In Seoul, permanence is elusive. The city reinvents itself with a restless energy that makes each visit feel like a first encounter. Viral trends come and go. Culinary hotspots emerge and vanish. Even longtime residents find themselves pausing at street corners, momentarily disoriented by how completely their familiar haunts have transformed in a short span of months. Seoul's thirst for the next big thing is evident in neighborhoods like Seongsu-dong, often seen as a global epicenter for pop-ups, where new fashion and design concepts emerge year-round. Seoul’s food scene mirrors this constant evolution. Trends flash by, like tanghulu – glazed fruit on a stick that seemed to pop up everywhere overnight – or espresso bars, which briefly captured the city’s coffee obsession before fading from view.

At Gulgune, a barbecue restaurant in Itaewon, the meat arrives on double-prong skewers, par-cooked over charcoal until just done. A server deftly slides each long strip of samgyeopsal – pork belly – onto a tilted grill pan set over a gas burner, the drippings falling into a vessel below. As the meat browns to golden, a trio of accompaniments sizzles at the pan's bottom: blanched bean sprouts, chopped ripe kimchi, and curls of green onions tossed in a sweet, spicy, and vinegary dressing. Cooked in the rendered fat, they cut perfectly through the meat's richness. For Koreans, samgyeopsal isn’t just a meal – it’s the heart of countless gatherings. The question “고기 먹을까?” (“Shall we go for some barbecue?”) almost always means pork belly is on the menu.

For nearly 50 years, Halmaejip near Gyeongbokgung Station has served jokbal (soy-braised pig’s trotters) and gamjatang (pork backbone stew) with the warmth, and once the scolding, of a Korean grandmother’s kitchen.