Cycle 16 – Item 12

17 (Fri) January 2025

-Post 5,491-

Haemul Pa Jeon

3.0

at Seongsura

-Seongdong, Seongsu, Seoul, Republic of Korea-

with W, all staff

Seongsura is a Korean restaurant.  The menu, most of which is dedicated to traditional booze options, offers a handful of traditional food items, mostly anju in nature.

An important, if now diminishing, part of Korean work culture is the hoesik (회식), an official office function involving dinner and drinks with colleagues, on the company’s dime.  Sometimes through multiple venues, for example: restaurant –> bar –> karaoke club.  Traditionally, hoesik was a regular and mandatory thing, perhaps as often as once weekly with the team, at least once or twice a year with the whole company, regarded as critical opportunities for bonding, brown-nosing, and bolstering morale.

In the 2000s (as far as I can recall), hoesik started to fall out of favor.  First, as work culture became increasingly less strict and less hierarchical, formal gatherings began to feel stifling.  Also, younger employees began to resist the bullshit that hoesik often entailed, especially in the later stages of the evening, such as binge-drinking and sexual harassment.  Finally, employees across the board realized that they’d rather spend their free time with people that they actually liked, such as actual friends and family.  This decline was further accelerated during the pandemic, when workers were urged by the government to go home after work, and in any case restaurants were prohibited from accepting parties larger that 4 people at a time, and all establishments had to close by 8pm – even after the restrictions were lifted, most people seemed quite content to leave hoesik behind.

For the first time since January 2020, the first time since I joined the company in September 2020, we had a company-wide hoesik.  Whether because it had been so long, and/or because a certain someone had recently been booted, and/or because we had just wrapped our 2nd biggest year in the company’s history, everyone was in a celebratory mood.

The evening, however, didn’t start out so great.  Having scouted the location a couple weeks back, we had spent the interim carefully planning everything with the owner, including the same spread for all 8 of our tables.  But when we arrived at 18:00, nothing was ready, not even place settings.  The first dish (haemul pa jeon) for the first table wasn’t served until nearly 18:25.  Then, the kitchen served the second dish (bossam) for the first table, and the third dish (yuk hoe) for the first table – so one table had their full spread, while all the other tables remained empty.  WTF?!?!  When we called the manager over and asked him to serve a round of the first dish to all tables first, then move on to a round of the second dish, then the third dish, he looked kinda confused.  The 8th table got their first dish around 19:00, and their third dish around 19:30.

The food was okay.

Not an outright ban, but I wouldn’t authorize any future events there.

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(See all RESTAURANTS IN KOREA)