London’s new Korean food festival tests authenticity in K-wave era

People explore Korean food booths at the Jung Korean Food Festival at King's Cross in London, Friday. Courtesy of Jiji Ahn

LONDON — What was billed as London’s largest Korean food festival quickly drew overwhelming crowds and long lines.

Held over the May bank holiday weekend from Friday to Monday near King’s Cross, Jung Korean Food Festival brought together around 30 vendors, including hot food stalls, dessert teams and sponsored brands including Jongga and Bibigo. The event was co-organized by Korean cultural platform Market Root, which hosts pop-up events showcasing Korean and Korean-inspired designers and brands, and food content creator Rollin Lee.

The festival gained lots of traction online even before opening day, but as videos of packed walkways and hourlong lines began circulating on social media, the scale of interest became clearer. A timed entry system was introduced for the remaining days as additional crowd control measures, highlighting both the demand for the event and the challenges of managing it.

Some visitors gave up without entering, while others — especially those who traveled from outside London — expressed frustration at the long waits. Several stalls sold out early, suggesting that demand had exceeded expectations and that planners had not fully accounted for the scale of interest.

Yet the turnout signaled something undeniable: Korean food is no longer niche in London.

Ogam offers various Korean liquor at the Jung Korean Food Festival at King's Cross, London, Friday. Courtesy of Jiji Ahn

From niche to mainstream

Over the past decade, Korean food has become more mainstream in the U.K. as restaurants, supermarkets and delivery platforms have made Korean-inspired dishes more widely available than ever.

But as interest has grown, so too has adaptation. Korean flavors have been folded into burgers, fried chicken and fusion menus, often prioritizing accessibility over accuracy. For some Koreans in London, this has led to a growing concern that the cuisine is being simplified or at times misrepresented.

Jung Festival arrived at a moment when Korean food is widely recognized but not always fully understood.

The organizers were clear about their intentions from the outset.

“We wanted to show how diverse Korean food really is,” said Kim Hyeon-ju, who moved to the U.K. several years ago, where she cofounded Market Root with Yang Soo-jin.

The food offerings reflected that ambition to move beyond the most familiar dishes.

Alongside well-known foods such as tteokbokki and gimbap were items less commonly found in London, including Korean-style salt bread, sundae (Korean blood sausage), kkwabaegi (Chinese-Korean donuts) and street market-style chicken skewers. These are foods many Koreans would associate with everyday life rather than restaurant menus abroad.

What set Jung Festival apart from other Korean-themed events in London was its focus. Rather than presenting Korean culture as a broad, generalized concept, the festival centers food as its primary lens, bringing together vendors that reflect both everyday Korean eating habits and less commercially visible dishes. The appeal lies not in introduction but in recognition of foods that are rarely found in restaurants, presented in a way that mirrors how they are typically experienced in Korea.

However, the experience did not always match the intent. While the range of foods was strong on paper, navigating the space and accessing that variety was more difficult in practice. Clearer signposting, particularly around dishes that are less widely available in the U.K., would have helped visitors better understand what was on offer.

People line up at Dak Kkochi Express, a chicken skewer stall, at the Jung Korean Food Festival at King's Cross, London, Friday. Courtesy of Jiji Ahn

Authenticity under pressure

Much of the festival’s meaning emerged through its vendors, many of whom were actively negotiating how Korean food should be presented to Londoners.

Pastry chef Hwang Goong-yeon of B.Road London and Michelin-starred restaurant Sketch described Korean baking as both experimental and deeply rooted in memory and emotion. Her menu included items such as Korean-style “pizza bread,” a sweet and savory snack commonly sold near schools in Korea. For many, it is a nostalgic food that reflects how Korean baking blends global influences with local tastes.

“Korean desserts have a softness and warmth to them. We take familiar ingredients and reinterpret them,” she said.

“If we change everything to fit local tastes, we lose what makes it Korean.”

While the concept was compelling, not every item felt fully realized, highlighting the challenge of translating that distinctiveness consistently in a high-volume setting.

At Dak Kkochi Express, authenticity was expressed through scale, flavor and memory.

Go Jae-myeon, who previously ran food trucks in Korea, set out to recreate the experience of Korean street food in London. His signature 30-centimeter chicken skewers are significantly longer than those typically found in the U.K., coated in a gochujang (pepper paste)-based sauce designed to reflect the taste of Korean markets.

Key ingredients such as gochugaru (chilli powder) are sourced directly from Korea, as the quality available in the U.K. did not meet his standards. Other elements, such as halal chicken, reflect local considerations.

The stall also leaned into nostalgia. Go and his wife, Indee Katar, wore retro-style Korean school uniforms, while traditional games added a cultural dimension to the experience.

Jung Super-Market booth offers a variety of Korea-themed merchandise at the Jung Korean Food Festival at King's Cross, London, Friday. Courtesy of Jiji Ahn

Rethinking what ‘K’ means

At Ogam, the conversation moved beyond authenticity to something more fundamental: how Korean identity is defined through cuisine.

Bartender Kim Tae-yeol, who has worked in the industry for more than 17 years and has spent seven years in the U.K., recently rebranded his business to focus on cocktails, placing greater emphasis on craftsmanship and ingredients.

“It’s not just about calling something ‘Korean,’” he said. “It’s about the person making it, the technique and the story behind it.”

He noted that bartenders from other backgrounds are rarely defined by their nationality in the same way, and hopes that his work will be approached similarly. His drinks incorporate Korean ingredients and traditional alcohol, but are not positioned as “K-cocktails.” Instead, the focus is on balance, technique and quality.

At the festival, a tomato-based cocktail stood out for its clean, refreshing profile, demonstrating how Korean influence can exist without being reduced to a label.

Music from the 1980s and 1990s played by a DJ in the main food space helped create a retro atmosphere reminiscent of Korean markets, adding to the overall setting without leaning too heavily on more commercialized K-pop cues.

Together, these elements offered a more layered representation of Korean culture, appealing across generations and extending beyond its most globally recognizable forms.

A visitor tries an old-fashioned Korean lucky draw game at the Jung Korean Food Festival at King's Cross, London, Friday. Courtesy of Jiji Ahn

Who is this festival really for?

Perhaps the most important question raised by Jung Festival is who it is ultimately for.

For some Korean attendees, the event offered a sense of pride. One visitor described being “amazed at how many people are interested in Korean culture and food,” while others pointed to specific dishes that reminded them of home.

For other visitors, the festival functioned as an accessible entry point into a cuisine they were already beginning to explore. In that sense, Jung Festival appears to have struck a balance, offering familiarity to some and discovery to others.

But the festival also revealed the challenges of meeting demand at scale. The next question is not simply how to grow the presence of Korean cuisine in London, but how to define what is being represented, for whom and to what standard.

One organizer noted that they hoped visitors would leave having felt a sense of “jung”— the Korean concept of warmth, connection and shared experience.

At its best, the festival gestures toward that. But it also highlights how difficult it is to deliver it to larger-than-expected crowds. That tension between intention and execution, between popularity and authenticity, is where the future of Korean food now sits.

Jiji Ahn is a London-based journalist who covers both cultural and political stories with a focus on Korea. She reports for BBC News and previously worked for CNBC International and NBCUniversal. Fluent in Korean, she provides reporting and analysis on Korea’s role on the global stage.