Until just recently, family restaurants serving Western-style foods or seafood dishes enjoyed tremendous popularity in Korea. However, classy salad bar style Korean food restaurants are now booming, tempting Korea’s leading food companies to rush to open their own franchises.
People here in Korea used to consider hansik or Korean food as the common home meal and showed unwillingness to pay much for the staple foods. This is no longer the case.
Major players like Shinsegae, CJ and E-Land now target health-conscious consumers with the business slogan of ‘healthier menu and more reasonable price tags in their franchise hanshik restaurants. Currently, these kinds of restaurants are crowded and diners need to wait hours for a table.
Consumers can get limitless access to a wide variety of tasty hot or cold Korean dishes, desserts, and drinks during a given time period. Because of these advantages, users often express deep satisfaction with these restaurants.
Food industry insiders say that several factors in such a recent rapid growth of hansik restaurants are at work, including the declining popularity of franchises family restaurants. Experts point out that now the hansik restaurants are replacing them. Consumers are enthusiastic about the high quality and a wide selection of dishes — marinated grilled pork, ssambap (rice with leaf wraps), Korean soup, a variety of Korean vegetable side dishes, Korean pancakes, and pickled vegetables — and relatively reasonable charges of between about 15,000 (about US$15) and 25,000 (S$25) won in these hansik restaurants. For this reason, experts expect that the new hansik franchises will remain popular for quite a long time.
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