Category: Food

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.

People find it funny that foreigners take photos of Korean convenience stores like it’s some kind of attraction. To me it’s just the place 30 seconds from my front door. I don’t even need shoes with backs on them to get there, I just slip on sandals. There’s the weird snack angle, melon bread, corn soup in a can, that’s real too. But for a lot of us it’s not novelty. It’s the kitchen. My actual second kitchen, and honestly some weeks it’s the first one.

The drive to my work, outside of rush hour, is maybe 25 minutes. During commute hours it’s over an hour, easy. By the time I get home from a shift I have exactly zero energy to wash rice, cook something, then wash the dishes after. So the convenience store isn’t a backup plan. It’s the plan.

What happens the second I walk in

The order is almost always the same and I think this is true for most tired workers here, not just me. You walk in, you don’t even really look at the shelves anymore because you already know where everything is. Triangle kimbap, a dosirak, a cup noodle, maybe a can coffee. That combination alone solves dinner in under 15 minutes including the walk there and back.

The dosirak, the boxed meal, is usually somewhere around 4,000 to 5,500 won, so maybe $3 to $4 depending on the exchange rate that day. I’m honestly not totally sure of the exact number anymore because I stopped checking, I just pay.

The dosirak part is the bit foreigners don’t expect. You bring it to the register, and right there next to the cashier there’s a microwave. Sometimes the staff heats it for you, sometimes it’s self-service and you push the buttons yourself. Either way it comes out actually hot in under two minutes, maybe 90 seconds, I’ve never timed it exactly. This is not a cold sandwich situation. This is kimchi jjigae dosirak, jeyuk bokkeum dosirak, sometimes a bulgogi one, stuff that tastes close to actual home cooking, just smaller and in a divided plastic tray.

The triangle kimbap has a little ritual to it. There’s a plastic wrapper with numbers on it, 1, 2, 3, and you pull the tabs in that order or the seaweed and rice fall apart in your hands. It’s not hard once you know it, but I don’t think anyone explains it to you the first time. You just fail at it once and then you know forever.

Nobody talks about the sink part

Here’s the actual point though, and I think this is the part outsiders miss. There’s no dishes. None. You eat, you throw the tray away, you’re done. After standing at a machine all day and then sitting in traffic for an hour just to get home, doing dishes afterward feels like too much. A convenience store meal means the day just ends. No pot soaking in the sink until tomorrow.

You eat standing at the window counter, or outside at the little plastic tables if the store has them, and then you walk back with nothing to clean.

People imagine convenience store food as this junky, snacky category, chips, ice cream, that kind of thing. And sure, that’s there too. But the real daily use, the one keeping a huge number of tired workers fed every evening, is the dosirak-plus-ramen combo. It’s closer to a cheap home dinner than to junk food. It’s just packaged and sold by CU or GS25 or 7-Eleven instead of made by your own hands. I don’t really have a strong preference between the three honestly, whichever one is closer to where I’m standing wins.

Summer makes it worse. Or easier, I go back and forth

When it’s hot like it gets here in the summer, even the 30 second walk feels long, and I know a lot of people just order the same convenience store stuff through a delivery app instead of walking over. I’ve done it myself a few times when it was really bad out. I get it. Some days even walking to the store feels like a lot. But personally I still mostly just walk over, because for me it’s less about the heat and more about avoiding effort in general, and walking over is honestly less effort than opening an app and picking things and waiting.

Prices have crept up over the last couple years, like everything else. A dosirak that felt like it was around 3,500 won a while back is more commonly 4,500 to 5,500 won now, and the premium ones, the ones with more side dishes or a brand collaboration or a chef’s name stamped on the lid, can go past 6,000 or even 7,000 won. I’m not certain those exact numbers hold at every store, prices move around a bit chain to chain, but that’s roughly where it sits in my head. Still, a full meal for around 4 dollars, heated for you, no cleanup, sitting right outside your door, I don’t know what else competes with that on a weeknight.

The bakery thing, for contrast

My son works part-time at Tours Les Jours here in Cheonan. It’s a big nationwide chain, not some local specialty like Sungsimdang is to Daejeon, but around here it’s the bakery most people default to when they need a cake. And people abroad seem to have this idea that Korea is all beautiful bakery culture, Paris Baguette everywhere, croissants, that whole picture. Meanwhile I personally go into a bakery maybe once a year. Once. Usually to buy a cake for somebody’s birthday. That’s it.

The convenience store, on the other hand, I’m in there basically every day, sometimes twice. So there’s a gap between what people picture from outside and what I’m actually eating on a random Tuesday. It’s not the bakery, most days. It’s the store with the automatic door chime, right down the street.

I barely leave my apartment on weekends either, I could count on my fingers how many times I’ve gone somewhere on a Saturday or Sunday in the past year. So the convenience store ends up being almost the only outside I get some days. Thirty seconds there, thirty seconds back, that’s my whole errand for the evening.

One more thing about how these stores are built

What I notice is how these stores are built around exactly this kind of person, the tired worker, the night shift person, the student studying late. There’s almost always a standing counter by the window, a microwave right there next to the register, hot water on tap for the cup noodles so you don’t need your own kettle. None of that is designed to look nice for a photo. It’s built for someone who has nothing left after work and still needs something that isn’t cold.

A tourist walking in sees the wall of drinks and the seasonal snacks and thinks it’s fun and different. For me it’s just what solves dinner, every night, for a few dollars, and after I’m done there’s nothing left to wash.

My son works part time at Tours Les Jours near us. Even with my own kid behind the counter, I go into that store maybe once a year. Cake day. That’s it. So people overseas lining up outside a new Paris Baguette like they found some secret Korean thing — that confuses me a little. There’s nothing to discover. It’s a bakery.

Because here, this is not special. This is the bakery next to the pharmacy, next to the real estate office, next to whatever chicken place is in your apartment complex’s little strip of shops. Every neighborhood has one, sometimes two, sitting there like a utility. Nobody takes a photo of it.

The Daejeon thing

There’s a bit of regional pride depending on where you’re from. In Daejeon, the local bakery everyone brags about is Sungsimdang — that one actually is special, people drive from Seoul and stand in a long line for it, I think the fried pineapple bun with red bean is the one everyone talks about, and the chive bread too. In Cheonan, where I live, we don’t have anything like that. What we have instead is just… a very solid Tours Les Jours. Not because it’s amazing. Just because that’s the one that took root here. Every region kind of has its own default bakery, and for us it happens to be whichever franchise ended up strongest on that block.

That’s the part that doesn’t translate. Paris Baguette and Tous Les Jours (I know the Konglish spelling is a bit different depending who you ask, close enough) are not boutique bakeries. They are franchise chains, same as a convenience store is a franchise. You’ll find them inside apartment complex shopping strips, right next to a subway exit, in the lobby of some office building. They are everywhere for the same reason a GS25 or CU is everywhere — the business model is being close to where people already are, not being a destination you plan a trip around.

What it costs

Price-wise, a regular bread item runs somewhere around 2,000 to 4,000 won, so maybe $1.50 to $3. A pastry with cream or fruit on it can go a bit higher, 4,000-5,000 won. Cakes are the real spend — a basic round cake starts around 25,000-30,000 won and the fancier ones with fruit or character decorations for kids can go past 40,000, sometimes 50,000 won if you add writing or extra toppers. That’s roughly $20-40. Not cheap, not crazy either. It’s birthday-cake money, spent once or twice a year per person.

Now, about the cake part — I said earlier you basically have to order ahead, and I want to walk that back a little because I checked myself and it’s not that strict. The fridge case does usually have some whole cakes sitting there ready to grab, the plainer ones especially. But if you want a specific size, or a specific character design for a kid’s birthday, or writing on top, that’s the part you need to call in a few days early for. So it’s not all-or-nothing like I made it sound. It’s more like: basic cake, walk in and get lucky. Specific cake, you plan ahead. My son’s the one behind the counter for this stuff, not me, so I don’t actually know the exact cutoff for how many days ahead you need to order — I’m just going by what I’ve picked up.

Paris Baguette vs Tous Les Jours

These two chains are basically the national rivalry of bread. It really is a Coke-versus-Pepsi thing, and depending on the neighborhood, one just wins. Some blocks have a Paris Baguette doing better business, some blocks it’s Tous Les Jours, and people who live there will have a mild opinion about whose bread is better, or whose cake design looks nicer, without ever thinking hard about it. It’s not loyalty like a football team. It’s more like which one happens to be a two minute walk versus a ten minute walk. Convenience wins almost every argument here.

What it’s actually for

Nobody I know goes and sits at Paris Baguette with a laptop and a coffee for two hours. That’s not really what it’s for, even though most locations do have a small seating area with a few tables. The actual use pattern looks like this:

• Breakfast on the way to work — grab a bun and a small milk or the iced coffee from the fridge case, eat it in the car or at your desk
• Birthday and anniversary cake, sometimes ordered ahead, sometimes just grabbed off the shelf
• Bringing bread when visiting someone’s house, especially older relatives — turning up with a paper bag of pastries is a very normal small gift here
• Quick bread run before a meeting, or when guests are coming and you need something to put out with coffee

It’s a buy-and-leave place, not a sit-and-stay place, even though the tables exist. If you want the actual cafe experience, sitting an hour, meeting a friend, working — Koreans go to Starbucks, or Mega Coffee, or Compose Coffee, or one of the thousand tiny independent cafes. The bakery chains sell coffee too but people don’t really go there for that.

What nobody explains about the gap

Here’s the actual misunderstanding, I think. Outside Korea, when a Paris Baguette opens in a new city, it comes with a kind of premium shine on it, nice interior, careful branding, feels new and a little upscale, and people go in thinking they found a hidden Korean bakery secret. Meanwhile here, this is closer to the bread version of a convenience store run. Nobody says “let’s go check out Paris Baguette” the way you’d say let’s try a new restaurant. It would be like a foreigner getting excited to visit a 7-Eleven.

The ones who talk with real passion about bread here are usually talking about small independent bakeries, a place run by one baker in some back alley, or the famous regional ones like Sungsimdang, or whatever neighborhood bakery has a line out front on Saturday morning because their sourdough sells out by 10am. Those places get the “you have to try this” talk. Paris Baguette and Tous Les Jours get none of that, mostly because they’re everywhere and always the same. You know exactly what you’re getting there, and I guess that’s exactly the reason nobody thinks it’s exciting — same reason you don’t get excited about a GS25.

Prices have gone up the last couple years like everything else. Bread and coffee chains keep raising prices a little at a time, and people grumble about it on any given week, the way you complain about gas, then keep buying anyway because there’s nothing else that close to your apartment.

So who’s right about it

I don’t think either side is wrong exactly. Outside Korea, Paris Baguette is a new, polished, slightly premium taste of a country a lot of people are curious about right now, and as an export it’s doing its job — clean stores, good branding, a real point of difference from a generic bakery chain. Inside Korea it’s just there. It’s where my kid folds boxes for a part time paycheck and where I show up once a year, say the flavor I want, hand over my card, and leave. Nobody in my building has ever said “let’s go hang out at Tous Les Jours” in the fifteen-something years I’ve lived here.

I think this pattern probably repeats for a bunch of things with a “K-” label on them now. Something completely ordinary here gets looked at fresh somewhere else and suddenly it’s a trend. I’m not saying that’s bad, I just think it’s a little funny, that’s all — the exact same brand, one place it’s furniture, another place it’s a discovery.

227 grams. That’s what the scale said this morning before I stopped it and just poured the rest by hand, watching the water level instead of the number. This is a hand drip every single morning before I go to work, and every single morning I ask myself why I keep doing the one thing that takes the most effort when I have the least time for it. I don’t have a good answer. I just keep doing it. Twelve minutes usually, sometimes fifteen if I’m being slow with the bloom.

Here’s the thing about mornings here — everybody is rushing. Bus rushing, subway rushing, even walking from the parking lot to the building feels rushed. Coffee is mostly grab-and-go, not sit-down. So standing at the counter doing a slow pour with a gooseneck kettle and a scale, before a twelve and a half hour shift, kind of looks backwards. It should be the first thing a person like me cuts. Instead it’s the one thing I won’t cut.

What’s on the counter

Nothing special, honestly. Dripper on top, paper filter inside, black ceramic mug underneath sitting right on the scale. The scale just needs to read to the gram — if you eyeball the water you get a different cup every day, some days weak, some days like medicine. The scale takes the guessing out of it. I’m not sure what brand mine is anymore, the sticker rubbed off years ago, but I remember it wasn’t expensive, maybe two or three man won when I bought it.

The kettle is the part people get wrong when they try this for the first time at home. You can’t use a regular kettle, the fat round spout kind — the water comes out in a blob and half your grounds get pushed sideways before you even start. You need what’s called a gooseneck kettle, long thin neck, curved like a swan, because that’s the only way to control the water into a thin steady line. Without one you’re not really doing pour over, you’re just making a mess with extra steps. A basic stainless one here runs maybe 3만원, and if you want one with a temperature dial built in it can go past 15만원. I use a cheap one. It works fine.

Then there’s the bloom. First pour is small, just enough to wet the grounds, then you wait maybe 30 seconds and watch it puff up and bubble. That’s the coffee releasing gas — I’ve read that fresher beans bloom harder and stale beans barely move, and from what I’ve noticed with my own bag that seems about right, though I’m not testing it scientifically or anything, just watching. After it settles a bit you pour the rest in slow circles, trying to keep the water level across the grounds instead of digging one hole in the middle.

Ratio-wise I think most people doing this at home land somewhere close to 1 to 15, coffee to water, so something like 15 grams of grounds to 225ish grams of water. That’s roughly why my scale stopped near 227 this morning. It’s not a science in my kitchen. It’s more a habit my hand does without me thinking about it anymore.

This is not how most people here drink coffee

I want to be clear, because I think people outside Korea sometimes picture the whole country doing pour overs every morning. Not even close. Walk into any 편의점 at 7am and you’ll see canned coffee and the little instant mix sticks, 커피믹스, moving fast — sugar and cream and coffee powder already mixed in one packet, rip it open, hot water, stir, done in fifteen seconds. My own kitchen at home has a box of those too, for guests mostly, because not everyone wants to wait around for a hand drip when they’re just visiting.

And then there’s the franchise takeout culture, which is honestly the bigger one — Starbucks, Ediya, Mega Coffee, Compose Coffee, Paik’s Coffee, sometimes two or three of them within one block near a subway exit or bus stop, people lined up buying an iced americano to carry onto the bus. Prices move around a lot by brand — the cheaper chains like Mega or Compose are usually under 3,000 won, and Starbucks is closer to 4,500 or 5,000 won for a regular size. That’s the actual morning coffee ritual for most people. Bought, not made, and definitely not dripped through a kettle somebody had to think hard about buying.

Hand drip at home is a minority thing here, and it carries a little bit of a “이 사람 여유 있네” feeling attached to it — like, this person has spare time, must be nice. It gets lumped in with the home-cafe crowd, which skews younger, a lot of them dreaming about opening their own cafe someday, or just into the gear itself, the scales and kettles and grinders. It’s not some old tradition passed down through families or anything. Coffee itself isn’t old in Korea — tea was always the traditional drink here, coffee only really took over in the last few decades, franchise culture first, and hand drip came after that, like the next step once people got tired of the same iced americano every single day.

Why I still do it

So why do I bother when my mornings are tight and the rest of my day runs on somebody else’s clock — the commute stretches out badly if I leave at the wrong minute, and once I clock in I’m on everyone else’s pace, not mine. It took me a while to figure out why I keep doing this. It’s not that I do it despite being busy. Maybe it’s more that those twenty minutes with the kettle are the one part of the morning nobody else is timing. Even the scale is something I chose to put there.

Grinding the beans, waiting for the bloom, pouring in slow circles — none of it can be rushed even on the mornings I want to rush it. Pour too fast and the water just cuts straight through the grounds instead of soaking them, and you get a thin sour cup for your trouble. So the process makes me slow down whether I feel like it or not. That’s most of the appeal, I think. It’s not that I have time to relax. It’s that doing this thing, because it refuses to go faster, is the only way I get any of that twenty minutes back for myself.

Things that trip people up

A few things get people if they try this at home for the first time. First, bean freshness matters more than people expect — most roasters here print a roast date on the bag, and you want to use it within maybe 2 to 4 weeks of that, not months later. Past that the beans barely bloom at all, which, like I said, is actually a fast way to tell your coffee’s gone flat before you even taste it.

Second, water temperature. Straight off the boil is too hot, it scorches the coffee and tastes flat and bitter. Most people let it sit maybe 30 seconds to a minute after boiling. I’ve heard people say something like 90 to 96 degrees is the target but honestly I don’t own a thermometer for it, you just learn the timing by feel after enough mornings of doing it.

Third, grind size. Too fine and the water can’t push through fast enough, sits there and turns bitter. Too coarse and it drains through too quick, comes out weak and sour. I’m honestly not sure what grinders cost here now — I’ve had mine a long time — but I know the cheap electric ones start somewhere around 4만원 and the nicer imported ones can run well past 30만원 if you’re buying through Coupang or ordering direct.

One more thing

My kitchen counter isn’t anything to look at. It’s just the counter, the dripper, the scale glowing its blue numbers early in the morning before the sun’s really up, and whatever else is sitting there that day. It’s not really about the coffee tasting better than a franchise americano either, though it probably does. It’s about those twenty minutes being mine before I hand the rest of the day over to a factory floor and everybody else’s schedule. That’s the trade I make every morning. So far it still feels worth it, even on the mornings I don’t feel like making it.