The Drink Order That Stopped Making Sense
At some point in the last few years, the default café order started feeling like a failure of imagination. Not the coffee itself — coffee is fine, coffee is great — but the reflexive reach for an oat latte or a matcha when the menu in front of you has something far more interesting sitting two lines down. In Seoul, those two lines down have always been there. Misugaru latte. Black sesame. Sikhye on ice. Boricha, served warm. These drinks did not arrive from a trend. They arrived from Korean households and royal court kitchens and traditional medicine, made their way into corner convenience stores and grandmothers' thermoses, and then — somewhere around 2023 to 2025 — got discovered by a generation of cafés that understood they were sitting on something the rest of the world had not yet named.
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| Neither of these started as a café drink. Both ended up as the most-photographed thing on the menu. |
According to Yelp's 2026 forecast, U.S. searches for black sesame matcha jumped 147 percent between 2023 and 2025. Black sesame lattes and coffee both rose more than 20 percent. Black sesame desserts climbed 21 percent. Those numbers describe something that moved faster than most food trends, and for a specific reason: black sesame, and the broader family of Korean grain-based drinks it belongs to, fills a gap that neither coffee nor matcha quite closes. The person who has moved past sugary drinks but finds plain water insufficient. The person who wants something functional and grounded but not medicinal. The person who wants flavor that means something. Korean traditional drinks have been answering this question for centuries. The café format just made the answer more photogenic.
What These Drinks Actually Are
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| These ingredients predate the wellness trend by about five hundred years. Korea just forgot to brand them until now. |
The category of Korean functional drinks is not a single product — it is a family of ingredients with different origins, different flavor profiles, and different histories, unified by the fact that they all predate the wellness trend by several hundred years.
Misugaru is the most versatile of the group. Traditionally, Korean multigrain powder is made from a blend of roasted grains — brown rice, barley, black beans, glutinous rice, sesame seeds, and millet — roasted, finely ground, and mixed together to create a naturally nutty and earthy flavor. Modern versions often include even more ingredients, with some blends containing as many as 33 different grains and seeds. In its original form, misugaru was mixed with cold water or warm milk for a quick breakfast — a drink that kept a person full through the morning and required no preparation time beyond stirring. In its café form, it becomes a latte: the powder dissolved in steamed oat or soy milk, slightly sweet from the roasted grain itself, with a flavor somewhere between a toasted nut and a mild grain cereal. It is not trying to taste like coffee. It is trying to taste like something nourishing, and it succeeds at that precisely.
Black sesame is the dramatic one. The flavor is nutty, faintly bitter, slightly rich in the way that tahini is rich — and the color, a deep charcoal grey that sits somewhere between slate and ink, photographs better than almost anything else on a café menu. The ingredient has long been prized in East Asian tradition for its nutty depth and perceived health benefits, and its crossover into mainstream American cafés from Phoenix to New York happened because it offered something no existing drink category could replicate: visual impact combined with genuine flavor complexity. A black sesame latte made well is not sweet in the way that a flavored syrup drink is sweet. The sweetness is restrained, almost reluctant, balanced by the natural bitterness of the sesame. It lingers. It makes you think about what you just drank.
Sikhye sits in a different register entirely. A traditional sweet Korean rice beverage, sikhye has a history traced back to the Three Kingdoms period from 57 BCE to 668 CE. It was initially consumed as a medicinal drink and prepared by fermenting rice with barley malt, producing grains of cooked rice that float in the liquid alongside a moderately sweet, malt-scented broth. Koreans believe sikhye is good for digestion, as it contains dietary fiber and antioxidants, and it was regularly served to royalty after meals for this purpose. Today it appears in convenience store refrigerators in canned form and on café menus as an iced dessert drink — mildly sweet, slightly effervescent from the fermentation, with a clean finish that makes it a natural post-meal option. It is the Korean equivalent of a digestif that requires no explanation.
Boricha — roasted barley tea — is the quiet anchor of the entire category. In Korea, boricha is often served year-round, enjoyed hot in winter and cold in summer, and it is so common that barley tea is frequently served instead of water in restaurants. It is naturally caffeine-free, with a flavor profile that is nutty, lightly toasted, and slightly bitter — a warm, grounding flavor that requires no sweetener and no milk to function as a complete drink. This is the drink that Korean households have been keeping in pitchers in the refrigerator for decades, offering it to guests the way a Western household might offer water. That domesticity is precisely what makes it interesting as a café offering: it is the most ordinary thing on the Korean table, now being encountered for the first time by people who find it unexpectedly sophisticated.
Why Now: The Context Behind the Crossover
The timing of Korean functional drinks landing on international café menus is not coincidental. It maps onto two shifts happening simultaneously in consumer behavior, and Korean ingredients happened to be exactly positioned for both.
The first shift is away from sugar. A generation that grew up on flavored syrups, Frappuccinos, and bubble tea loaded with sweetened milk has started looking for drinks that deliver flavor and satisfaction without the sugar spiral. Matcha made the first significant move in this direction — a drink with genuine bitterness, a grounding earthiness, functional appeal, and enough cultural specificity to feel intentional rather than just diet-adjacent. Korean cuisine maintains authenticity through recognizable flavor pillars — fermentation, grain, roasted depth, and natural balance — while staying flexible enough to incorporate new formats and techniques. Those pillars translate directly into drinks that are complex without being sweet, functional without being clinical, and specific enough to feel like a choice rather than a default.
The second shift is toward East Asian ingredients as a primary reference point rather than a novelty. Gen Z is actively seeking what Asian cuisines offer: bold, spicy, umami-rich, and tangy flavors — a generation that encountered K-dramas, K-pop, and Korean food culture simultaneously and developed an appetite for the full picture, not just the gateway dishes. When someone who has been eating tteokbokki and watching Korean café culture on social media for two years walks into a café that offers misugaru latte, they are not encountering an exotic novelty. They are completing a picture they already started building.
The Seoul Café as Laboratory
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| The Korean café that serves misugaru latte is not trying to be traditional. It's betting that what's old is exactly what's next. |
Seoul has more cafés per capita than almost any city on earth, and the competition between them has produced a relentless culture of menu innovation that treats ingredients like a rotating research project. The café that opened last month in Seongsu-dong is already being benchmarked by the café opening next month in Yeonnam-dong. In that environment, the rediscovery of traditional Korean drink ingredients was not nostalgic — it was competitive.
Korean-style cafés are now taking London by storm. Angel Dabang, a small café named after the traditional Korean dabang coffee houses, sells green tea from Boseong and Jeju Island, dabang-style coffee laced with condensed milk, misugaru as a hot roasted grain drink, and ssangwhacha — a flavorful herbal tea made from medicinal roots including cinnamon, ginger, jujube, and licorice. In the same city, mugwort lattes — made from the earthy, grassy herb known as sook — have been boosted by Korean food influencers whose Instagram posts have expanded the audience well beyond the Korean diaspora. What is happening in London reflects what happened in Seoul first: a new generation of café operators recognizing that the most interesting menu territory is often the one that has been sitting in their own culinary heritage all along.
A spoonful of misugaru grain powder blended into an espresso shot creates a unique nutty flavor that functions like a fusion between a café latte and a traditional Korean drink. Many café owners in Seoul now serve this as a misugaru latte, and it is especially popular as an iced multigrain coffee during warmer months — not too sweet, slightly toasty, and naturally rich in plant-based protein. The espresso-misugaru combination is a good case study in why these drinks work so well in a café context: neither ingredient overwhelms the other. The espresso provides the structure and the caffeine; the misugaru provides the grain depth and the body. The result is a drink that satisfies the coffee drinker and the grain-curious simultaneously.
Black sesame was introduced at Do Qoo in Singapore as a drink featuring black sesame, soy milk, and soy pudding, promoted explicitly as an option to "beat fatigue and bolster heart health" — a positioning that connects the ingredient's traditional East Asian health associations directly to the modern wellness language consumers already recognize. That framing — ancient ingredient, contemporary wellness vocabulary — is exactly the bridge that makes these drinks accessible to audiences who have no prior relationship with Korean food culture. You do not need to know what misugaru is or where it comes from to understand that "roasted multigrain latte, no added sugar, naturally nutty" is a drink you want to try.
What to Order and Where to Start
For someone encountering Korean functional drinks for the first time, the entry sequence matters. Black sesame latte is the best starting point for anyone who drinks matcha: the bitterness is in the same register, the color is more dramatic, and the flavor is distinct enough that there is no confusion between them. Order it with oat milk for the creamiest result; with whole milk if you want the sesame to sit heavier and richer on the palate.
Misugaru latte is the entry point for anyone who wants a grain-forward drink that is still accessible. It is the least challenging of the Korean functional drinks — mildly sweet, subtly nutty, with a warmth that comes from the roasting process rather than from added spice. The iced version, with cold brew or espresso added, is the variant that tends to convert people permanently: the coffee lifts the grain without dominating it.
Sikhye is the drink to order after a meal — specifically after a meal that felt heavy. Its malt-fermented sweetness and the subtle fizz of the fermentation process do what Koreans have always understood it to do: clear the palate, settle the stomach, and leave you feeling finished in a way that coffee after dinner does not quite achieve. Boricha, meanwhile, is worth ordering simply to understand what Korean hospitality feels like in beverage form — a drink offered freely, without occasion, as a baseline of care.
The Korean functional food market reached roughly $9.4 billion in 2025, on track for $10 billion in 2026, with analysts projecting it to approach $16 billion by 2033. Behind those numbers is a simple cultural fact: Korea has been making drinks that are simultaneously functional and delicious for longer than most wellness brands have existed as companies. The café menu is catching up with what Korean kitchens already knew. The only thing left to do is order something other than the coffee.
References
Yelp 2026 Trend Forecast. U.S. search growth data for black sesame drinks, 2023–2025. Published January 2026.
Mark Spark Solutions / Seoulz, Korea Functional Food Market Analysis 2026. Korean functional food market valuation and projections. Published June 2026.
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