Vegan Korean food is not a workaround.
Most guides written for vegan travelers heading to Korea open with a warning, and the warning is not entirely wrong. A lot of Korean cooking leans on anchovy stock, dried shrimp, and fish sauce buried somewhere in a broth or a marinade, often in dishes that look completely plant based on the surface. It is a reasonable thing to be cautious about, and this piece will get to exactly what to watch for.
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| None of this needed a modern label to already be vegan. |
But that caution tends to obscure a much older and more interesting fact. Korea has been running a fully developed plant based culinary tradition for well over a thousand years, long before the word vegan existed anywhere in the world.
A Tradition Older Than the Word for It
Sachal eumsik, Korean Buddhist temple cuisine, traces back to the fourth century, when Buddhism first arrived on the peninsula and monastic kitchens began building an entire food system around the principle of non-violence. Meat, fish, and eggs were excluded outright. So were the five pungent vegetables, garlic, onion, chives, leeks, and a few regional variants, based on the belief that they overstimulate the mind during meditation. What temple cooks built instead, using tofu, wild mountain greens, fermented pastes, and mushrooms, became one of the more sophisticated plant based cooking traditions in the world, refined generation after generation inside monastery walls.
This is not a fringe curiosity kept alive by a handful of monks. In 2025, Korea's Heritage Service designated Buddhist temple food as National Intangible Cultural Heritage, and it is now under consideration for UNESCO recognition. Balwoo Gongyang, a Seoul restaurant serving temple cuisine, holds a Michelin star for dishes built entirely around this tradition. Venerable Jeong Kwan, a nun from Baegyangsa Temple, became internationally known after her episode of Chef's Table, and later received a James Beard Award, one of the most respected honors in global gastronomy. None of this happened because temple food adapted itself to modern vegan trends. Modern interest simply caught up to something that had already existed for well over a millennium.
What to Actually Watch For
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| The hardest part isn't finding vegan food. It's spotting the broth that isn't. |
Outside temple kitchens, Korean home and restaurant cooking is a different landscape, and this is where the earlier caution actually matters. Many everyday broths, the kind used in soups, stews, and even some seasoned vegetable side dishes, are built on anchovy or kelp stock, and jeotgal, salted fermented seafood, shows up in most commercial kimchi even when the dish looks like plain fermented cabbage. Gochujang and doenjang, the two pastes underneath most Korean sauces, are typically plant based on their own, but the broth a sauce gets stirred into is where animal products tend to hide.
The most reliable strategy is not memorizing a list of dangerous dishes. It is learning to ask a specific, direct question at the counter or table: whether a broth uses anchovy or meat stock, and whether the kimchi being served contains fish sauce or shrimp paste. Restaurants specializing in sachal eumsik, or menus explicitly labeled with the Korean word for vegetarian, sideline this entire guessing game, since the tradition was built from the ground up without those ingredients in the first place.
Seeking Out the Real Thing
Sanchon, operating out of a traditional hanok in Bukchon since 1985, remains one of the more accessible ways for a visitor to experience a full temple style meal, typically arriving as a dozen or more small plant based dishes served over a slow, deliberate pace rather than a quick sit down meal. Temple stay programs, run directly through Buddhist temples across the country, go a step further, letting visitors eat the exact meals monks eat as part of a short overnight stay. Between those two options and a growing number of dedicated vegan restaurants in Seoul, a visitor avoiding animal products has considerably more to work with in Korea than the anchovy stock warnings usually suggest.
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| This meal was never a compromise. It was the original plan. |
None of this erases the real risk of an accidental bowl of anchovy based broth. That caution is fair and worth keeping. What it does is put that risk in its proper context: a challenge to navigate carefully, sitting right next to a tradition that solved the exact same problem more than a thousand years before anyone needed a word for it.
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