What Korean Presidents Eat: Kalguksu, Hongeo and a Gimbap Cabinet Meeting

Korea has had twenty presidents since 1948, and what they ate has been unusually public. The presidential archives publish their favourite dishes. Palace chefs give interviews. Restaurants that fed them put it on the wall. For a visitor, this turns into something practical: a list of old, inexpensive Seoul places with a verifiable story attached.

This is the third piece in a series on what Korea’s powerful have eaten, after the Joseon kings and the Goryeo and Silla courts. What follows sticks to food. Where a story is a legend rather than a record, it says so.

Why did the Blue House serve nothing but noodles?

When Kim Young-sam took office in 1993 he declared he would accept no political money, and the kitchen followed the politics. The official presidential table was reduced to kalguksu - hand-cut wheat noodles - and a piece of rice cake. Expensive dishes for foreign guests were dropped. The presidential archives record his own description of it: a common people’s food.

Guests were not universally delighted. Korean press reporting notes that complaints about portion size were common, and that Kim Dae-jung, then leading the opposition, ate again after a summit meeting because the bowl had not been enough. The president was unmoved.

The recipe came from a specific person. Kim Nam-sook, a noodle cook from Andong, stayed inside the Blue House for three months in 1993 to teach the kitchen how to make it. Her own shop - opened in Apgujeong in 1984 as Andong Guksi, later renamed Sohojeong and moved to Yangjae - is still running.

How one president made fermented skate a national dish

Hongeo is skate fermented until it gives off ammonia. It is the single most divisive food in Korea, and until the late 1990s it was mostly eaten in the southwest.

Kim Dae-jung, president from 1998 to 2003, was born on Hauido, an island in Sinan County near Mokpo, and hongeo was his home food. A chef who cooked in the Blue House for twenty years across five administrations has said in interviews that Kim was the biggest eater of the five, and that what he wanted specifically was unfermented skate sashimi - not the ammoniated kind.

What happened next was commercial. Skate sent out as gifts early in his term set off a national wave; a small-pack producer in Yeongsanpo had started nationwide distribution in 1997, and Naju ran skate festivals in 2000 and 2001. Within a few years a regional food was in Seoul restaurants.

The Seoul address is Shinancheon, opened in Naeja-dong in 1986 by a Mokpo woman who had trained as a nurse. Kim became a regular around 1990. The story the owner tells is from 2009, when he was in intensive care at Severance Hospital: she kept fermenting skate anyway, so it would be ready the moment he was discharged. Nobody asked her to.

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What the other presidents ate

Syngman Rhee (1948-1960), Korea’s first president, is recorded in the presidential archives as favouring a clear soup made from dried pollack heads with spring onion and chilli. His Austrian-born wife Francesca tasted every dish before it went to him, and the archive lists what she put on the table: dried radish greens, soybean-paste soup with them, loach stew, bean-curd lees stew, chilled soybean broth - and a rotating set of seasonal teas.

Park Chung-hee (1963-1979) is the makgeolli president. He tasted Baedari makgeolli at a tavern in Samsong-ri in 1966 and drank it thereafter; Geumjeongsan fortress makgeolli in Busan, which he had known since his days commanding there, received Korea’s first folk liquor licence in 1979 on his instruction. He is also widely credited with popularising makgeolli cut with cider. There is a much-repeated story that he had gomtang flown from Hadongkwan by helicopter while inspecting Jeju - Korean press writes it up explicitly as a legend, and that is how it should be read.

Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008) had a wheat allergy, so the Blue House kitchen made his noodles from rice. His dish was monaegi guksu, “rice-planting noodles” - the snack farmers ate at transplanting time, named because a heavy pile of garlic chives on top looks like a flooded paddy with seedlings in it. The chef who cooked for him described a president who wandered into the kitchen to chat.

Lee Myung-bak (2008-2013) was, by the accounts of the owners of his regular restaurants, a man who ate anything - snacks, spaghetti, fish cakes, bagels - though he strongly preferred plain white rice to barley or mixed grain. The reliable Seoul address is Jinju Hoegwan near Seosomun, where he ordered chilled soybean noodle soup often enough to ask for extra broth on its own.

Park Geun-hye (2013-2017) ate so sparingly and so consistently that kitchen staff nicknamed her the human scale, weighing out vegetable sides at twenty grams each.

Moon Jae-in (2017-2022) is attached to the most-watched meal in recent Korean history, below.

Yoon Suk-yeol (2022-2025) cooked. At a May 2024 dinner for roughly 200 reporters on the lawn of the presidential office in Yongsan, he put on an apron, made the rolled omelette himself and served the kimchi stew personally, with beef and pork grilled over charcoal by his staff. No alcohol was served.

Lee Jae-myung, in office since June 2025, opened with a cabinet meeting eaten over a single roll of gimbap - reported at the time as the “lunchbox cabinet.” In May 2026 he said at a senior secretaries’ meeting that he mostly eats at traditional markets after events, because he likes eating in markets.

The noodles that stopped the country, 27 April 2018

At the inter-Korean summit at Panmunjom, the North sent the head chef of Pyongyang’s Okryugwan restaurant to the truce village and installed a noodle press in the building on the northern side, so the naengmyeon could be pressed fresh and carried across to the summit house.

Kim Jong-un’s line about it - that they had brought the noodles from far away, then catching himself, “I suppose I shouldn’t say far” - became the phrase of the year in South Korea.

Then something unusual happened in Seoul: people went out for cold noodles. Korean newspapers reported queues forming before lunch that day at Pyongyang naengmyeon houses across the city, naming Pildong Myeonok in Jung-gu, where staff described a weekday matching high summer, along with Bongpiyang, Gwanghwamun Gukbap and Jungin Myeonok. The Blue House staff canteen put naengmyeon on the menu the following week and was overwhelmed.

In September that year Moon ate at Okryugwan itself in Pyongyang. Okryugwan has operated since 1960, and Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun had eaten there on their own visits north.

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Can you visit the Blue House?

Not right now, and most English-language guides get this wrong.

📌 Blue House access, in order

Date	What changed
May 2022	Presidential office moved to Yongsan; Blue House opened to the public
1 Aug 2025	Public tours ended
29 Dec 2025	Presidential office moved back into the Blue House
Sept 2026	Officials say partial tours may resume in 2027; no date set

The presidential office said in September 2026 that it is working on a model where working use, security and limited public access coexist, with the office and residence excluded. Until then, the thing you can actually enter is Cheong Wa Dae Sarangchae, the exhibition hall outside the gate on Hyoja-ro, open 09:00-18:00 and closed Tuesdays. There is no restaurant inside the Blue House open to the public, whatever you may read.

Where to eat all of this in Seoul

📍 Guksujip 📍 Shinancheon 📍 Jinju Hoegwan 📍 Baedari

🏆 Presidential food in Seoul, with prices and closing days checked from restaurant listings in September 2026

Restaurant	Order this	Price	Closed	Note
Guksujip	Guksi (kalguksu)	₩11,000	Wed, Thu, Fri	Opened 1969
Sohojeong	Andong guksi	₩16,000	Never	The recipe that went into the Blue House
Myeongdong Kyoja	Kalguksu	₩12,000	Never	No presidential link - Seoul’s famous bowl
Shinancheon	Hongeo samhap	Ask	Never	Call for current price
Hongeomyeongga	Hongeo samhap	₩69,000-130,000	Never	Sinkil-dong, three generations
Jinju Hoegwan	Kongguksu	₩16,000	Check	Summer dish - confirm in cold months
Baedari Makgeolli	Makgeolli + tofu kimchi	₩15,000	2nd, 4th Sun	Opens 18:00 only
Cheongjinok	Haejangguk	₩12,000	Never	Opened 1937, from 06:00
Yonggeumok	Chutang	₩12,000	Sun	Opened 1932
Pildong Myeonok	Pyongyang naengmyeon	₩15,000	Sun	The 2018 summit queue
Wooraeok	Pyongyang naengmyeon	₩18,000	Mon	Opened 1946
Hadongkwan	Gomtang	₩18,000	Sun	07:00-16:00 only

📍 Cheongjinok 📍 Yonggeumok 📍 Pildong Myeonok 📍 Hadongkwan

Cheongjinok and Yonggeumok have no verified presidential connection, but they belong on any list of this kind: Cheongjinok has been ladling hangover soup since 1937 and opens at six in the morning, and Yonggeumok has been making Seoul-style loach soup since 1932. Yonggeumok carries one good political story of its own - at inter-Korean talks, a North Korean vice-premier is said to have asked after the founder by name.

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Last in this series: the state banquets, from the 1966 menu card that served Lyndon Johnson sinseollo to the halal-certified Korean beef served to a visiting president in 2026.

For the dynasties before the republic, see what Joseon kings actually ate and what Goryeo and Silla courts ate. If the hangover soup entry caught your eye, we have a fuller guide to Korean haejang food.