Still bothered about missing that beef hoesik. My company had one last Friday, chose Hanwoo of all things, and I couldn’t go because my shift is 08:00 to 20:30. Regular day shift, not late. I wasn’t dodging it, I just physically was not there when it happened. But in a small metal fab shop, when you say “I had work” for missing the good dinner, people don’t always take it simple like that.
People outside Korea hear the word hoesik and think it means company dinner, that’s it. It’s more than that. Hoesik is really about who shows up, who pours for who, who leaves early — the food is almost the secondary thing. A hoesik table shows you the whole office hierarchy in two hours, more than watching people at their desks for a month would.
What actually happens
A normal hoesik starts after work, around 6 or 7pm, and there’s almost always alcohol. Soju, beer, somaek (soju mixed into beer), whatever the boss prefers that day. Seating isn’t random. The most senior person, boss or department head, sits at the head or the center of the table, and everyone else just arranges around that without anybody saying so out loud. Nobody hands out a seating chart but somehow everyone lands in the right spot anyway.
Pouring has rules too. Two hands, or one hand with the other arm supporting it, when you pour for someone senior. You fill their glass before your own. You don’t pour your own drink when someone senior is sitting close, that’s seen as a little rude, like you couldn’t wait for them. I hear this is loosening up in the big Seoul office jobs. On a factory floor like mine, it’s still very much alive, nobody skips it.
The menu tells you something too. Samgyeopsal or fried chicken means a normal, no-big-deal hoesik, nothing was planned specially — I’d guess something like 15,000 to 20,000 won a head with drinks included, though prices move around depending on the place. Hanwoo is a completely different signal. Korean beef isn’t cheap, I think it runs somewhere in the 40,000 to 60,000 won range per person just for the meat, sometimes more depending on the cut, and if the company or the boss is paying for that, everyone reads the message the same way — this time we’re celebrating something, or the boss wants to make things right about something. You don’t just skip a Hanwoo night for no reason.
Nobody tells you this bit
The story you usually hear is “hoesik isn’t mandatory anymore, young workers push back, culture is changing.” That’s true for some companies. Big city office job, sure, some of that pressure has eased off.
But a small manufacturing company, maybe 30-40 people total like mine, none of that really applies the same way. Showing up is still basically a loyalty test wearing a dinner as a costume. Everyone notices who came, what time they left, one drink or five. And the next morning at the factory, all of it gets talked about — small company, small group of people, so everything gets noticed and remembered a lot longer than it would somewhere bigger.
This part gets complicated for me specifically. I made real mistakes here before, and I know I did — that’s just fact. I’m trying to fix that now, but a small slip still gets connected in people’s heads to how I used to be, so I feel like I’m being watched a little closer than someone with a clean record would be. A hoesik is one of the few times the boss is relaxed instead of watching the floor, pouring drinks and just talking, not supervising anything. Missing this one, the good one, feels like losing a chance I don’t get that often. That Friday I just went home like usual, made coffee the next morning same as always, didn’t do anything special, but I kept thinking about it all weekend.
The excuse calculation
When someone skips a hoesik here, they usually say something simple — something came up, family thing, whatever. But everyone at the table is quietly doing math about whether that’s real or not. If the boss picked an expensive menu and is paying for it himself, skipping without a very solid reason is close to the one hoesik you don’t miss.
My reason actually was real though, my shift goes 08:00 to 20:30, there’s no version of that where I show up even for the last hour. But real or not, being physically unable to go doesn’t make the awkward feeling go away, the feeling of not being there when the good meat came out. That’s the annoying part about it. I didn’t choose this.
2차, and why it doesn’t stop at dinner
A lot of outside writing skips this — hoesik traditionally isn’t one stop. There’s 1차 (ilcha), the first place, usually the meal itself. Then 2차 (icha), a second spot, used to be almost automatic and now depends more on the company. Icha is often a bar or a noraebang, sometimes both if the night runs long. A noraebang room for a small group, I’d guess maybe 15,000 to 25,000 won an hour, though it depends a lot on the neighborhood and whether it’s a weekend, plus drinks — people grab soju or beer from the convenience store next door before going in because the noraebang’s own drink prices are rough.
This two or three stage thing used to be close to mandatory in a lot of places, especially manufacturing and construction type industries. It’s shortened over the years, a lot of companies stop after ilcha now, since overtime and next-day work got looked at more carefully with the 52-hour workweek law. But it hasn’t disappeared everywhere. Some companies, especially with an older boss, still expect at least a short icha, even one quick round somewhere before people actually go home.
Who pays, and how much
For a normal hoesik, the company or department budget usually covers it, sometimes split between the company card and the boss personally covering the “extra” stuff at 2차. Nobody splits the bill Dutch-style at a hoesik the way you might with friends, that would look strange, almost like you don’t trust the company or the boss to handle it. When a boss personally treats everyone to something like Hanwoo, people notice, and it does buy some goodwill for a while.
A full night, ilcha plus icha, for maybe 10 people, can add up past a million won pretty easily once you count good beef, soju, beer, a couple hours at a bar or noraebang after. That’s something like 700 to 800 US dollars for one evening, I’m not totally sure on the exact conversion these days, but for a company trying to boost morale or celebrate a good quarter, that gets treated as a normal cost, not something crazy.
So who gets to skip it
In theory anybody can say no now. In practice some excuses work better than others. Someone with young kids, someone pregnant, someone with a doctor’s appointment, these usually get accepted without much pushback. Someone who’s just tired, or doesn’t feel like drinking that night, has a much harder case to make, especially if they haven’t been around long enough to have earned that kind of freedom yet.
Shift workers are a weird middle case. My missing it wasn’t a choice, it was just my schedule, but people still process it through the same lens as any other excuse — was it good enough, was it real, does it forgive me for not being there. There’s no rule anywhere that says shift workers get an automatic pass. It just depends on how much goodwill you already have with people. That’s the part that bothers me a little, because goodwill is exactly the thing I’m still working on getting back.
Anyway. Next time there’s a good one, I hope the schedule lines up. Hanwoo doesn’t show up on the menu that much.
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