Solo Dining in Seoul: The Rise of 'Honbap' in Cafe Culture — Epoche B2
Honbap: the word, and the meals it was coined against Honbap is the Korean word for eating a meal on your own: honja , alone, plus bap , rice and by extension a meal. It was coined in the 2010s alongside honsul , drinking alone, and it exists because the ordinary Korean meal is built for more than one person. Small side dishes, banchan , are set in the middle of the table for everyone to reach; a stew is brought in one pot and eaten from it with several spoons; at a barbecue restaurant the meat is grilled on a burner set into the centre of a four-person table. Katarzyna Cwiertka's history of modern Korean cuisine describes this rice-and-shared-dishes table as the organising form of the everyday meal. Eating alone, then, is not simply eating unaccompanied. It cuts against the way the food is portioned, priced and served. That is what makes the half-joking "honbap levels" — an internet ranking that circulates in several slightly different versions — more than a joke. It runs from buying a triangle kimbap at a convenience store, at the bottom, up to sitting down alone at a Korean barbecue restaurant at the top. The ordering is usually explained as a scale of nerve, but the thing it actually tracks is how strongly a venue's layout, pricing and service assume a group. A convenience store has a standing counter, no table service and no minimum order, so a single customer imposes nothing on anyone. A barbecue restaurant sells meat by weight, commonly with a two-portion minimum, seats you at a table built round a grill, and sends staff over to turn the meat. The obstacles at the top of the ladder are structural before they are emotional, which is why the ladder has the order it has. The number everyone quotes, and what it does not say Statistics Korea, the national statistical office, publishes an annual register-based Population and Housing Census, and in its recent rounds single-person households come to roughly 35 per cent of all households — the largest single category, ahead of two-person and four-person households. A household in this census is one person, or a group of people, sharing living quarters and housekeeping: an administrative unit built from residence registers. Nobody has been asked what they ate, or with whom. So the figure does not measure solo dining, and the essay should not pretend otherwise. What it does support is weaker and still useful: in about a third of Korean dwellings, cooking for one is the default and there is nobody at home to eat with. Eric Klinenberg's comparative study of living alone insists on this distinction: living alone is a residential arrangement, not a description of a social life, and the people who do it are often the ones out in public most. Jesook Song's ethnography of single women renting in Seoul adds the local point: living alone in Korea carried a specific stigma, tied to the assumption that adulthood ends in marriage. It is that assumption, rather than the arithmetic of households, that has loosened. Three conversations, and what three conversations can show We spent a Tuesday visiting cafés in three districts and asking people who were eating alone why they were there. Three people, all of whom agreed to be asked, on one weekday: this is not a sample, and it cannot tell you how common any of these reasons is. What it can do is establish which reasons people offer unprompted, and in what words. We kept the word "loneliness" out of the questions until the last one in each conversation, so that the earlier answers would not be organised around denying it. Lee Min-jun, 24, university student — Hongdae, 11:40 a.m. He has an open textbook, a 4,500-won Americano and a half-eaten pastry. Interviewer: You could have eaten in the campus cafeteria for a third of the price. Why here? Min-jun: Because the cafeteria closes at two and this table is mine until I leave. What I'm paying for is the seat, not the coffee. Everyone knows that. There's even a word for us — kagongjok , the café-study tribe. Is eating alone part of the appeal, or just something you put up with? Min-jun: It's the point. If I eat with friends, lunch takes ninety minutes and half of it is deciding where to go. Alone it takes twenty and I've already read a chapter. I don't feel lonely. I feel efficient. Does anyone mind? Min-jun: The café does, sometimes. On weekends they put up a sign — two hours maximum during busy periods. That's fair. I go somewhere quieter on Saturdays. His word for himself is built the way such words usually are in Korean: ka from kape (café), gong from gongbu (study), and jok , a suffix meaning roughly "tribe" or "set", which attaches freely to name a social type. And his claim about what he is buying can be checked against his own figures. A cafeteria lunch at a third of 4,500 won is about 1,500 won, but the cafeteria shuts at two. The extra 3,000 won buys the afternoon — which is why an entire separate business, the study café, sells seat-time by the hour and nothing else. Kim Ji-yeon, 38, graphic designer — Insadong, 2:15 p.m. She is in a traditional teahouse in an alley off Insadong-gil, drinking ssanghwacha , a dark herbal tea served with a few pine nuts floating on top. It costs 9,000 won, roughly twice what a coffee would. Interviewer: That's an expensive way to spend forty minutes. Ji-yeon: It is. That's why it works. If it were cheap I'd treat it like a coffee and drink it at my desk. At nine thousand won I sit down properly and I don't touch my phone. Is this a break from work or from people? Ji-yeon: Honestly, from people. I spend my mornings in meetings where I have to read everyone's mood. Here nobody needs anything from me. I sketch, or I look at the courtyard. Ten years ago I would have felt conspicuous doing this. Now the teahouse has two-seat and one-seat tables, and half the room is people on their own. Would you describe it as loneliness? Ji-yeon: No. Loneliness is when nobody is expecting you. Everybody is expecting me — that's the problem.