South Korea with Kids: Eating Out & Finding Restaurants while Traveling

Traveling in South Korea with kids is easy if you can map out restaurant options you know your kids will enjoy. If your kids are not used to Korean foods, they may initially be overwhelmed by the huge variety of side dishes, fermented flavors, and spicy condiments. However, you can find SO many delicious options if you know where to look.

My kids are 7 and 10, and they don’t yet enjoy kimchi or chili flavors. The tips in this post will be useful for most kind of eaters, although I should note that while we try to eat more vegetarian/carbon-conscious at home, on the road we sample all the local fare. In Korea, that means a fair amount of meat.

Download and Set Up Naver Maps

Set up a favorites list and practice pinning some places. You can see a few screenshots from Naver maps below. When getting directions, you can choose public transport, bus, walk, or bike. Under favorites, I created color-coded categories to help with organizing my pins. “Eats” are orange.

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Search for Local Foods

Using the Naver app, search for restaurants your kids will like. Note that the Korean syllabary does not transliterate exactly to the English alphabet, so if you want to search for Korean foods, it’s best to search in Korean. Here are some of my kids’ favorites that we search for and pin on the map. 

Pork Cutlet – 돈까스  – Cutlets are breaded with panko-style crumbs and super crispy. My kids are obsessed with the pork cutlets filled with mozzarella cheese. Usually the cutlet restaurants also have a variety of udon soup options.

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Udon – 우동 – Udon soup is the kids’ favorite rest stop lunch. They like it with tofu or sometimes shrimp tempura. They can both eat a huge adult-sized bowl.

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Ramen – 라면  – My kids love noodles. These places have different types of broths and you can choose spicy or non-spicy.

Dumplings – 만두  – A favorite while we are traveling, steamed, boiled, or in a soup.You can find tiny, hole-in-the wall take-away mandu shops, or you can find fancier sit-down places that often also have soups with hand-made noodles.

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Gimbap –  김밥 – Vegetables, egg, and other fillings inside a rice and seaweed roll. If your kids like sushi rolls, they will probably like gimbap, and you can find this everywhere in Korea. These are great for a quick take-away meal too.

BBQ – – I find Korean BBQ restaurants a bit stressful if I’m the only adult. These restaurants have a small grill in the middle of the table that you need to manage. The meat or veggies for grilling come ready to cook, and you’ll have a big variety of side dishes. My kids love the meat and the rice but usually ignore all the veggies. It’s one of my favorite things to eat when I’m kid-free, OR we are with another family to help manage all the tiny dishes and burn hazards.

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Short Ribs – Another delicious option which involves a hot grill on the table. The kids are not a huge fan of the ribs, because they find the bones difficult to deal with, but there is often a soup course which is pretty basic, as well as some blander side dishes.

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Fried Chicken – You can usually find a fried chicken joint nearby just by searching “chicken” in English. Naver even has a special symbol for it, since there are so many fried chicken restaurants.

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Ox Bone Soup – 설렁탕 – Seolleongtang is a beef bone broth soup with glass noodles and topped with thinly sliced beef brisket. The best seems to be found at restaurants that serve only this dish, or just a few types of soup.

Search for International Foods

International foods come in different degrees of Korean fusion. Below are what I search for to find things I know my kids will eat while traveling. Some western foods such as “Burger” and “Pizza” will show up if you search in English, but you’ll get more options if you search in Korean. 

Pasta  – 파스타 – Korean pasta restaurants usually have red sauce, cream sauce, and rose options. Be aware that some flavors, like gorgonzola, are almost always paired with honey to make them sweet. We ordered some pizza and pasta before that was sweeter than a dessert.

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Mexican – 멕시코 인 – When you search “Mexican,” you will find a bunch of “Mexican chicken” restaurants, which is basically just Korean fried chicken. Try searching for “taco” 타코 to get more relevant hits.

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Indian – 인도 – Searching for “Indo” will bring up Indian restaurants. We lived in Mumbai prior to our move to Korea, so it’s a nice bit of nostalgia for us when we can find good Indian food. Non-spicy things the kids like include naan bread, malai kofta or kebabs, pulao rice, sliced salad, and tandoori chicken.

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Burgers – 버거 – You can find McDonald’s & Burger King all over. We try to go to small, local burger joints. If your kids don’t like sauces and toppings, you should be extra-clear that you want the burger plain, or only with cheese. In a few major cities, including Busan and Daegu, you can find Shake Shack.

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Pizza – 파스타  – Pizza restaurants in Korea have their own style. Often, the sauce is a bit sweet, and the topping choices are catered for locals. Corn may find its way into your pizza, whether you ordered it or not. Beware of sugar on your pizza and french fries if that’s not your thing.

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Pin Go-to Chain Restaurants on Naver Maps

While I prefer to eat at non-chain, local restaurants while traveling, sometimes we just need a quick bite that I know the kids will like. Below are our go-to road trip options.  You can search for these in English. 

Pizza School –  Our go-to cheap pizza chain while traveling is Pizza School, which you can find in all the major cities. I’ll often grab 3 boxes of Pizza School pizza to bring back to our Airbnb. We get cheese (say no corn), pepperoni, and olive. We tried the “Truffle Buffalo” pizza and other pies with interesting names, but alas, the flavors have not been as we expected.

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Pho Mein – Since my kids lived in Vietnam, they are always hankering for a good bowl of pho, rice noodle soup or some rice wraps. This chain can be found in major South Korean cities. Search as one word, “Phomein.” Searching for “pho” brings up mixed results, as it gets mixed up with the English words “for” and “four” in Naver.

Paris Baguette – A bakery cafe with sweets, wraps, salads, sandwiches, and smoothies. Most of the sandwiches have sauces, so my kids are not a huge fan, but we can usually find something for everyone if we are in a pinch. Paris Baguette opens at 7am at many locations, which is 3 hours earlier than most of the other chains. 

Mom’s Touch – If your kids like fried chicken, this is a good chain to have marked. There are lots of Korean fried chicken places around, but if the menus are not in English, you may have trouble ordering something without spices or sauces. 

Subway – The international sandwich chain shows up in many South Korean cities. Because my kids really like Asian foods, they actually ate at Subway for the first time when they were 6 and 9 years old. They were blown away! I like to reserve Subway as a nice surprise when we can’t find anything locally we want to try.

Final Tips for Eating Out with Kids in South Korea

While driving on the highway, you can stop at Korean rest stops for delicious hot lunches. While the fast-food options are outside, the more substantial meals are inside. Sometimes it’s hard to read the menus; they are often behind the counter, obscured by something, and in teeny, tiny text. But usually you can point at the photos of what you’d like. All the Korean staples that my kids like, including udon, cutlet, bibimbap, and ox bone soup can be found at the rest stop for an affordable price. 

If you have a specific restaurant in mind and can’t find it in Naver Maps, try using the phone number to look it up. 

Do you have favorite restaurants in Korea, or strategies to find kid-friendly eats while traveling?