A Guide to Banchan — The Name Records How It Was Made, Not Whether You Ordered It

You sit down and several plates arrive that you did not order. The question a visitor actually has in front of them is a single one: am I paying for this? Korean dish names are not built to answer it. What a name records is how the thing was made, and on that axis a dish you ordered and a plate that simply appeared are indistinguishable.

This guide sets out that mismatch. The real rules about paying live not in the name but in How to Order at a Korean Restaurant, and this guide points you there.

At a glance

The list has no banchan category
Only 2 of 778 entries carry "Side Dish" in the English, and both mean "served with the set meal".
Yet 89 entries are named for those preparations
12 kimchi, 16 namul, 33 muchim, 18 jangajji, 10 jeot — each registered as a dish in its own right.
The English collapses five preparations into Salad
All 33 muchim and all 16 namul land on the same word.
And menus barely mention them
Across the 216 menu rows this site holds, the word 반찬 appears zero times.

The notation list has no slot called banchan

The Korean Food Promotion Institute's official menu-notation list held 778 entries when checked on 2026-09-07. Exactly two of them carry the phrase Side Dish anywhere in the English.

Korean	Official English
간장게장정식	Soy Sauce Marinated Crab Served with Rice and Side Dishes
보리밥정식	Barley Rice Served with Side Dishes

Both are set meals. Side Dishes here describes what arrives alongside the rice; it is not the name of a class of food. Across the whole list, nothing is filed as a side dish.

The absence is not sloppiness. It is that the list is recording a different axis altogether.

And yet 89 entries are named for exactly those preparations

There is no category, but the plates themselves are all over the list. Counting by the ending of the Korean name:

Name ends in	Entries	English head-word
김치 kimchi	12	Kimchi
나물 namul	16	Salad
무침 muchim	33	Salad
장아찌 jangajji	18	Pickled …
젓 jeot	10	Salted …
total	89

All 89 are registered as dishes in their own right. On the list they are not distinguishable in any way from something you order.

And that indistinguishability is closer to a fact than to an error. Dubu-kimchi ends in 김치 and is a dish you order. Miyeok-cho-muchim is the same: on one restaurant's menu it is an item, at the next table it is a plate that simply came.

Which is the point. These names record what a thing is and how it was made; they do not record whether you asked for it. Whether it was brined, dressed or fermented is in the name. Whether you pay for it is not.

A temple-cuisine table — namul on the woven tray at the centre, kimchi and pickles around it. Every one has its own name, and none of them is called banchan

Richy! (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0)

A Jeonju bibimbap table — this site's record for the house lists one menu row, while the table carries several accompanying plates

Seefooddiet (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

A dwaeji-gukbap table — cabbage kimchi, cubed radish kimchi, green chilli with garlic, and seasoning paste

chomjong (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

The English collapses five preparations into one word

There is a place where the English reassembles what Korean had separated. Sixty entries carry the word Salad, and those sixty absorb five distinct Korean preparations.

Name ends in	Entries
무침 muchim	33
나물 namul	16
냉채 naengchae	3
생채 saengchae	3
채 chae	1
others (샐러드김밥, 골뱅이소면, 냉채족발, 도토리묵)	4

All 33 muchim and all 16 namul render as Salad, without exception. The difference between something dressed raw, something blanched and dressed, and something served chilled survives none of it.

This is the same shape of collapse this site recorded in A Guide to Korean Noodles, where mul-naengmyeon and naeng-memil-guksu both appear as Cold Buckwheat Noodles.

So Salad in the English does not license the assumption that you are getting cold dressed vegetables. The Korean name tells you more about what is on the plate.

And menus barely carry them at all

Everything above is the notation list. Real menus are a separate matter.

This site holds 487 place records, 99 of which write down a menu — 216 menu rows in total. Searching those 216 rows for the words above gives this:

Word	In the 216 rows
반찬 banchan	0
깍두기 kkakdugi	0
장아찌 jangajji	0
젓 jeot	0
무침 muchim	1 (ureongi-muchim, at Ureonggaksi Ssambap in Gyeongju)
김치 kimchi	2

The word 반찬 does not appear in any of the 216 rows. Which follows: a menu is where you write what can be ordered, and banchan is not ordered.

The two kimchi rows make the point sharper. In both, kimchi is an ingredient inside a dish you order — Gaeseong Mandu Koong's Gaeseong kimchi-dumpling hot pot in Seoul, and Wooraeok's kimchi-mari-naengmyeon. Kimchi does not earn a menu row on its own; it earns one only once it has gone into something else.

Hangukjip's record shows the contrast in short form. Its menu is a single row, Jeonju bibimbap, while the table in the photograph above carries several accompanying plates. What arrives and what is written down are not the same list.

🔵 So does the word 반찬 appear in this site's records at all? It does — in two places, and both are markets. The record for Tongin Market's Dosirak Cafe describes buying "market banchan" with brass coins, and Seoul Jungang Market is described as 124 shops dividing "banchan, dried seafood and butchery" between them. In this site's records, banchan gets named where it is being sold.

The records named above

What the name will tell you

The ending does not give you a price, but it does give you a method, and that is worth something.

장아찌 jangajji — brined in soy or soybean paste. The English begins with Pickled.
젓 jeot — cured in salt. The English begins with Salted, and it is strongly salty.
김치 kimchi — salted and fermented.
무침 muchim · 나물 namul — dressed with seasoning. The English renders both as Salad.

If you are avoiding an ingredient, this distinction matters more than usual. A kimchi made with salted seafood is not distinguishable by name. That problem is handled separately in Eating Vegetarian and Vegan in Korea.

What this guide does not say

It does not settle whether you pay for banchan. Whether it is free, whether refills are, whether a self-service bar is involved — those rules are set out in How to Order at a Korean Restaurant. This guide goes only as far as saying the name will not answer that question for you.

Table manners are also out of scope. How utensils are used, who starts first and the rest are already covered in Korean Etiquette Basics.

The figures above measure two different things. The 89 and the 60 count the Korean Food Promotion Institute's notation list. The 216 rows, and the 0s, 1 and 2 inside them, count this site's own 99 restaurant records. The second set is not a sample of Korean restaurants; it is the whole of what one travel site chose to write down.

Counting by name-ending measures names. It does not measure what any restaurant actually serves unordered, and this site holds no source that does.

The notation list is not a menu. Restaurants are under no obligation to use these English renderings, and you will meet menus that name the same dish differently.

Frequently asked questions

Can I tell from the name whether a plate is banchan or something I ordered?

No. In the Korean Food Promotion Institute's notation list, the 89 entries whose names end in kimchi, namul, muchim, jangajji or jeot are all registered as dishes in their own right, indistinguishable from things you order. Dubu-kimchi ends in kimchi and is an ordered dish. The name records the preparation, not whether you asked for it.

Does the notation list have a banchan category?

It does not. Of the 778 entries, only two carry the phrase Side Dish in the English — 간장게장정식 and 보리밥정식 — and both use it to describe what comes with a set meal. Nothing in the list is filed as a side dish.

If the English says Salad, is it a salad?

Read the Korean instead. Sixty entries carry the word Salad, and all 33 muchim and all 16 namul are among them, alongside naengchae and saengchae. The difference between something dressed raw and something blanched and dressed does not survive into the English.

What is the difference between jangajji and jeot?

The method differs, and the English head-word records it. Jangajji is brined in soy or soybean paste, so its English begins with Pickled; jeot is cured in salt, so its English begins with Salted. The notation list carries 18 names ending in 장아찌 and 10 ending in 젓.

Why is banchan not on the menu?

Because a menu lists what can be ordered. Across the 216 menu rows this site holds, the word 반찬 never appears, and the two rows containing 김치 both have kimchi inside an ordered dish — a Gaeseong kimchi-dumpling hot pot and kimchi-mari-naengmyeon.

Do I have to pay for banchan?

This guide does not hold that answer. Its point is that the name will not tell you, and the actual rules — free or not, refills, self-service bars — are set out in How to Order at a Korean Restaurant.

I am vegetarian. Is banchan safe?

The name alone will not tell you. A kimchi made with salted seafood does not say so in its name, and what went into a muchim or namul dressing is outside the name as well. Eating Vegetarian and Vegan in Korea sets out how to check ingredients.