one last month either.
People outside Korea see Paris Baguette opening up in New York or London, cake photos everywhere, and think Korea must be a cake-obsessed country. I get why. But it’s kind of backwards. The bakery chains expanding overseas has almost nothing to do with how often regular people here actually buy a whole cake.
Bread is real, cake isn’t
Korea does have a serious bakery culture, that part is true. Paris Baguette and Tours Les Jours are the two big national chains, and then almost every region has its own local hero. Daejeon has Sungsimdang, famous for their tuigim-soboru, this fried version of the crumbly sugar bread, people go out of their way for it, it’s basically a landmark now. Cheonan, where I live, has Tours Les Jours as the local go-to, which happens to be exactly where my son works.
And the daily rush there is a bread rush, not a cake rush. People walk in, grab a tray and tongs, and load up on individual pieces — red bean bread, soboru, cream bread, garlic baguette, that kind of thing. I think it’s something like 2,000 to 4,000 won a piece, I’m not totally sure of the exact number these days since prices keep moving, but you end up with a tray of six or seven things and the total is maybe 15,000 to 20,000 won. That’s a totally normal Tuesday purchase. Nobody thinks twice.
The cake section sits in its own glass case near the register, mostly untouched most days. Priced completely differently too — a basic cake starts somewhere around 25,000 to 30,000 won I believe, and goes up from there depending on decoration, maybe 40,000 to 50,000 won if it’s something fancy. It’s just a different category in people’s heads. Bread you eat. Cake you buy because something is happening. Nobody grabs a cake on the way home the way they grab a red bean bun.
So when do people actually buy one
Pretty much two times a year, and honestly one of them barely counts as spread out at all. Birthdays — your own, or your kid’s. And Christmas, which is the real peak season for every bakery in the country. If you don’t pre-order a Christmas cake by mid-December, there’s a real chance the good ones sell out completely on the 24th and you’re picking from whatever’s left in the case. People here order through the bakery app now too, Paris Baguette has its own app, and a lot of people use their telecom membership points (SKT, KT, LG U+ all have some kind of bakery discount tied to the membership) to knock a bit off the price. My mother still just walks in and asks at the counter, she doesn’t bother with any of that.
Outside those two windows cake mostly disappears from people’s shopping. Nobody buys a cake because it’s Tuesday, or because they had a good week. That’s just not really a thing here.
My son works at the bakery almost every day, and still — no cake sitting around our house. If he could bring one home easy and doesn’t, that says something about how deep this pattern goes, more than any statistic would.
Cake vs tteok
There’s a generational layer under this too. Cake is a Western import, tied to Western event culture — birthday parties, Christmas. The old celebration food here is tteok, rice cake, not sponge cake. For a first birthday, dol, or a 60th birthday, hwangap, older generations still lean toward tteok, or have it alongside a cake. Go to an older relative’s birthday and there’s a decent chance there’s both — a Western-style cake for the candle photo, and a box of tteok, usually songpyeon-shaped or the layered baekseolgi kind, for guests to actually eat and take home in a little plastic container. Younger people mostly just do the cake now, the tteok side has faded a lot, but it hasn’t disappeared, especially at grandparents’ generation events.
So cake culture here sits on top of an older food culture, it didn’t grow out of it. It came in through Western holidays and Western birthday parties, and it never really merged with everyday eating the way bread did.
Why bread went mainstream and cake didn’t
Bread had decades to become an everyday food here. The chains built their whole model around small, cheap, individual items you eat standing at the counter or bring to your desk. Cake never got that treatment because a cake isn’t really a food for one person, it’s built around sharing, candles, a moment happening. You don’t buy a slice on your way to work the way you grab a bun. Convenience stores do sell small cake slices now, in the refrigerated section near the sandwiches, I think around 3,000 to 4,000 won, and that’s probably the closest thing to casual cake-eating that exists here. But that’s a slice in plastic, eaten alone at a desk. Nothing like the ordering ahead, candle blowing, whole cake thing.
And cake prices keep climbing on top of that, the bakeries raise prices every so often on all kinds of items, cakes included, so an already-occasional purchase just gets pushed further into occasional. When something is expensive and rare already, going more expensive doesn’t make people buy it more, it makes them wait for the one day a year they were already going to buy it.
What foreigners get wrong
I think the confusion comes from seeing the overseas branches and assuming that’s the same as the home country. Paris Baguette abroad leans hard into the cake case, lots of decorated cakes on display, Instagram-friendly, because that’s what sells in a market where people expect a bakery to have beautiful cakes out front. But walk into a Paris Baguette or Tours Les Jours here on a random weekday afternoon, and it’s trays of bread being loaded up, a line at the register for bread, and a cake case that maybe one person out of fifty even looks at twice.
The overseas expansion is a business decision about what works in a new market, that’s all it is. It doesn’t tell you what’s happening back home. Bread every day, cake maybe twice a year, and here nobody thinks that’s strange at all. It’s just how the two categories split off a long time ago and stayed split.
Anyway. My son’s back at the bakery again tomorrow, smell of butter and all, and there’s still no cake in our fridge. Next one is probably whenever my birthday comes around. That’s just how it goes here.
Leave a Reply