Visitors in Seoul can order food on mobile devices

By Kim Se-jeong

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Food is one of the beauties of traveling. A challenge when you don’t speak the language of the country you are visiting is to find authentic restaurants popular with locals, and to place an order for the dish of your choice.

This is a common problem facing many foreign travelers in Seoul.

They rely on travel guidebooks to find authentic dishes and when they arrive at a restaurant, they find they are surrounded by lots of other tourists.

Redtable was born to solve this problem.

“We’re aiming at providing good local food information to foreign travelers who don’t speak the language so that they can enjoy their dining experience,” Do Hae-yong, the CEO, said.

Redtable made a list of Korean restaurants that are popular among locals, and took pictures and detailed ingredients of dishes served in those restaurants, available on the mobile device app.

“We made the ranking from data from popular Korean search engines and blogs. So these are really authentic restaurants loved by Koreans,” Do explained how they chose popular restaurants.

Redtable also has a payment system built in its website, enabling customers to place an order and pay online, even before arriving at the restaurant.“It’s like making a reservation,” the CEO said.

This meant close collaboration with restaurants. Not all responded to Redtable’s collaboration proposal, but many did — it is currently working with almost 300 restaurants in Seoul and this number is growing.

Redtable is aiming to become a global restaurant market platform. In Korea, the service is available in Seoul and Jeju. Outside Korea, 11 Asian cities are covered by Redtable, including Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai, Taipei, Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta and Ho Chi Minh.

Redtable’s service is well received by travel agencies and service delivery websites.

In Korea, it works with Hana Tour for inbound tourists. Outside Korea, Ctrip, a Shanghai-based travel service provider with accommodation reservation, transportation ticketing, packaged tours among other services, is one of its partners, as well as Meituan-Dianping, the world’s largest online and on-demand delivery platform.

“They want to present our contents to their customers,” Do said.

Redtable is also doing a project with the Seoul Metropolitan Government which selected it as a successful tourism startup company.

They are creating a menu featuring 500 Korean dishes, with detailed images and ingredients for visitseoul.net. The project also includes pictures of 70 dishes sold at the Seoul Express Bus Terminal, targeting those who will visit the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics via the bus terminal.

“There are fine (Korean) dishes. But if people don’t know about them, they will not try them. That’s why we need to spread the information,” Do said.