There’s a version of a Seoul night out that has almost nothing to do with the one in the guidebooks. It’s the one most of this city has. The traditional Korean drinking districts run before ten. They happen sitting down, in a room with fluorescent lighting and a gas burner set into the table, on a street with no English signage, usually with people you work with rather than people you chose.
Most expats live here for years without doing it properly. That’s a shame, because it’s where Korean social life happens and it’s the cheapest and warmest thing in the city.
This is a guide to those districts: where they are, what each one is for, why they exist in that particular spot, and how to walk into one without feeling like you’ve gatecrashed. Consider it the counterweight to our club map, which covers the other Seoul entirely.
Jongno: The Deepest Roots in the City
If you do one of these, do Jongno (종로). It’s the oldest continuously operating drinking district in Korea and it has never stopped being one.
The origin story is a good one. Jongno was the main road of the Joseon capital, reserved in practice for officials on horseback that commoners were expected to bow to. So people walked the back lanes instead. Those lanes became known as Pimatgol (피맛골), the alleys for avoiding horses. They filled with what such a route always fills with: cheap standing bars, griddle shops, taverns for people going about their business out of sight of the important ones.
Reading the Street
Most of the original alley was lost to the office towers that now line Jongno, with a partial reconstruction inside them. Korean writers have been mourning it for twenty years. But the district kept its character. Around Jongno 3-ga (종로3가) you’ll still find standing bars, bindaetteok (빈대떡) shops that have been open for decades, gukbap (국밥) for a few thousand won, the old cinema and arcade blocks, and the highest concentration of men over sixty drinking soju in Northeast Asia.
It’s also where the last music dabang (음악다방) DJs kept working longest, which isn’t a coincidence. Jongno is where the twentieth century went to keep going.
Go for: cheap grilled food, bindaetteok and makgeolli (막걸리), standing bars, the sense of being in a city that predates everything else on this list.
Euljiro: Workshops by Day, Everything Else by Night
One subway stop away and a completely different logic. Euljiro (을지로) is a working industrial district, mostly printing, lighting and small manufacturing. Its night grew up in the buildings the industry left empty after six.
The bar scene is famous now, and everyone calls it Hipjiro (힙지로). They’re worth the hype: unmarked doors, third floors, no signage, rooms that seat twelve. But the thing most visitors miss is the daytime district underneath it, roughly eleven hundred print shops around Inhyeon-dong (인현동) that are the reason the bars could afford to exist. Walk it on a weekday afternoon before you drink there on a Friday night.
Go for: the old school beer halls under the arches, the hidden bars, the noraebang (노래방), and nogari (노가리) with draft beer on plastic stools in the middle of the street in summer, which is one of the great Seoul experiences and costs almost nothing.
Yeongdeungpo and the Southwest: Where the Factories Drank
Across the river and west, the drinking economy was built by industry rather than by offices or students. Yeongdeungpo (영등포) has been Seoul’s industrial district since the colonial period. The Guro (구로) export complex south of it employed over a hundred thousand people at its peak in the late seventies.
Workers drank where they worked, because getting into central Seoul after a shift was an hour each way. The result is a dense, cheap, food first, early starting night that still runs today, now serving the IT workforce of G Valley on the same streets that served machinists. I’ve written about that belt in detail separately, including Mullae (문래), the steel district slowly turning into an arts district.
Go for: the cheapest night on this list, jokbal (족발) and gukbap and hof at volume, and a Seoul most visitors never see.
Daehangno: The Theatre District Rhythm
Daehangno (대학로) takes its name from the old Seoul National University campus that once sat there. When the campus moved the area kept a cultural function, becoming the centre of Korean theatre, with dozens of small stages, most of them basements.
That gives the district an unusual evening shape: everything fills at once when the shows come out, around nine or ten, and then quietens relatively early. The crowd skews young and the drinking is casual rather than heavy.
Go for: a play you won’t fully understand followed by chicken and beer with the audience. That’s a better night than that sentence suggests.
Sinchon: The Ghost of Student Seoul
Sinchon (신촌) was the student capital of Korea in the eighties and early nineties, serving Yonsei, Ewha and Sogang. If you talk to Koreans now in their fifties this is the district of their youth.
It has had a hard couple of decades, and the reason is instructive: student districts run on cheap rent, and popularity destroys cheap rent. Seoul Institute researchers have published work asking why people left Sinchon. It’s still busy, still young, still full of chains and cheap pocha (포차) and karaoke, but the energy moved to Hongdae (홍대) and then past it.
Go for: an honest look at how a Korean district ages, and very cheap student prices in the back streets.
The Neighbourhood Alley Is the Real Korean Drinking District
The thing I most want a newer resident to take from this article is that the most typical Korean night out doesn’t happen in a named district at all. It happens in the golmok (골목), the alley, within four hundred metres of a residential subway station, in a street of small businesses that exist entirely to serve the people who live upstairs.
Every station in this city has one. Yours does. It has a chicken place, a grill place, a hof, two pyeonuijeom (편의점), a noraebang and a 24 hour gukbap room. The customers are locals, the owner recognises regulars within three visits. The prices are what people who live there can pay every week rather than what a visitor pays once.
If you’ve lived here for two years and never drunk within walking distance of your own flat, you’ve been commuting to Korean culture while standing on top of it.
How to Not Feel Like an Intruder in a Korean Drinking District
Practical rules for all of the above, most of which come down to reading the room correctly.
Order food, always. These are food businesses culturally and, as this site has covered, in terms of how they’re registered. Ordering drinks only creates a real problem for the owner and reads as rude.
Go early and expect to be finished by eleven. This isn’t a warm up before the club, it’s the actual event.
Learn four words: yeogiyo (여기요) to call staff, igeo (이거) for that thing on the next table, hana deo (하나 더) for another, gyesan (계산) for the bill. That vocabulary will carry you through a hundred nights.
Don’t pour your own drink, and use two hands with anyone older. The full etiquette is in our drinking culture guide, but those two rules cover ninety percent of it.
And be relaxed about being the only foreigner in the room, because you very often will be. In more than twenty years of doing this the reaction has almost always been curiosity and an offer of somebody’s side dishes. These districts aren’t closed. They’re just not advertised, which isn’t the same thing.
FAQ
Where do Koreans actually go out in Seoul?
Far more often in ordinary neighbourhood alleys near their own subway station than in the famous districts. Beyond that, the traditional drinking areas of Jongno, the industrial southwest around Yeongdeungpo and Guro, Euljiro’s workshop district, and university areas like Sinchon and Daehangno. Hongdae, Itaewon (이태원) and Gangnam (강남) carry most visitor traffic but represent a small slice of how the city really drinks.
What’s the most traditional place to drink in Seoul?
Jongno, which has been a drinking district since the Joseon dynasty. The Pimatgol back alleys formed because commoners avoided the main road where they would have to bow to officials on horseback. They filled with cheap taverns and griddle shops. Much of the original alley was lost to redevelopment. The surrounding Jongno 3-ga area retains standing bars, decades old bindaetteok shops and the city’s oldest drinking culture.
What time do Koreans start drinking?
Typically right after work, around six or seven in the evening, with the first round being a proper sit down meal. In traditional and working districts the night often finishes by eleven. That’s because the pattern follows the working day rather than a late club schedule. Only the club districts run to the very late hours that visitors tend to assume are the norm.
Is it rude to order only drinks in a Korean bar?
It is unusual and it creates a practical problem for the venue. Korean drinking culture pairs alcohol with anju (안주), food eaten alongside it. Most bars and music venues also operate on a restaurant business registration built around food service. Ordering at least one dish is both the cultural expectation and a courtesy to the owner.
Are traditional Korean drinking districts friendly to foreigners?
They’re welcoming but not adapted. Expect little or no English, no English menus, and often no other foreign customers, but very rarely any hostility. Translation apps, pointing, and a handful of Korean phrases handle almost every situation, and regulars and owners tend to respond to visitors with curiosity rather than suspicion.
Sources and Archives
Jongno and Pimatgol. Financial News on the alley as the original downtown market · Asia Economy on where its taverns went · Seoul Love on the Jongno bossam alley.
The other districts. Euljiro’s industry sits under the Sewoon Map and our piece on the print alleys. Sinchon’s decline is documented in the Seoul Institute study asking why people left, with Seoul Love on the attempt to revive it. For the industrial southwest, our factory belt guide has the full history. For the street food and tent culture that runs through all of these districts, the Korea Tourism Organization and Stripes Korea both keep current guides.
Old photographs of the drinking city. Search 선술집, 대폿집, 포장마차 and 종로 in Seoul History Archive (서울역사아카이브) and Seoul Photo Archive (서울사진아카이브). Seoul Institute, Seoul in Photographs lets you move by decade. That’s the best way to watch the tent bars appear and then thin out under regulation. e영상역사관 national archive photography has the newsreel version.
And the etiquette, in more detail than this article had room for, is in our piece on how Korean nightlife developed its own rules.
Picture Credits
- Jongno during Line 1 subway construction, 1971
공유마당, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: KOGL Type 1. View the original file and its full licence terms. - Pagoda Park, Jongno, 1985
National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: KOGL Type 1. View the original file and its full licence terms. - Present day photographs
The DJ Diaries.
Historical images on this site are used under the licence stated for each file. KOGL Type 1 is the Korean public sector open licence permitting commercial use and adaptation with attribution; public domain items carry no restriction. If you hold rights in any image here and believe it has been used in error, get in touch and it will be removed.
Written from Seoul, by someone who has been in the booth for more than twenty years. More on the site, or book a DJ.
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