What Joseon Kings Actually Ate - and Where to Try It in Seoul

Korean palace dramas have given the royal table a reputation it half deserves. There really were tables groaning with twelve kinds of side dish. There were also kings who skipped meals, kings who sent servants out for street food at night, and one king whose favourite drink was used to try to kill him.

The records are unusually good. The Annals of the Joseon Dynasty and the Daily Records of the Royal Secretariat were kept for five centuries and both survive, which means we know what specific kings complained about at specific dinners. What follows are the episodes that are actually written down - and, after them, the nine Seoul restaurants where the food itself is still on a menu.

What did a Joseon king eat in a day?

Four meals, only two of them large. The day opened with chojoban, a light porridge course before dawn. Josura, the morning meal, came around ten. Natgeotsang in the early afternoon was closer to tea than lunch - fruit, rice cakes, sweets. Seoksura, the evening meal, landed around six or seven.

Did Sejong really refuse to eat without meat?

Yes, and the line is in the Annals - but the story it is usually attached to is the wrong one.

The context matters. Sejong was in mourning and had given up meat entirely to observe Confucian ritual, and his father was ordering him to eat because his health was failing. This is a father worrying about his son, not a courtier describing a glutton. And Sejong’s response to being fed again was to order the provinces to stop sending meat tribute, because it was a famine year.

He is often blamed for his own diabetes on the strength of that one sentence. It is a thin case. What the record actually shows is a king whose eating was a political act - fasting to demonstrate filial duty, then refusing provincial tribute to demonstrate restraint.

Why is Sunchang famous for gochujang? Because of one king

King Yeongjo mentions chili paste in the Royal Secretariat records in 1749, saying roughly that as earlier kings had liked salty and pungent food, he had come to like gochujang. Chili had only been in Korea for a century and a half at that point; this is close to the first royal endorsement of it.

It escalated. Within a few years he reportedly could not get through a meal without it, and - more interestingly - he preferred a commoner’s version to what the palace kitchen made. The batch he kept asking for came from the household of Jo Jong-bu, an official in the Office of the Inspector General. Jo’s ancestral seat was Sunchang. That is the origin of the Sunchang gochujang reputation you now see printed on tubs in every Korean supermarket.

The first late-night delivery order in Korean history

In 1800, his first year on the throne, King Sunjo was out looking at the moon and got hungry. He sent a guard on night duty outside the palace walls to buy naengmyeon.

One of the guards used the trip to buy himself pork on the side. Sunjo noticed and told him that he could eat that one alone. It is a throwaway anecdote recorded by a later official, and it is the earliest description we have of anything resembling Korean late-night food delivery - a genre that now runs the country.

Sunjo was not the only one. Cheoljong recorded getting indigestion from naengmyeon and abalone at a Chilseok feast. And a court banquet register from 1848 lists cold noodles served at a palace celebration, which is the first time the dish appears in an official royal menu.

Gojong's naengmyeon, and the coffee that was poisoned

Gojong, the second-to-last king, ate naengmyeon as a night snack. The version described in accounts of his table used dongchimi - the thin, sour radish-water kimchi brine - as the broth, topped with sliced boiled beef, pear and pine nuts. If that sounds familiar, it is because the pear and pine nuts are still sitting on top of the bowl at Wooraeok.

His other habit is the darker story. Gojong took refuge in the Russian legation in 1896, and it is usually there that he is said to have acquired a taste for coffee, through Antoinette Sontag, a German-Russian woman who had come to Korea in 1885 and been put in charge of Western cooking for the royal household. She later ran the Sontag Hotel in Jeongdong, whose ground floor held one of Seoul’s first coffee shops.

On the evening of 11 September 1898, opium was mixed into the king’s coffee. Gojong took a few sips, found the taste wrong and spat it out. The crown prince - the future Sunjong - drank most of his cup, vomited and collapsed. Seven eunuchs and three court ladies were also poisoned.

The plot traced back to Kim Hong-ryuk, a Russian interpreter who had risen with the king’s flight to the legation and then been sentenced to exile for embezzlement. Before leaving he passed opium to a palace official with instructions to put it in the king’s food; it reached a kitchen worker who was promised a thousand nyang. All three were hanged on 10 October 1898.

Where can you eat royal court cuisine in Seoul?

Four places serve full court-style courses. None of them are cheap, all of them want a reservation, and each is closed on a different day - which is the detail that actually ruins trips, so it is in the table further down.

Korea House is the safest first choice if you want the full theatre of it: a walled hanok compound three minutes from Chungmuro Station, lunch and dinner seatings, and courses from 120,000 won for a main-hall lunch up to 250,000 won for dinner in the annex. Closed Sundays and Mondays. It reopened on 11 March 2026 after an eight-month renovation, with a court-cuisine researcher brought onto the team and several dishes restored - including gujeolpan, which had been off the menu for around forty years.

📍 Open in Naver Map

Jihwaja in Cheongun-dong is the one to pick if the history is the point rather than the setting. Its entry course, a grilled short rib sura, runs 89,000 won, which makes it the most affordable real court meal on this list. The 160,000 won tier includes a vegan version - genuinely unusual for this category of restaurant. Closed Tuesdays, reservation required.

📍 Open in Naver Map

Onjium sits on the fourth floor of a building facing the Gyeongbokgung wall, with counter seating over the kitchen. The team behind it researches historical Korean cooking and then rebuilds it with modern technique, so it is the least costume-like of the four. Prices are not published; expect the top of the range.

📍 Open in Naver Map

Seokparang is the atmospheric one. The building incorporates a sarangchae pavilion relocated from Seokpajeong, and the restaurant’s name comes from Heungseon’s own art name, Seokpa. There is a persimmon tree in the garden said to be over 150 years old. Course names are published but prices are not; closed Wednesdays.

📍 Open in Naver Map

Where to eat the specific dishes, without the course price

If you would rather eat one thing a king ate than sit through nine of them, this is the cheaper route. Yongsusan is the outlier here - it cooks Kaesong food, the cuisine of the Goryeo capital, which is a different dynasty and a story for another article.

🏆 Royal-adjacent dishes in Seoul, with prices and closing days checked from restaurant listings in September 2026

Yongsusan was opened in 1980 by Choi Sang-ok, who grew up in Kaesong and learned the city’s cooking from her mother before graduating from Kaesong Girls’ High School in 1947. The restaurant is named after the mountain behind that school. It is the one place on this list whose food belongs to the dynasty before Joseon.

Wooraeok is where to go for Gojong’s version of the bowl - beef broth rather than dongchimi, but the pear and pine nuts are there, and the kitchen has been doing it since 1946. Pildong Myeonok is the plainer, cooler, more austere style, three thousand won cheaper, and it closes at 19:50, which catches people out. Hadongkwan opens at seven in the morning and closes at four in the afternoon, so it is a breakfast or lunch decision, never a dinner one.

📍 Yongsusan 📍 Wooraeok 📍 Pildong Myeonok 📍 Imun Seolnongtang 📍 Hadongkwan

Is the royal origin story of seolleongtang true?

Probably not, and it is worth saying so plainly because every guidebook repeats it.

The story goes that a king performing the spring ploughing rite at the Seonnongdan altar was caught in rain, could not return to the palace, and had the sacrificial ox boiled in plain water to feed everyone present - seonnongtang wearing down into seolleongtang. It is a lovely story and the altar is real. But linguists have long pointed at the Mongolian word shulu, meaning boiled meat broth, which arrived with the Mongol presence in the thirteenth century and fits both the sound and the cooking method better. A third theory says the name just describes simmering something slowly.

What is solidly documented is the modern half. Japanese colonial-era cattle policy pushed beef prices down, and seolleongtang became the cheap urban staple of Seoul - ten jeon a bowl in 1930 when most dishes were fifteen. A 1924 newspaper called it “the undisputed king of Joseon’s food world,” which is a nice accidental pun given the subject of this article. Imun Seolnongtang has been open since 1904 and is among the oldest continuously operating restaurants in the city.

This is the first of four pieces on what Korea’s powerful have eaten. The rest of the series: the Goryeo and Silla courts, where Buddhism made meat disappear for centuries and the Mongols brought it back along with distilled liquor and dumplings; the presidents of the Republic of Korea, from a Blue House that served nothing but noodles to a first cabinet meeting held over gimbap; and the state banquets Korea has put in front of visiting heads of state.

If you are building a day around this, the full-day palace route puts Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung within walking distance of Onjium and Yongsusan. For what the court drank rather than ate, see our guide to makgeolli and traditional Korean liquor and to Seoul’s traditional tea houses.