Hi. I’m Jae Yong (재용). Everyone calls me Jae. I’m in my forties and I live in Seoul.
I’m Korean. I grew up here, I still live here, and I eat here every day. That’s the entire pitch for this site.
About that name, while we’re here. “Jae” on its own isn’t a Korean name. Given names here are two syllables and we use both, every time. Mine is 재용, which is 재 (jae) and 용 (yong). I cut it in half because Jae is the part people abroad actually remember, and I’ve stopped fighting it. Small thing. But the small things nobody explains are most of what this site is.
Why I started this
Friends from abroad kept asking me the same handful of questions over KakaoTalk. What do I order at a Korean barbecue place? Is this sunscreen actually worth 30,000 won? Is Myeongdong a tourist trap? (Yes. Go anyway, at 8pm, and only for the food.)
So I’d go looking for an English guide to send them, and the guides kept being slightly wrong. A restaurant that closed three years ago. A “traditional dish” nobody my age has ordered in their life. Prices copied from a blog post that copied another blog post.
Answering the same four questions by text got old. I started writing the answers down instead. That’s KoreaCrush, which I started in July 2026.
The name comes from having a crush on something. That’s roughly the feeling I’m trying to pass on.
What you get here that a Korea guide written from abroad can’t give you
I can go.
That’s the short version. If I say a place opens at 11am, it’s because I checked recently, and the post tells you the date I checked. If I say a bowl of naengmyeon (냉면) costs 12,000 won (about $9), that number came off a receipt or a menu photo, not from a five-year-old article.
I can also read the Korean internet. Naver reviews from last week, the restaurant’s own Instagram, the neighborhood forum post complaining that the portions got smaller. Most English-language Korea sites can’t see any of that.
And I’ll tell you when something isn’t worth your afternoon. I think that part matters more than the recommendations do.
I’ve also been the foreigner
I started travelling in 2003. About twenty countries since then, backpack for most of them.
That’s the part that ended up mattering here. When you’re the one who can’t read the menu, who doesn’t know if you order at the counter or wait to be seated, who can’t tell whether the price on the wall includes the side dishes — you learn exactly which small things trip people up.
Most Korea guides written by Koreans skip those parts. Not out of laziness. They skip them because to us they were never questions in the first place.
I remember being on the other side of it. That’s who I’m writing for.
What I write about
- Food. What to order, what it actually tastes like, what I’d pick if it were my first time.
- Travel. Neighborhoods, day trips, and honest notes on how crowded things get and when.
- Products. Skincare, snacks, kitchen things. What I’ve used, not what pays the best commission.
- Culture. The small unwritten rules nobody explains, like why the person across the table keeps refilling your glass before it’s empty.
Korean words get the romanization, the 한글, and a short explanation the first time they show up. Copy the 한글 into Kakao Map or a delivery app and it’ll actually work.
How this site pays for itself, and what that doesn’t buy
Ads, plus some affiliate links. If a post has affiliate links, it says so at the top, before you’ve read a word of the review.
No brand gets to see a post before it goes up, and no brand gets to change one. If I ever get paid to write about something, that post will say so in the first line. My editorial policy has the long version, including how I fact-check and how I use AI in my workflow.
Come talk to me
If you’re planning a trip and stuck on something specific, ask me. If I got a price or a closing time wrong, please tell me, and I’ll fix it and say what changed.
You can reach me through the contact page, or just leave a comment. I read all of them.
Tell me your spice tolerance from 1 to 10 and I’ll tell you what to order first.