How to Make Restaurant Reservations in Korea

At a glance

• 🚶Most places are walk-in

  Noodle shops, cafes and ordinary barbecue are not a booking culture.

• 📈Penalty standard 10% → up to 40%

  Announced by the Fair Trade Commission on 18 December 2025.

• 🍣40% is for reservation-based restaurants

  Omakase and fine dining. General restaurants are 20%.

• 📩Only if disclosed in advance

  Deposit, penalty and refund terms must be told to you first.

The set of places where a reservation genuinely matters is narrower than people expect.

• Popular and trending restaurants — especially Friday and Saturday evenings, and public holidays.
• Fine dining and omakase — where a course is prepared ahead, booking is assumed.
• View restaurants — rooftops and riverside, at sunset.
• Large groups, anywhere.

Otherwise, noodle shops, cafes and ordinary barbecue places are walk-in by default. Many do not take bookings at all, and trying to make one often complicates the conversation.

On 18 December 2025 the Fair Trade Commission announced a revision to the consumer dispute resolution standards, raising the penalty benchmark for restaurant no-shows.

A reservation-based restaurant is one such as an omakase or fine-dining venue that buys and prepares food against the booking. If it falls through, the ingredients are discarded that day and the seat cannot realistically be resold at short notice. The revision cites a food-service cost ratio of around 30% as part of its reasoning.

One condition attaches: the restaurant must tell you the deposit amount, the penalty amount and the refund basis in advance, by an accessible means such as a text message, for the standard to apply. Check that you received that notice when you book.

• Catchtable — the most widely used reservation app, with an English interface. Fine dining and the hard-to-get places concentrate here.
• Naver reservations — many restaurants take bookings straight from their Naver Place page. The widest coverage.
• The phone — plenty of places still take nothing else.

If calling in Korean is the obstacle, asking your accommodation's front desk to call is a common and unremarkable request. Guesthouses generally do it as readily as hotels.

You need three things: date and time, number of people, and a contactable number. Without a Korean number, leaving your accommodation's is normal.

Plenty of restaurants take no reservations and run a walk-up waitlist instead. You put your name, party size and a contact number into a tablet by the door, and they text you when your turn comes.

This is where a Korean mobile number is sometimes required. If you do not have one, speak to a member of staff and ask to go on the paper list, or ask whether you can leave your accommodation's number. If the wait is long, it is worth also asking whether you can look around nearby and come back, and what happens if you are not there when your name is called.

• "예약하고 싶어요" (yeyak-hago sipeoyo) — "I'd like to make a reservation."
• "두 명이요" (du myeong-iyo) — "Two people."
• "몇 시에 되나요?" (myeot si-e doenayo?) — "What time is available?"
• "예약 취소하고 싶어요" (yeyak chwiso-hago sipeoyo) — "I'd like to cancel my reservation."

That last one is the most important sentence in this article.

Frequently asked questions