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| A table set at a cockle restaurant in Beolgyo, South Jeolla, a town known across Korea for its blood cockles |
How much do you know about Korean food?
You probably know the main dishes. Bulgogi, Korean BBQ, tteokbokki. And kimchi, of course, which might be the most famous Korean food of all.
But did you know a proper Korean meal isn’t just rice and a main dish? It comes with a whole spread of smaller dishes on the side.
If you’ve eaten at a Korean restaurant or traveled in Korea, you’ve probably seen this happen. You order your food, and before it even arrives, the table fills up with little plates of this and that.
These are called banchan (반찬). And no, they’re not tapas. You don’t order them one by one. They just show up.
Korean meals are built around rice, and banchan are there to go with the rice, separate from the main dish. Kimchi is always on the table too, of course, though Koreans usually think of kimchi as its own thing, apart from the other banchan.
Japan and China have similar customs, but neither sets the table with so many side dishes that you could make a whole meal of them without a main, the way you can in Korea.
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| At a raw fish restaurant on Jeju, the banchan and side plates keep coming, course after course, until the table is full |
There are so many kinds of banchan that they change from region to region and season to season. I’ve lived in Korea my whole life and eaten Korean food every day, and I still run into banchan I’ve never seen before. Every family also has its own way of making them, recipes handed down from mom, and from her mom before that. In the end, what lands on the table depends on whoever’s doing the cooking.
Not every restaurant does the full spread, though. Places that serve quick meals, like noodles, gukbap (rice in soup), or bunsik (Korean snack food), usually give you just two or three banchan, kimchi included. If you want the full banchan experience, go somewhere that serves a proper main dish, like a braise (jorim), a stew (tang), or a stir-fry (bokkeum).
So What Exactly Is Banchan?
Banchan is the word for everything you eat alongside rice. The closest Western idea is a side dish, but there’s one big difference. A side dish supports the main. Banchan are rice’s partners, and a Korean meal isn’t complete without them. Most Koreans wouldn’t call a bowl of rice on its own a meal.
We have a saying for a quick, bare-bones meal: “I just had it with kimchi.” It means you ate rice and kimchi and nothing else, which is Korean for “I didn’t eat properly.”
Then there’s maenbap. Maen means bare, with nothing added, so maenbap is a bowl of plain rice on its own. No banchan, not even kimchi. Saying you ate maenbap is almost the same as saying you skipped the meal. Plain rice has no seasoning and nothing mixed in. It’s just carbs.
So banchan fill the gap, adding the fiber and minerals a main dish might be missing. Most banchan are vegetable-based: seasoned greens (namul), stir-fries, pickles. Fish, seafood, and eggs show up a lot too.
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Rolled egg is one of those banchan that shows up everywhere, and it goes inside gimbap too. There's a step-by-step roll in my gimbap post, GIF and all
And even without a main dish, you can pull a few banchan out of the fridge and have an easy meal in minutes.
My mom says “there’s nothing to eat” whenever we’re down to three banchan or fewer, not counting kimchi.
That’s how much banchan matter here.
THE BASIC KOREAN TABLE
- Rice: everyone gets their own bowl
- Soup or stew: your own bowl, or one pot in the middle to share
- Several plates of banchan: all in the middle, shared by everyone
- Kimchi: technically a banchan, but almost always treated separately
What surprises most visitors is that banchan aren’t individual portions. They’re shared. At most Korean restaurants they’re free, and when a plate runs out, you can ask for more.
Why Are There So Many Kinds?
My husband and I both work, so I don’t get to spend a lot of time on housework. I cook with whatever I picked up at the store that week, and truth is, a lot of our banchan come from my mom, who lives nearby. Even so, our fridge almost always has at least three or four kinds.
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| Golbaengi muchim, a spicy sea snail salad, usually shows up with drinks. My husband loves it, so it lands on our dinner table too. The kimchi jeon takes minutes |
But if you ate the same banchan every day all year, you’d get tired of them fast, right?
Korea has four distinct seasons, and each one brings its own ingredients. So banchan followed whatever was in season.
Long before modern refrigeration, people figured out ways to make those seasonal ingredients last, and those methods were passed down. That’s how we ended up with so many banchan today.
The best examples are pickles and jeotgal (salted, fermented seafood). Soy sauce and salt keep them good for a long time, and a little goes a long way. One small bite can carry a big spoonful of rice.
Have you heard of gejang? It’s raw crab marinated in soy sauce, and its nickname is bapdoduk, “the rice thief.” Eat it with rice and your bowl is empty before you know it. It makes the rice go down easy.
Koreans have a couple of ways to praise a dish like that. We say it “calls for rice,” or “you can’t eat this without rice.” It’s high praise, and it usually goes to dishes that are salty, savory, or spicy.
Types of Banchan, by How They’re Made
Every home has its regulars. In mine, it’s saeu bokkeum and myeolchi bokkeum, small dried shrimp or anchovies stir-fried in soy sauce. I also buy myeongnan-jeot and ojingeo-jeot a lot and keep them in the fridge.
Most of what I make myself is quick stir-fries and seasoned vegetables. Jeotgal and pickles take a long time and a lot of work, so I usually buy those.
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| A single-person set meal at a Korean restaurant: tteokgalbi (grilled short rib patty), braised burdock root, saeujang and jeotgal, gat kimchi (mustard leaf kimchi), and doenjang soup |
Gejang, saeujang and the like are treats. I buy them now and then, but they’re not cheap enough to keep on hand all the time. The everyday regulars are mostly vegetables.
Every Region, Every Home Is Different
Even within Korea, some regions keep the table simple, and others fill it until there’s no space left.
As a rule of thumb, the further north you go, the fewer banchan you get. The further south, the more show up at once.I grew up in Gwangju, the biggest city in Korea’s southwestern Jeolla region. In Korea, this area is known as the place for good food. It sits between two seas, the West Sea and the South Sea, and it has wide, fertile plains that have grown the country’s grain for centuries. So all kinds of dishes and cooking styles developed here. And when you grow up eating good food, and lots of different food, you get pretty good at tasting it and making it yourself. Long story short: I’m a pretty good cook.
The banchan my mom made when I was little are the ones I now make for my own family, in my own kitchen. I’ve had that kitchen for over 20 years, so some of her recipes I’ve made my own, and there are things I picked up myself that she never taught me.
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| A table my mom set for us. She's from Jeolla, and it shows |
Marriage brought in a whole new set of banchan, too. My husband’s family is from Hoengseong, in Gangwon Province, up in the northeast of Korea. A big mountain range splits Gangwon into two sides, Yeongdong in the east and Yeongseo in the west. Hoengseong is on the Yeongseo side, where the mountains kept seafood from ever becoming a big part of the cooking. What they have instead is plenty of field crops, wild greens and mountain vegetables.
When I first visited my in-laws after we got married, there were so many banchan I’d never seen. They’re just not eaten much in Jeolla. The two regions are far apart, with the Chungcheong and Gyeongsang regions in between, so there was never much back and forth.
The best example is a dish called oksigi-juk in the local Gangwon dialect. I’m Korean, and I still had no idea what it was from the name.
Turns out it’s corn! Corn kernels, soaked, seasoned and simmered down. Corn grows well in Gangwon, so people there came up with all kinds of ways to store it and cook it.
To this day, I’m not quite sure how it’s made. And I’ve never seen it outside Gangwon. Not even in Seoul, where you can supposedly find food from every corner of the country.
It went the other way too. When my husband came to Gwangju, he tried a few things for the first time. One was maesaengi, as a soup and as a seasoned banchan.
Maesaengi is a kind of seaweed. It’s made of very thin, dark green strands, a bit like gamtae (another thin seaweed), and those strands pack together tightly.
So when you make soup with it, the maesaengi sits on top like a blanket and traps the heat. No steam comes off, so it doesn’t look hot, and people take a big spoonful and burn their mouths. There’s even an old saying: “Serve maesaengi soup to the son-in-law you don’t like.” Ha!
And guess what my mom made the day her future son-in-law came to meet the family? Maesaengi soup! Not because she didn’t like him, of course. She’d been thinking about what he’d never had before, something from Gwangju, and maesaengi was her pick. She warned him plenty of times that it was hot before he took a bite.
He still remembers it as a strange-looking soup that turned out to be delicious.
And Then There’s Jeju
By sea, South Jeolla is Jeju’s closest neighbor on the mainland. Jeju was even part of Jeolla Province for a long time. But it’s still an island, and even I found a few banchan here unfamiliar.
The big one is jaridom-jeot, fermented damselfish. Even now, I can’t bring myself to eat jaridom-jeot or jari-mulhoe (a cold raw damselfish soup).
On the mainland, gosari (bracken fern) is dried and stored, then soaked in water and seasoned as namul. In Jeju, people freeze it fresh instead of drying it, and grill it right alongside pork or put it in soup.
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| This one comes straight from the sea around Jeju. Haenyeo, the island's women divers, harvest the dolmiyeok by hand |
Being an island, Jeju also turns all kinds of seafood into banchan. Bomal, a small sea snail, is one of Jeju’s signature ingredients. It goes into noodle soup (kalguksu), porridge, and banchan.
Even at my age, every time I go somewhere new in Korea, there’s a banchan I’ve never seen. I love that.
When the Season Changes, So Do the Banchan
Every season here brings something new. Farming has come a long way, and greenhouses grow things all year, but some ingredients you can still only get in season.
And some only taste right in season.
When spring comes and the weather warms up, markets and grocery stores fill with spring greens: naengi (shepherd’s purse), bomdong (young, tender cabbage that comes up in spring), dureup (fatsia shoots). You can only get these in spring. For Koreans, the first naengi muchim or naengi doenjang-guk (soybean paste soup with naengi) of the year means spring is here.
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| Namul made with Jeju-grown greens: chwinamul (aster), gondre (Korean thistle) and yuchae (rapeseed greens) |
In Jeju, spring means gosari. Jeju gosari is so famous that some people fly in just to pick it. The most common way to eat it is seasoned as namul, but it also goes into yukgaejang (spicy beef soup), and it’s a must in japchae.
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| Gosari picked on Jeju in spring, frozen fresh, then grilled with the black pork. Nothing goes better with it |
In early summer, yeolmu (young summer radish) is ready, and we make yeolmu kimchi to eat with noodles or bibimbap. Once summer heats up, yeolmu loses its flavor, so it’s only good in early summer and early fall.
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| Summer yeolmu kimchi, made with green chilies and Cheongyang peppers ground into the paste. Spicy and bright |
In Jeju, summer brings mini kabocha squash, which we steam and eat as a banchan.
Fall is when everything’s plentiful. Around September, daeha (big prawns) come in on the West Sea (the Yellow Sea). People eat them raw, salt-grilled, or fried. When I lived up near Seoul, I’d go every mid-September to a little harbor near Chojidaegyo Bridge, the way from Gimpo onto Ganghwa Island, just to eat daeha. The place is known for its shrimp, so it’s packed that time of year. Since moving to Jeju, fresh shrimp like that are hard to come by.
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| Around September the daeha come in, and the little harbors near Chojidaegyo Bridge fill up with people eating them fried |
Winter is kimjang season, when families make enough kimchi to last the whole year. Once the winter cabbage has grown and the winter radishes have fattened up, it’s time.
A lot of younger families don’t do kimjang anymore, but my mom and I have been doing it together for 10 years now.
When the kimchi fridge is packed full of fresh kimchi, it’s the best feeling. Like we’re set for the year.
Winter is also when Jeju’s vegetables come pouring in. Jeju’s radishes, carrots, cabbages and broccoli are all harvested in winter, and the most famous of them is the carrot.
Carrots from Gujwa, on the northeast side of the island, are the best known. People make carrot rapée, carrot gimbap and carrot juice with them. Gujwa carrots are sweet and crunchy even raw, and everyone loves them.
Good to Know Before Your First Korean Meal
When you sit down for your first meal in Korea, the strangest thing might be all those little plates that land on the table the minute you’re seated. Do you have to pay for them? Will they charge you if you want more? Relax. Banchan are almost always free, so go ahead and try them all.
Some restaurants serve the first round at the table, and after that you get refills yourself from a self-serve bar. There’ll be a separate station with a sign saying it’s self-serve, so keep an eye out.
If there’s no self-serve bar, just ask your server. Point to the empty dish and say “deo juseyo” (more, please). That’s all it takes.
Like I said, banchan are meant to be eaten with rice. So while you wait for your main dish, just have a little taste and save the rest for when the food and rice arrive.
You can’t take leftover banchan home. Restaurants don’t reuse them, so whatever’s left gets thrown out. So try not to leave too much.
Some banchan are red from gochugaru (chili flakes) or gochujang (chili paste), so you can tell they’re spicy. But some banchan are spicy without being red. Koreans love a green chili called Cheongyang pepper, and dishes made with it can look mild and still be plenty hot. If you see chili in the seasoning, ask how spicy it is first.
Coming Up in This Series
In this series, I’ll introduce the banchan Korean families actually make at home, one at a time. If there’s one you’ve seen at restaurants but never knew the name of, or one you’d love to make but don’t know where to start, I’ll walk you through it step by step.
Next up is jinmichae. It’s dried squid, shredded thin and tossed in a sweet, spicy sauce. Most Koreans have had it at some point, whether in a packed lunch or with drinks. If you’ve been to Korea, there’s a good chance you’ve had it too.
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| Jinmichae, dried squid shredded thin and tossed in a sweet, spicy sauce. That's the next post |
Even if you’re not planning to cook along, come take a look.
Wrapping Up
Even in the same town, every family’s table looks different. There’s no one right way to do banchan.
For dinner tonight, I cut up one of the radishes that went into the jars with the cabbage at last winter’s kimjang and tossed it with sesame oil and sesame seeds. Next to it, myeongnan-jeot with a drizzle of sesame oil. There was also a namul made from sweet potato stems, and napa cabbage kimchi from last winter’s kimjang. Oh, and garibi-jang, scallops marinated in soy sauce with garlic chives and green onions.
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| The radish from last winter's kimjang, with sesame oil and sesame seeds |
That’s five banchan right there. And it was nothing special, just an ordinary dinner.
Is there something like this where you live, small dishes that come with the main meal? There are so many food cultures out there, so I’m guessing banchan has a few cousins somewhere.
I’ll be back soon with jinmichae!
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