Our journey begins with two foundations of the Korean table: rice and jang.

After meeting in Seoul, we travel to Icheon for Icheon ssalbap, a generous multi course meal centered around the region’s celebrated rice. Over lunch and a relaxed orientation, we’ll settle into the journey and get to know the people we’ll be traveling with.

Later, we continue into the countryside for our first hands on experience. Using traditional doenjang, Korea’s fermented soybean paste, we’ll cook with a local host who learned her way of making food from the generation before her.

This is our first introduction to jang. Not simply as an ingredient, but as one of the quiet foundations of Korean cooking.

And then we do what makes the most sense after cooking together. We sit down and eat.

Meals included: Lunch, Dinner

Food culture is also about everything that surrounds the meal.

We begin in a local pottery studio, where a Korean ceramic artisan introduces us to the relationship between clay and the Korean table. You’ll create and personalize your own piece while learning how pottery has long been part of the way Koreans cook, serve, and share food.

After a traditional Korean lunch, we travel to a local farm and turn our attention to preservation. Together with the farmer, we’ll make ganjang jangajji, seasonal ingredients preserved in soy sauce.

Our afternoon slows down at Myeongjae Historic House, a centuries old home where descendants still live today. Tiled roofs, quiet courtyards, and rows of jangdok jars surround us as we sit down for a traditional tea experience.

It is a gentler end to a day spent thinking about the hands, land, and everyday rituals around Korean food.

Meals included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Some of Korea’s most important flavors take time.

Our morning begins at local brewery, where traditional Korean liquor has been made for more than a century. Brewing still happens inside these old spaces today. We’ll walk through the brewery, hear the family stories held within it, and taste what happens when grain, fermentation, and patience come together.

From there, we continue to Sunchang for one of the most memorable meals of the trip. Lunch centers around lotus leaf rice, seasonal banchan, and regional dishes served with the kind of care that makes you want to slow down.

In the afternoon, we meet Korean Food Master Kang Soon ok, who introduces us to one of Korea’s essential fermented foods, gochujang.

We hear her story. We make gochujang ourselves. Then we use it to cook tteokbokki and sit down to taste what we’ve made. Learn it. Make it. Cook it. Eat it. We finish the day in Gwangju over dinner together.

Meals included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Today, everything slows down.

After a relaxed morning and brunch, we travel to Seonunsa Temple in Gochang. Here, food is approached through simplicity, seasonality, and a different rhythm of daily life.

We’ll spend the afternoon learning about Korean Buddhist food through a temple cooking experience, then share an evening gongyang, the communal meal served at the temple.

As daylight fades, we join the evening Buddhist ceremony and settle into our overnight stay surrounded by the temple and its natural landscape.

After several days of cooking, tasting, and traveling, this evening gives us something equally important.

Time to be still.

Meals included: Brunch, Dinner

The morning begins quietly with the temple’s early ceremony and breakfast.

Then we continue south to Boseong, where rows of green tea stretch across the hills. We’ll spend time walking through the landscape and sit down for tea, experiencing another Korean ingredient in the place where it grows.

From here, we travel toward Korea’s southwest coast.

In Mokpo, we pause for lunch and coffee before checking into the hotel for some well earned time to rest. The break is intentional. By now, we’ve eaten, made, moved, and learned a lot. There should be room to take it all in.

That evening, we return to the table for our farewell dinner.

Live octopus, abalone, pork, and the bold flavors of the sea make it immediately clear that we have arrived in a port city. Mokpo’s table feels generous, lively, and very different from where this journey began.

And then we finish the night as many Koreans would. With music, drinks, laughter, and one last evening together. By now, nobody feels quite like a stranger anymore.

Meals included: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

We start our final morning with breakfast before checking out and making our way back to Seoul.

Over six days, we’ve followed Korean food through rice, clay, farms, fermentation, temple kitchens, tea fields, and the sea.

But the journey has always been about more than ingredients.

It is also about the farmer who grows them. The artisan who makes the bowl. The brewer who waits. The master who passes on what she knows. The temple kitchen that asks us to eat a little differently.

We return to Seoul with new flavors, things we have made with our own hands, and hopefully a different way of looking at the Korean table.

Meals included: Breakfast