Why Do Koreans Eat With Their Mouths Open, Slurping and Smacking?
Why Do Koreans Eat With Their Mouths Open, Slurping and Smacking?
Wheoo-loop. Nyam nyam. Jjeop jjeop.
Eating hot noodles without blowing on them first isn’t easy for anyone. But that combination of sounds — the slurping, the smacking, the open-mouth chewing — is something that grates on a lot of visitors, especially people who grew up being told that making noise while you eat is basically the worst thing you can do at a table.
I get it, honestly. I’m Korean, and even I can’t fully sit through it. If the table next to me at a restaurant starts up with that sound, my appetite just leaves the room. Not every Korean eats like that. But I do think TV has something to do with why it’s still so common.
It’s Been on Screen for Years
Korean dramas and variety shows travel far beyond Korea now, and eating scenes are everywhere in them. One that comes to mind is Boys Over Flowers, where F4 — the wealthy, high-society characters — are shown chewing with their mouths open, smacking as they go. For fans who came to the show through the glossy, upper-class world it was selling, that scene must have landed as a strange contradiction. These are supposed to be the most refined people in the story.
And it’s not a one-off thing. Go looking through the kind of YouTube videos that break down “how tourists from each country behave,” and Korean eating sounds keep coming up as a recurring point. When something shows up again and again across different creators, in different videos, made by people who don’t know each other — that’s usually a sign there’s something real behind it, not just one bad experience someone happened to have.
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This Isn’t How Korean Table Manners Were Supposed to Work
Traditional Korean dining etiquette actually calls for eating quietly. Slurping and smacking were never the standard — they go against what was taught for generations. So when I think about how modern Korea gets seen from the outside through this one habit, it stings a little. It doesn’t cover the whole culture, obviously. But it’s a real habit, and it’s the one a lot of people abroad end up remembering.
Please Don’t Assume This Is All of Us
If you’re visiting Korea and you run into this, I’d rather you not walk away thinking every Korean eats this way. Plenty of us don’t. And plenty of us have opinions about it, too — this is something people here complain about among themselves, not just something foreigners notice from the outside. I’ve seen Koreans get genuinely stressed out by a loud eater at the next table, the same way anyone would.
A habit some people picked up at home, or just never thought twice about, ended up getting broadcast to the whole world through K-dramas and variety shows. Now it’s part of how Korea gets read from outside, whether that’s fair or not.
I don’t know if this post will ever reach the people who actually eat this way. But if you’re reading this and you recognize the habit in yourself, I’d just ask you to notice it a little more, and think about the people sitting near you.
