Vegetarian and Vegan in Seoul: Harder Than It Looks

Korean Buddhist temple cuisine — sachal eumsik — is a formal tradition with rules: no meat, no fish, no dairy in most interpretations, and no garlic, onion, spring onion, chive or leek, which are held to disturb the mind. What is left is vegetables, mushrooms, roots, seaweed, fermented pastes and rice, prepared with a great deal of technique.

It is served as a set: a tray of small dishes, a clear soup, rice and a fermented element, for roughly ₩15,000 to ₩30,000 depending on the restaurant. Lunch is the usual service and the better places take reservations.

The area around Insadong and Jogyesa, the head temple of the Jogye Order, is where temple restaurants concentrate, which makes it a convenient lunch between the palaces. Several temples also run a templestay programme with meals included — an overnight version of the same food. More on Seoul's temples.

One caution: the no-garlic-or-onion rule means temple food tastes different from restaurant Korean food. That is the tradition working as intended, not a compromise.

'I am vegetarian' translates but does not communicate, because the category is unfamiliar in many kitchens and is often heard as 'no red meat'. Naming the ingredients works far better.

The sentence to use is gogi, saengseon, jeotgal da bbaejuseyo — please leave out meat, fish and fermented seafood. For vegan, add gyeran-do, uyu-do — no egg, no milk.

Two more are worth having. Yuksu-neun gogi-guk-i-eyo? asks whether the broth is meat-based; chaesik jusikjeom is the term for a vegetarian restaurant. Papago handles all of these accurately if you would rather show a screen than pronounce them.

What does not work is expecting substitutions in a restaurant built around one dish. A barbecue place cannot feed you and a kalguksu counter cannot change its broth. Choose the restaurant, then order — not the other way round.

Insadong and the streets around Jogyesa are the strongest area, because temple cuisine has a natural home there and several restaurants specialise in it.

Itaewon and Hannam have the broadest international choice: Indian, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean kitchens where vegetarian dishes are ordinary rather than an accommodation. This is the reliable fallback when Korean options run out.

Hongdae and Seongsu have the young vegan cafés — plant-based burgers, bakeries, brunch — at ₩10,000 to ₩18,000, aimed at a domestic audience that has grown quickly in the last decade.

At Gwangjang Market the picture is mixed: bindaetteok is mung bean and vegetables and is usually safe, the vegetable kimbap is straightforward, and almost everything in a bowl is not. A dedicated vegetarian market tour runs there for about $89 and exists precisely because the navigation is hard.

When a day goes wrong, the convenience-store shelf is the reliable floor: triangle kimbap with vegetable fillings, plain rice, instant noodles whose packets list ingredients in English, fruit, nuts, soy milk and increasingly a plant-based ready-meal section.

Supermarket kimchi labelled vegan exists and is stocked in the larger stores; the standard product almost always contains fish sauce or salted shrimp.

Bakeries are widespread but heavy on butter, milk and egg, so a vegan breakfast usually means fruit and soy milk rather than pastry. Coffee shops all carry oat or soy milk as standard and charge ₩500 to ₩1,000 extra, which is the same as anywhere else in the world.