South Korea Can’t Shake Off Its Bad Habits

Soon after I arrived in Seoul in 1996 as a young correspondent, a colleague brought me to a tiny restaurant buried deep in a warren of alleyways in the capital’s center—the kind of place only a local could find. Tucked into a traditional Korean house was a restaurant where customers on wooden stools and floor mats were huddled over steaming crocks of soojaebi, a hearty soup with thick, hand-torn noodles. Even back then, the eatery was a glimpse into a fast-fading past in a city relentlessly on the move, and it quickly became one of my favorites.

More than two decades have passed, and large swaths of Seoul are wealthier and practically unrecognizable, including sections around those alleyways, now unfortunately refurbished into a Disneyfied version of what old Korean streets might look like. But that restaurant has somehow survived, as difficult to locate as ever, with the same wooden stools and pots of soojaebi. South Korea is like that: The more things change, the more they just don’t.