Last updated on August 16, 2024
Guidebooks to Korea rarely mention coffee, and if they do, it is usually in passing.
Visitors and residents, however, wonder how so many cafes stay in business. Coffee aficionados who travel abroad quickly learn that Korea sells some of the best coffee in the world. Together, the large number of cafes and high quality of the coffee ensure that good coffee is plentiful. What is going on?
Coffee has long been popular in Korea. It first gained popularity among artsy and literary types in Seoul during the Japanese colonial period. During the economic boom from the 1960s to the 1980s, coffee became a symbol of success and became a mainstream beverage of choice. “Tabang” (literary “tea rooms”) were popular with middle age and older people.
Cafes aimed at students and young people began to open in the 1980s. Nandarang, the first major cafe chain aimed at young people, was all the rage in the latter half of the 1980s. The 1990s was a period of weak coffee, but cafes themselves became more elaborate, which created the infrastructure for today’s coffee boom.
The cafe boom says much about society. Cafes play an important role a “third place” between home and work. Working hours in Korea are long and workplace culture remains authoritarian; juniors listen to what seniors say and do it.
Home, meanwhile, is not always a large condo in a posh area, but a small, crowded, often noisy apartment. Families in Korea, like everywhere else, have a hierarchy between parents and children, but the authoritarian line is stricter in Korea. Cafes offer a quiet place for people to escape to, usually for conversation with friends or quiet web surfing. In short, cafes offer a respite from the hierarchical relationships that are the norm in Korea.
Cafes vary greatly in size, but they are governed by the need to distinguish themselves in a crowded market place. To do so, a new cafe must offer a unique visual experience. This means that the design should be creative in an effort to differentiate it from other cafes in the area. This need to be distinctive explains the mid-2000s boom in cafes that used modern furniture and other icons of mid-century design from the U.S.
The irony in distinction, of course, is that cafes distinguish themselves in the same way, creating an overbearing trend. The trend in American mid-century furniture started in the Garosu-gil in Shinsa-dong, but quickly spread to other trendy areas in Seoul. As it spread, what was new and distinctive quickly became ordinary, creating pressure that gave rise to a new trend. This apparent contradiction explains the rapid pace of change in Korea and the powerful pull of conformity.
A large market of customers in search of a third space supports the number of cafes, but many cafes fail. They fail for a number of reasons, but the most common reason, as with many types of retail business, is location. Another important reason is the loss of distinctiveness. Koreans gravitate to new and trendy cafes in order to either update or, in rare cases, rely on a loyal customer base. The fact that so many people start cafes in this crowded and competitive market reflects the optimistic, can-do spirit of the Korean character.
And then there is the coffee. In terms of quantity, Korea is a major coffee importer, but coffee consumption per capita is still not nearly as high as it is in many European countries, North America, or even Japan. Large sectors of Korean society rarely drink coffee at home.
Most light coffee drinkers are over the age of 40, and many senior citizens rarely drink coffee at all. Serious coffee consumption, then, is a trend among the same generation that has difficulty with hierarchical relationships. Many in this generation know their coffee well and do not settle for mediocre quality.
Cafes may have reached their peak. As the young third-place seeking generation ages, it will have less time for cafes amid the needs of work and family. This generation may find that another activity is more interesting than sitting in a café with friends or a computer.
As Korea becomes less hierarchical, subsequent generations may not need cafés and prefer other places. In the end, the current boom in cafes reflects the times, and in Korea, the times change like nowhere else. What is here today is gone tomorrow, but coffee, addictive as it is, will endure.