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Foreigner’s Guide to Food Delivery in Korea

Wonderful

Dec 9, 20246 min read

Updated: Jan 1

Korea has many great food delivery services and they became especially crucial during the height pandemic when social distancing rules had to be observed. Even though Korea has removed most of the rules, food deliveries provide a great way to discover food from various restaurants in your area. If you are not too much into cooking, staying at home does not mean that you can’t enjoy great food!

Wonderful has complied a basic guide with tips on available food delivery options for foreigners in Korea, with some useful tips below that.

Shuttle Delivery

Shuttle Delivery is a fully bilingual service providing deliveries from a variety of Korea's best restaurants, so you can enjoy the best food in the comfort of your home, office, or wherever you happen to be! They currently offer the most diverse range of restaurant options to choose from, with dishes from every continent such as South American cuisines, European cuisines, even to African cuisines... they have options for everyone. They also support payments using multiple foreigner friendly options such as international card, Paypal and bitcoin.

Wonderful clients with deposits can become Shuttle VIP customers. You can get more information about the partnership by following this link.

Coverage: certain parts of Seoul, Busan, Songtan and Pyeongtaek (delivery to Camp Humphreys is available too)

Yogiyo

Yogiyo is a great service available both as a website and an app. If you would like to try it, we recommend using the website instead of the app, since you can use google translate to view the menus and restaurants in English (Google translate English :D ). All restaurants are grouped by category: chicken, Chinese, Korean, etc. You can even have items delivered from a nearby convenience store or large grocery stores such as Homeplus. IMPORTANT! before you start browsing restaurants, you need to first input your address (up to street number) in order for Yogiyo to give you the list of places that do delivery in your area.

Baemin

Baemin is currently only available as an app. Some would argue that it has more options than Yogiyo, though according to our experience, they have very similar offerings. The biggest difference between the two, would probably be the coverage. Baemin has a wider coverage than Yogiyo and usually has more options than the other food apps.

Coupang Eats

Coupang Eats has quickly grown to be one of the top 3 food delivery apps. They also offer an interface in English so it has become popular in the foreign community. Though, one major issue is that while some restaurants have English menu in Coupang eats, a lot of these menus are automatically translated by Coupang so they are often not accurate. Some translations might result in laughs some in endless frustrations if you receive what you did not want to order. That said they have a wide coverage across Korea and are growing fast.

Danggyo

Another new entrant into the food delivery scene, Danggyo is developed and run by Shinhan bank, which is a large conglomerate in Korea. They are still new so, they might not have a lot of coverage in the country, but they do offer some benefits for Shinhan Bank customers.

General Useful Tips

Inputting your Location

To get the available restaurants in your area, once you sign in, you would need to input the address into the food app. Usually the address is edited at the top of the app. You can click on the target icon for the phone to get your address automatically. However, sometimes this address is not accurate. You need to copy the address up to the street address (without the building name or apartment number) to get your address listed. We have highlighted which part of the Korean address you need to copy in the image above. Korea has 2 address formats, so for in the example above searching for 관악구 원신길 79, might result in 신림동 808-502, which is the same but in the other format. You can confirm both formats by searching on Naver or Naver maps. Afterwards you can input the detailed address as shown on the second image. Usually the room number is indicated with 호 and the building number indicated with 동, just to give you an idea what the address is. This should apply to other food delivery apps as well.

Payments

For most food apps, there are usually 2 ways to pay for the food, via payment online or payment on delivery. In the image above, both Yogiyo and Baemin have multiple delivery options you can choose from. Some food apps like Coupang eats, or Ddangyo require you to register your card, so they do not allow for payment on delivery. Most food apps allow for both payment options but lately, some apps restrict the payment on delivery option from the faster express delivery restaurants. For Yogiyo, those restaurants with 익스프레스 require payment on the app, for Baemin it would be 배민1. (Shown below)

As you can imagine the Express/Baemin1 option offers faster delivery. It usually doesn't take more than 30 minutes for delivery. However, apart from the payment limitations, they might not always have enough riders to take orders during peak hours.

Delivery instructions

These days most delivery apps offer the option to not deliver utensils to reduce the amount of plastic waste made during food deliveries. While this is an admirable goal, some apps default on not having the utensils delivered which can lead to confusion, i.e. Baemin and Yogiyo. Shuttle offers the option of removing utensils on delivery. For Baemin, you need to uncheck the checkbox (marked 1) to get utensils, and for Yogiyo, you need to check the checkbox (marked 1) to get utensils. Also, you can input delivery instructions in Korean in the spaces below that.

Direct Order from Restaurants that Deliver

Food delivery options in Korea — Courtesy of domandhyo.com

Sometimes restaurants prefer to use their own delivery systems with their own paid drivers. Before most delivery apps, most restaurants had their own drivers. Many of those restaurants still retain their own drivers for deliveries. Most Chinese or small Korean restaurants can deliver, if you contact them directly. Some large franchises have their own apps and websites for delivery orders. Examples are: McDonalds, Burger King, KFC, Dominos, Papa Johns, Popeyes, Pizza Hut, Lotteria... just to name a few. (Click on the restaurant to go to the website)

Coverage: That depends on each restaurant. You would need to check with each restaurant to see if they can deliver to your area.

**Fun Fact: As a frequent clients to these restaurants, Wonderful gets discounts (sometimes up to 50%) when ordering online. Wonderful passes these discounts fully onto our clients, as you only pay for the time spent working on your request.

**Payment Issues?: With Wonderful you can avoid the hassle of making payments on local food delivery websites. We can charge your international card using secure payment platforms such as Stripe or Paypal and we will make the payment on your behalf.

3rd Party Delivery

Craving some Tandoori Chicken but there are no Indian restaurants in your area? Not an issue with 3rd party delivery. If you would like to order something that is out of reach of any of the options above, feel free to message us. We can help locate the closest restaurant and arrange for a 3rd party courier service to deliver the food to you, wherever you may be.

We can also assist with placing orders on the food delivery apps if you have difficulties navigating them. All you need to do is to send us a screenshot showing the name of the restaurant and what you would like to order. You can also just simply message us and let us know what you would like to eat (e.g. I’d like some tuna gimbab and Jajangmyeon) and our assistants can check for available restaurants in your area to place the order.

Wonderful is the best on-demand English-speaking virtual assistant service in South Korea. Serving the expat community for nearly 10 years we've maintained the highest customer ratings on both Google and Facebook.

Don't let language barriers or unfamiliar surroundings hold you back from getting the most out of your time in South Korea. Let Wonderful help you save time and make things easier.

Regarding our pricing, we charge for the time taken working on your request by the minute, for as low as 1250 KRW per minute, depending on your preferred pricing package. If interested in our service, you can reach us on Facebook, Kakao Talk, WhatsApp, Instagram or Email.

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